Your novel’s protagonist Ahmed is indeed yourself. This book contains your self-appraisement in retrospect; a review of your evolution in body, mind and heart: a self-assessment of what you have been, seen and become in the span of a lifetime.
I therefore consider your novel to be a thinly disguised autobiography. In fact, it is quite transparently your own life re-examined by the artist inside you. I would describe this book as a novel-cum-autobiography.
That you chose your life for such scrutiny is not surprising. What surprises one is why you chose to express your experience in English. Obviously, you are looking for a wider audience around the globe. English is a great medium to serve that purpose. Many people will accuse you of non-stylised use of this language, a resort to non-literary narrative. But I believe that such criticism will be misplaced. You have very deftly orchestrated Ahmed’s story through a mix of episodes and observations, plain reportage and literary quotations, metaphors and symbols, and experiences of pain as well as joys that define our lives. I for one found your novel both instructive and meaningful as shedding light on a prominent literary figure for whom art and social conscience are like our two hands, the right and the left. Your book begins, characteristically enough, with the human havoc wrought by Partition. Although in this chapter, your focus falls on the inhuman happenings in Pakistani Punjab, I am sure your art embraces such inhumanity in all of history and in every part of the world. Great art aims at universality even when its immediate focus is the particular or the partisan. Your sorrow, I am certain, extends to all arenas of injustice and cold-bloodedness, both motivated by excesses of religion and the devastations of secular ideologies with the mortals’ insatiable lust of power. I am sure the episodes you relate provide the same message everywhere, like for example the excesses committed since centuries by the Maharajas of Kashmir and the present day oppressors.
Your book begins, characteristically enough, with the human havoc wrought by Partition. Although in this chapter, your focus falls on the inhuman happenings in Pakistan’s Punjab, I am sure your art embraces such inhumanity in all of history and in every part of the world. Great art aims at universality even when its immediate focus is the particular or the partisan
It is equally applicable to the purges, ethnic cleansing, politically motivated exterminations and hatred-based holocausts.
I see your first chapter or Threshold One in that light. It is a powerful beginning which shaped the social consciousness of your protagonist.
One follows the account of this social consciousness evolving through the book.
The interaction with friends and acquaintances and the journeys in the West provide a great gallery of faces and places. But in my view, the book’s narrative marks its climax as a work of art in Thresholds 20 where the flogging of the musician and the lashing of your protagonist occur. What a brilliant symbolism in the description of the nine stripes across the musician’s nude body stretched on the earth like a human sitar, with him dedicating each lash to one of the Ragas! When the barbaric session is over, the musician shouts: long live the revolution and its music”. Then begins the flogging of your protagonist, that is yourself. Again it is a brilliant touch of art when every lash occasions a philosophical, historical or literary flashback. Both the references to your own past struggles and the thoughts of creative minds lends a Christ-like dignity to the scene. This chapter is really the literary crux of your novel. I enjoyed this part of your book immensely.
The flowering of your consciousness, after a life of physical suffering, into the metaphysical beauties of Indus Valley’s poet-mystics (you don’t mention the mystical poets of the Ganges Valley or Central and Outhitting India) carries great biographical interest. Again I include all such movements of the mind and heart in unison while you talk of Pakistan’s languages and quote from our poets. The spiritual quest of these poet-mystics has many dimensions and e ergo e among creative artistes and social reformers has the right to focus on what he or she is fascinated with. There are also fine points of differences in their utterances requiring a more exact scholarship. But their common aspiration for personal uplift meant, general prosperity and social equanimity that you focus on are as clear as daylight. Your choice of their verses makes your book a treasure-house.
And what a beautiful end. The love you discover in the denouement gives your narrative a wonderfully warm human touch. The last three words with which your book ends. LIGHT UP HOPE are a sum-up of your life and aspiration. We are all mortal creatures trying to look for LIGHT and HOPE.
The writer is an eminent poet and former chief secretary