In Oscar Wilde’s “The Nightingale and the Rose”, the image of that last sublime song while the bird dies with a thorn in its breast stays with you forever. Hobbs’ story is much the same, although his love is a Swallow. The greater pain, for me, than the tragedy of love (substitute the word for illusion and you’d be closer to the mark) and its subsequent loss, is why writers can’t see that a tale simply told has more power than when they try to be clever and fail if being clever is not their default position. If you are both, it’s a good day for the reader, as it will be for anyone who gets hold of In the Orchard, the Swallows .
A Man With No Name is recuperating in an isolated house on a mountaintop, having just been released from prison. He is wasted in mind and body. Taken in by a stranger, he remembers his life and the girl he gave his heart to. We learn he was thrown in jail because he spent some time with her under the stars after a wedding they both attended, talking of nothing and yet forging bonds that were to transcend time and space. Her father beats both of them and the boy strikes back. Soon, he is behind bars without trial or jury but an executioner in the shape of the country he lives in. This is Pakistan. And the rule of universal law does not always apply here (just like it does not in too many other parts of the world, including India).
Now the young man writes, sitting in the orchard that once belonged to his family, where boredom is no longer a question as he watches ants, or a pomegranate as it ripens waiting to be picked at just the right time or all is lost, or writes to his once-beloved, now held closer to his skin than his aching bones, and we are pulled into a parallel universe that makes for hellish knowledge.
Gripping
Prison can be worse than death, of course. Learning about torture, rape and the subsequent dehumanisation of inmates isn’t even surprising anymore, but the way Hobbs describes the stench, the power struggles, the loss of all autonomy, the utter physical helplessness faced with brutes in the form of both prisoners and guards and in the most spare language, is telling. It’s only as you keep going that you understand why the language is so spare and continues to be so after the boy leaves prison, just as arbitrarily as he entered, 15 interminable years later. When he went in, he was 14 years old. When he sat with the girl who may have been even younger, and was later asked if he had raped her during the time they spent together, he says truthfully he “did not know what it meant”.
But even in such a Kafkaesque landscape, there are saviours as the young man finds in his host Abbas on the mountaintop. Saviours who even have a sense of humour. Abbas has a daughter Alifa and asks the young man to help her with her homework as a means to integrate him back to normal life. When he sees the man’s struggle with holding a pen, he says “Or perhaps Alifa can help you.”
As the young man begins to read from Abbas’ library, he asks, “How is it possible to read so many?” and the reply is something that weighs like an inviolable truth while hinting at how to survive this life: “You begin with one...And then you move on to the next. And Insha’Allah, your life will be long.”
Moving on
After 15 years, there are truths that the young man has learned without reading; that anger fades, that bullies rule and if there is only one thing to regret it is the wasted years without the girl he loves. “...love is priceless. If I did not feel regret, I would forget its value”.
The joylessness he has been bequeathed, though, the absence within, cannot be dismissed. So while love survives, albeit with a thorn in the breast, the young man embraces its miraculous nature since it is the darkness that has the power to “erase the universe, wipe clean the stars from the night sky”.
The ending is delicious: It’s all possibility, all dreaming, all singing of the human instinct for grasping what single ray of hope pierces the gloom.
