Their language of love

Author: Bapsi Sidhwa

Publisher: Viking, Rs499

Sidhwa’s style is extremely visual, which gives great colour and mood to her narratives. This makes her writing serious without turning sombre, playful without regressing into farce, says Debraj Mookerjee

Bapsi Sidhwa is best known in the literary establishment on two counts. First, as Deepa Mehta’s writer-collaborator in creating two critically acclaimed narratives — Sidhwa wrote the Ice Candy Man (1991) which served as the basis for Mehta’s 1998 film Earth as well as the 2006 novel Water: A Novel, which reciprocally, as it were, is based on Mehta’s 2005 film Water! Second, she is known as arguably Pakistan’s most stylish woman writer in English, weaving stories from experiences and imagination that are nuanced, nostalgic and insightful. Her recent collection of short stories, Their language of love, is an attempt by the writer to chart new territory. She admits she is a “novelist by inclination and not a short story writer”, because of which even her short stories “tend to be lengthy”. A Parsee from Pakistan, Sidhwa, settled in the US, weaves her narratives amid all the familiar tensions that assault south Asian communities — large and demanding families, communitarian tensions, problematic nationalist aspirations and diasporic dilemmas. And yet, the drama she is able to imbue her stories with miraculously escape the violence that marks so much of the fiction emanating from the post-Partition angst of sub-continental consciousness.

The present volume features a cornucopia of stories with different protagonists, drawn either from autobiographical recollections, or from people encountered here and there during her years in Pakistan and America. The most clearly autobiographical story in the collection is the first one, ‘A Gentlemanly War’. Amid the charged atmosphere in lahore in the wake of a threatening Indian invasion, a upper class Parsee family plays out the inner pulls and conflicts of love, attachment to family homes and memories, and of course proximity to affairs of the state, as might be expected in feudal Pakistan. The insights are rich, and for an Indian, the story provides rare peek at what the other side was feeling through the days of conflict. Sidhwa’s character reminisces, “I cannot believe Indian Intelligence did not know that the lahore front was left defenceless… What then prevented the Indians from occupying lahoreIJ... I believe that the underpinnings of this strange miscalculation were an unacknowledged compassion.”

In ‘Breaking it up’, Sidhwa takes us to America from Pakistan. It records the rather amusing efforts of a Parsee mother — upon the express instructions of her husband, and her own somewhat trenchant adherence to the code of the Parsee clan (that thou shalt not marry a ‘non’) — who travels to America to break up the engagement between her precocious university attending daughter and her Jewish beau. The assault of a culture vastly different from the one in Pakistan, the moments of tender sharing amid acrimonious exchanges, and the sheer perseverance of the mother is going about her mission gives lucid cadence to the narrative. As a short story, this one is among the more organised in the collection, and in that sense perhaps most true to the genre.

Two long stories, centred on an American expat in Pakistan, Ruth, offer rare insights into the way Pakistani society shaped up in the 1950s and 1960s. The regal lifestyle of the expat, her social alliances and run-ins with the ISI, the little peccadilloes that inevitably are a part of high society, the trysts with eastern spirituality, and most significantly, the fine portraits of the upright Afghan guard, the pugnacious maid Billo, and the overall domestic arrangements make for great reading.

‘The Trouble Easers’ again appears autobiographical. It enacts the ritual story telling of a religious legend and its ironic reception by a young girl, both mesmerised by the paraphernalia of religious iconography, yet detached by earthy scepticism. The title story, ‘Their language of love’, is a sweet little episode with a happy ending, that traces the opening moments of a young bride who joins her software engineer husband in America. Their awkward acceptance of each other, the role playing doubly sharpened into relief by the backdrop of a complex foreign land with an alien culture, and the almost Bollywood style romance marks it among the more credulous inclusions in the collection. ‘Sehra-bai’ explores the compact world of an old woman passing on in the company of her daughter (who is in Pakistan having left her family in the US to be with her mother). Her beauty in youth, her numerous admirers, her somewhat eccentric manner, and her wealth of tales make for a great read.

Sidhwa’s collection ends with a powerful little story, which unlike most of the other stories, and in refutation of the claim made by the reviewer at the outset, is extremely dramatic. It is the one story where the pain of the Partition days is brought centre-stage, where the skeletons are allowed to tumble out, where the protagonists demand absolution through dramatic acts of contrition, and where the brutality of the historic parting (visited by both sides) are articulated, absorbed and shared. The story ends, however, on a note of forgiveness, which ultimately is the only way forward, Sidhwa seems to believe.

Sidhwa’s style is extremely visual, which gives great colour and mood to her narratives. The psychological insights are sharp without being dense. It is the quality of being serious without turning sombre, of being playful without regressing into farce, which draws readers to her works. For those who are familiar with her work, the collection will provide great joy; and, for those who are not, here’s the place to get started.

The reviewer is associate professor, University of Delhi