Trespassing by Uzma Aslam Khan
Trespassing bursts into life in a village by the sea with a powerful image of a boy, a wanton child of nature, beaten to pulp for trying to stop thugs from stealing a turtle’s newly laid eggs. Uzma Aslam Khan begins her book with death, as turtle eggs are destroyed in a splatter of yolk and albumin, and ends with birth—explosions in the sand as hundreds as turtles hatch and rush unerringly to the sea.
In the 400 pages between death and birth lie the intertwined lives of Salaamat, Dia and Daanish. In 1992 circumstances bring them together. It is the year Daanish returns to Karachi from Amherst to mourn the death of his beloved father, the man who had nurtured in him the love of seashells and the sea. He walks into the arms of his mother, Anu, and into a sticky web of maternal woe and matchmaking. At his father’s wake a girl catches his attention—Dia. Far too free and forthright for her peers, Dia has been brought up by her liberal mother, a successful businesswoman and widow. Her mother’s silk farm has watered her interest in fairytales and silk worms into a full-blown obsession, in which she remains cocooned.
Anu, wants to marry her son off to the beautiful Nissrine, Dia’s best friend. So Daanish agrees to go to a “bride viewing”, still common on the subcontinent, but is captivated by Dia instead, and they begin to meet secretly. Let’s not forget that this is Pakistan. Unmarried women are not allowed to befriend men. The penalty for disobeying this social rule is severe. But with the bravado of youth, Dia and Daanish disregard danger and fall in love. When Dia’s mother, Rifaat, finds out that her daughter’s new friend is Anu’s son she bars her from having anything to do with him, giving no reason. Dia finds this unusual, and the mystery deepens.
To convolute matters further, the driver who takes Daanish to meet his ladylove is none other than the turtle-watcher, Salaamat. Now a grown man, Salaamat’s has lived a wretched life. He left his village by the sea to seek his fortune in the big bad city, Karachi, joining first a bus builder and painter’s outfit as apprentice, then becoming a member of a terrorist group that murders Dia’s father, before finding refuge as a driver for a gun-runner.
Trespassing ends in a satisfying denouement that solves the mystery and hints at new beginnings. In the quest to live their lives to the hilt, Khan’s characters face life’s many temptations and struggle with their instinct to toe the line. They are all too human - generous, gentle, loving, humane, yet often wilful, vengeful, selfish, weak - a melange of good and bad, driven by their innermost needs. Through them, the book reveals again and again the contrariness of man: A generous employer is also a gun-runner, an inspirational mother is a cold wife, a loving child is a disobedient daughter, and a passionate lover is also a cruel soldier …
This is a Russian doll of a book: Although ostensibly just one overarching story of love and loss, others nest within, threaded on a filament of mystery. Khan has woven a complex braid of many stories but has also painted a vivid picture of modern Pakistan. She has contrasted the splendour that warms the lives of the middle classes (Dia and Daanish) with the squalor that demeans the lives of the marginalized (Salaamat); the terror that holds people in its clutches and the beauty that envelops them but remains largely unappreciated. She evokes the sights, sounds and smells of Karachi life, the cultural games that people play and the hierarchy that makes Pakistani social interaction so interesting.
Independence did not give Pakistan the stability it sought. Carved out of British India, Pakistan limps under the yoke of religion and military dictatorship, oppression and corruption. Using her pen, Uzma Aslam Khan has dissected her country like a cockroach pinned to a wax tray, showing how social and religious barriers in Pakistan make it almost impossible to live a normal life without trespassing on someone else’s property - her characters trespass regularly - and she has examined how even love, the most beautiful of human emotions, can be a trespassing.
As we turn the pages, the ominous rattle of skeletons in cupboards grows louder. Within the span of a few months the lives of these three characters grow in complexity and become inextricably enmeshed. If maturity is gained through suffering and trespassing, then each matures and emerges from the pupa of youth, reborn.
Khan has painted a chiaroscuro—the grey shades of liberalism and feminism contrasted with the polished halo of orthodoxy—and has put changing relationships under the microscope—mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, mothers and fathers, friends and lovers. She describes facets of life in Pakistan with a wonderful sense of humour and acuity—from the slow, corrupt bureaucratic chain that reigns supreme in every government office, and the garishness of mesmerising Bollywood films, to the overpowering monsoon that disrupts daily life.
I’ve read far too many books recently about the life of deracinated immigrants in foreign lands and the clash of cultures. Trespassing is a welcome change, for it talks of a homecoming and metamorphosis. It reminds us how difficult it is to decide to shed old habits, yet once the decision is made, how smoothly they unravel, like silk from a cocoon.