March 30, 2008

Evolution, continental shift, extinct seas and transitionally shifting animals; intermingled with the Islamic hegemony of Ziaul Haq’s despotism and glued in by a bittersweet tale of a family — Uzma Aslam Khan has boldly tapped uncharted themes in her latest book, The Geometry of God. It tells the story of Amal: an eight-year-old juvenile enthused by the scientific babble of her evolution professor of a grandfather or Nana, Zahoor.

Sitting on the foothills on Margalla Hills, Nana gives Amal many a lesson on evolution and ‘did-you-know’ facts. But what starts as a tale of a sweet bond of a young girl seeking refuge from aloof parents into the wings of a story-telling grandfather, twists when Nana hands her a picture of an amorphous animal caught between a dog and a whale. He calls it the Original Whale — the oldest specie of a whale to have existed. But proof there is none, until on an excavation trip to the Salt Range, Amal stumbles on a rock that turns out to be a bone of the Pakicetus — as it is christened. Simultaneously, Amal and her Nana are summoned back home, where Amal’s younger sister, Mehwish, has become blind.

‘From now on, you have to become Mehwish’s eyes,’ says Nana to Amal. And from there Amal is Mehwish’s eyes. As she battles with her new divided life and her transition from the quiet Islamabad to madding Lahore, Ziaul Haq and the fundamentalist Party of Creation (Jamaat-e-Pedaish) introduce a revamped ‘Islamic’ curriculum and in it evolution is banned. In the maelstrom in Amal’s life, a new narrative of the disturbed mathematics enthusiast Noman, who is the son of the head of the Party of Creation, is introduced.

Separated by quasi-religious gateways — the world, the man, the word, the love, the afterlife — the book uniquely describes the modern day Pakistani’s displacement in the vacillating ideologies of the state. Noman, under a controlling father steering his life towards The Truth, ends up in the Party of Creation and is told to devise a new study to prove evolution wrong, hence proving Zahoor wrong. And not only that, Noman is to do this by plucking evidence from the Quran, and therefore proving Zahoor an infidel. But in doing so all he finds is that Zahoor is anything but unIslamic. This eventually leads to their encounter and along it he meets Amal — Mehwish’s eyes and his love interest.

Rather than finding the path carved by his father, he finds peace in Zahoor’s ideologies. And while he continues working for his father, he establishes a clandestine and inspiring life with Zahoor. This initiates a strong bond between four people: Zahoor, Amal, Mehwish and Noman. Until adversity strikes at Amal’s wedding which places Zahoor in a quandary (I’m not disclosing everything), which would require all the efforts of Amal, Mehwish and Noman to save their father figure.

Khan writes about too many things whose repercussions she should fear, but she knows it’s easy to be bold when writing in English — considering the limited population that actually reads English novels in Pakistan (Khan mentions Lahore as ‘the city with a lower per capita book consumption than Mars). And it seemed for some time that Pakistani English literature had either blurred into a chorus of post-9/11 repression and conflict amongst Muslims or stories which somehow had to bring up controversy galore of Pakistan: prostitution, mafia, karo kari, feudalism, you name it.
 

Separated by quasi-religious gateways — the world, the man, the word, the love, the afterlife — the book uniquely describes the modern day Pakistani’s displacement in the vacillating ideologies of the state.
 

But Khan undoubtedly breaks the mould. She carves a sublime story of new and old with contemporary panache, in which people are real and their fears are prevalent and believable. Khan weaves a complex story whose narrative has a casual energy to it: each voice telling his or her story. The incessant play on English-sounding Urdu words is laughable but sometimes stagnates. The sexual innuendos are subtle in the girls’ thoughts but in the head of Noman all is sex and sex is all, and Khan is not afraid to say anything. And using ‘fur tail’ for male genitalia was downright condescending for me at least. I also believe Khan should have done less with the incessant use of crude language, which eventually abated the narration at times. And although the story worked well, the style had its undulations.

Short sentence structure and stream of consciousness work for me — I admire Cormac McCarthy and Virginia Woolf, respectively, for it. But Khan’s experimental narrative lacked coherence and felt like fleeting divergences rather than interesting anecdotes. Surrealism also made a guest appearance here and there, with floating zeros, mottled with trivial yet amusing afterthoughts. What started out as a twisted story of tumult of Amal and Noman also got slightly marred by the deliberately misspelled narratives of Mehwish.

And coming to my final criticism (they are few and I’m not a cynic!), the debate of secularism against Islamism is surely well-knit in the plot and does not overwhelm the book. But it’s still an aspect much too stale and worn out, eventually bringing us back to the quip: there are only seven original plots in the world. And in Pakistan there are even fewer than that. But at least on the plus side, Khan’s book presents the true colour of Islam — secular, accepting — unlike the popular fascist image of it. And after all, The Geometry of God is surely a har-binger to the coming changes in Pakistani literature in English.
 

The Geometry of God
Uzma Aslam Khan
Rupa & Co, New Delhi
Available with Liberty Books
ISBN 978-81-291-1279-8
328pp. Rs525