Universal themes of family love, loss and forgiveness
This deeply moving and beautifully written novel about different generations of an Indo-Pakistani family takes the reader on an emotional journey into how family and traditions define us and our choices in life.
By Nafisa Haji
William Morrow.
308 pp. $24.99
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Reviewed by Lisa Orkin Emmanuel
This deeply moving and beautifully written novel about different generations of an Indo-Pakistani family takes the reader on an emotional journey into how family and traditions define us and our choices in life.
It's a fast read, but its deeper meaning resonates long after the last page.
Haji's novel is set across countries - in the United States, Britain, and Pakistan. The reader sees the world through Saira Qader's eyes from her childhood in California until she is an adult traveling the world as a journalist. As a child she realizes that her grandfather left her Nanima, or grandmother Zahida, years ago for a younger British woman. Casting Zahida aside, he and the woman have three children. Saira's mother refuses to accept these people into her life or even speak about them.
So the story unfolds as Saira - the only one in her immediate family - travels to Pakistan, to attend the wedding of her Indo-Pakistani cousin, who, now that the grandfather has died, has invited his second wife and her children. Haji captures the pain and suffering this man inflicted on his family when he chose a new life and shrugged off the old one. In one passage Zahida's sister Adeeba talks:
But the years faded away as I watched her wrestle with the magnitude of what she had lost. Zahida was bewildered. She had been everything she was supposed to be - an obedient daughter-in-law, a dutiful wife, a caring mother, a pious woman - and she had lost everything.
Toward the end of the book, Saira, who has been away working as a reporter, comes home to be with her dying mother. Daughter asks mother if she is angry that she left.
" . . . You kept in touch. Those letters you sent were from far away. They made me realize and learn what I should have learned long ago. About anger and forgiveness," her mother says.
Her mother has finally begun a relationship with her step-siblings.
"There is no room - no time - in this short life, to stay angry and hold grudges," she said.
Loss, forgiveness, love, redemption. The themes in Haji's novel run through all our lives.