Published in Pique (pique.pk) http://pique.pk/culture/04-May-2013/food-for-thought
Food for thought
Their language of love by Bapsi Sidhwa
When one lives cheek by jowl with people of other faiths, saints jump boundaries and the barriers of animosity fall.’
Bapsi Sidhwa’s first collection of short stories, Their Language of Love, has a rather Mills and Boon-ish name, but otherwise much to recommend it.
The first of the eight longish short stories, A Gentlemanly War, is about the war between India and Pakistan in September of 1965, when Zareen is driven out of the trench in her garden by glistening snakes agitated when the soil was moved. Zareen, afraid to remain so close to India with her children, shifts to Pindi from Lahore, and is no less agitated by the move, blindly filling her suitcase with silk saris shot through with gold thread, leaving more practical possessions behind.
The book is set against a background of fact similarly shot through with fiction, such as the Murree Brewery (here belonging to Zareen’s father and later her brother Rustom), and their home requisitioned by Ayub Khan to serve as the State Guest/President House. There’s Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the young foreign minister to whom (rather than to the Field Marshal) Rustom is forced to hand his mother’s war donation. The situation is acutely prescient, the awkwardness palpable. Rustom’s reservations regarding the wisdom of giving the cheque into the foreign minister’s hands in the absence of witnesses to the exchange is sharply drawn. Rustom blushes. His callow lack of sophistication at finding himself in this predicament is transparent. Mr Bhutto also blushes.
The ending to this story is naive. Can a strategic miscalculation in war simply be ‘an unacknowledged compassion’ between the warring sides, commonalities notwithstanding?
If I were teaching creative writing and gender studies, I would quote this book’s simple prose, and strong women, its keen understanding of cultural and interpersonal issues, powerful message of amity between cultures, and its humour, never more present than inBreaking It Up, the most engaging story in the collection.
Breaking It Up, first published in the 1980s, was later expanded into the novel An American Brat, but rejected by a new publisher, who I imagine is kicking himself to this day. It was eventually published in 1994. In it, Feroza, Zareen’s daughter now in the U.S., wants to marry blonde, Jewish David. What upsets her parents most about David though is not his non-Parsee-ness, but ‘the pair of over-developed and muscular thighs’ bulging, almost bursting from a pair of frayed shorts.
And so Zareen, agitated once more, rushes to the U.S. in an attempt to storm the romantic citadel just as, in her mind’s eye, those hairy thighs could potentially storm the citadel of her daughter’s virginity. What follows is the funniest, most perceptively sympathetic account from everyone’s point of view, Zareen, Feroza and David.
Roshni’s story lends the book its name, Roshni, a newly married azIndian Parsee, and her struggle to settle into a new life in the U.S. with her husband. Himself new to the U.S., Nav’s brash and rather jarring character and his wife’s learning to live with it is sensitively, almost tenderly dealt with, as Roshni, a gentle but strong young woman, perceives Nav’s inexperience but allows herself to be impressed. Together they work out their roles, and their own language of love.
Sehra-bai, once a confident and ornamental feature of the Parsee community and now old and bed ridden, is looked after by her daughter. The frustrations and trials of both are dealt with gentle humour. Sehra-bai’s friend Hirabai the plump wife of Sehra-bai’s bank manager has ‘shimmied through her years in Lahore like an even keeled boat,’ now arriving ‘at the calm shore of an arthritic and liver-spotted old age without rancour’. Sehra-bai’s story will resonate especially with those who have cared for an elderly relative.
A married American expatriate in Lahore features in two stories as Ruth, disconcerted to find herself attracted to several men; she attributes it to ‘the sexually charged atmosphere a somewhat segregated community’ creates. The stories include Raj Tribhuvan Roy, once in actual fact Pakistan’s federal minister for minorities.
The subject of minorities winds through this book: Parsees in Zia’s ‘Islamic Republic,’ Pakistanis and Indians amongst Americans in the U.S., Americans in Pakistan, and the Partition of India with its bloody wrenching away of one community from another. That last one is what the final story in the collection is about, Defend Yourself Against Me, possibly the least attractive story in the book, but the one with the most important message.
The Trouble-Easers carries the other important message, that when one lives with people of other faiths ‘saint jump boundaries, and the barriers of animosity fall.’ This message, an important one today, is that it is possible to question one’s ingrained beliefs.
Published in Pakistan by Readings as Ilqa Publications, this book definitely makes you think.
