Does fast withering composite culture, once admired for articulating cultural and linguistic communion and creative culmination of spiritual and social sensibilities, use a streak of animism to overturn the tide of hostility and suspicion? Does much-maligned animism reveal a strong sense of tranquillity that yokes different communities together? Do some social convictions, irrespective of faith; perceive nature an indomitable source of emotional fulcrum? These questions have become central in an era where the narrative of hatred and intolerance has gained currency and they call for immediate answers. The contemporary historians and social scientists grope for answers but people, seeking escape from the cultural claustrophobia that looms large, are provided with an incontrovertible answer by a prominent novelist Syed Mohammad Ashraf in his scintillating novel “Aakhri Sawarian” (Last Passengers) that is creating waves in the Urdu-speaking world.
Ashraf, a Sahitya Akademi awardee, astutely blends a nuanced narrative that primarily arises out of nostalgia but it goes well beyond the formulaic and sentimental rendering of the wistful experiences as his character dynamics reveal true extent of human apathy and indulgence. The novel clearly eschews sensory overload approach and turns its attention to almost terminal decline of everything that we had stood for.
The protagonist of the novel spends summer vacations at his material grandmother’s house in a small nondescript town where communal divide is simply non-existent. A Brahmin family is the next door neighbour and one day the wife of the neighbour asks the grandmother to ask her domestic help Jammo water the Tulsi plant as she could not do it. The grandmother asks Jammo to do the needful but Jammo politely declines. Why do a Hindu woman and a Muslim girl feel shy of watering the plant? Both of them are having period pains and they could not touch Tulsi as it is highly venerated plant. Since they cannot offer prayers during the period, they hardly water the plant. It is what stems from more than sharing and it is what bends the arc towards mutual respect in a plural society. Ashraf weaves a pulsating narrative that symbolizes an indomitable life that can rescue us from institutional decay and incapacity.
Sensitive portrayalAshraf quite gifted at rendering complex human feeling accessible as vivid depiction of the innocence-fed relationship of a nine-year- old narrator with Jammo who just attained puberty, gives us a window into a boy’s psyche. Ashraf’s oeuvre is greatly influenced by the experiences that he underwent during his formative age. Curiously initially the narrator, who seems an over-emotional child, reads a diary of his great grandfather and he continues to read it though it puts him into unprecedented psycho-social trauma. The novelist puts together a strand of various episodes and each of them provides a contemporary interpretation of the imagined world of the author. Ashraf’s creative dexterity delineates socially redemptive power of art in a time where things potter around and quest for more benign world becomes more intensified.
Akahri Sawaria does not add to ever expanding bands of novels that announce the demise of the world and Ashraf delves deep into our cultural fabric to ask some unsettling questions. The passengers that include cultural icons are withering into oblivion but will they come back in altered situation or their departure is terminal, the author remains uncommitted but as a true artist he does not instil a false hope that draws on self-deception and vanity of power.
Ashraf’s multi-sensory narrative makes his novel a compelling read and the narration of the perils of chasing ambitions and beauty leaves the reader blissfully astounded.
