Just finished reading Other Days, a novel by Arshad Waheed. He was one year senior to me in Nishtar Medical College (now Nishtar University). That was the time of military dictatorship. We both were in Liberals, the left leaning progressive student group. We both had to pay the price for that. Later he pursued other interests closer to his heart and left the field of medicine.
The story is non linear. It starts in London and ends in an imaginary country which could be none other than Pakistan. It begins at the turn of the century and keeps you taking back to the early seventies.
Two adults had spent a part of a day together in the Sheher (read Lahore). There were some very intense moments in that day, starting from a Sangat meeting of Heer reading followed by a raid by members of a conservative student party in a university hostel. By chance they meet again some thirty years late on New Year's Eve in London. Going back and forth the story takes them (and the reader) back to their native country, for different reasons.
This novel took me back to those days of a democratic experience Pakistan had after the Fall of Dhaka. The People's Party was in power. The Left considered it as a mark on the road and dreamt of a socialist future. Conservative minds were looking for a resurgence of fundamentalism. Some of the young budding members of the Left intelligentsia were experimenting with the local revivalist movement and breaking boundaries with the orthodoxy.
There is one free spirit, a true to the core Punjabi fearless village girl who moves to the city. She tears apart all the walls and refuses to be boxed in, either by the stifling tradition or by the progressive pundits. She experiments with life, charts her own way, pays the price and keeps moving on.
Moving to London, she goes through what every expat in the diaspora has seen and experienced; the revival of dogma in the displaced. Here we see the tension between generations, the pain of separation from the land of birth, and the constant redefinition of what is home.
New characters from the next generation fill the stage and the story travels back to Pakistan. This is the time of immediate post 9/11, the war at the border and the war within. Here you see abductions, suspicions, disappearances, and born again zealots.
Then there is drama, tension and horror.
The language is simple and matter of factly. Story is engaging. It has a grip on the reader and makes you keep reading. Somehow it deflects escalation of conflicts at many times where it could have raised the stakes.
Finally there is a conflict, horror and then some more. Arshad could have chosen any of the stories running side by side in the novel to climax. He picks one which was the least expected, at least to me. I will leave it to the reader to decide on the merits of that.
He could have put a closure to many of the other parallel stories. Somewhere in the narration, they are left half way.
The end makes you think what to make of it. That is the beauty of a good story. It leaves it open ended.
This is a story set in our time. We went through a period of revolutionary romanticism in the seventies and eighties, eventually seeing it fade away and the country moved towards orthodoxy, opportunism and conservatism. It affected us and the generation which followed. We moved in different directions. Some became born again, some settled with the ground realities and yet some remained dreamers and die hard revolutionaries to the core. You see it all in the book.
Thank you Arshad Waheed. You brought it all back to me. .
