Some voices, despite quiet cadences, succeed in making themselves heard very clearly above the cacophony of lesser noises. Writer Farzana Doctor undoubtedly belongs to this minor group, speaking in meaningful whispers and bewitching her readers into complete submission. A prolific blogger, playwright and documentary producer, the multi-faceted Doctor makes her foray into literature with two back-to-back novels, one of which was included in the Top Ten Books of 2011. The cover of the second novel grandly announces that Six Metres of Pavement is the recipient of the Lambda Literary Award 2012: Lesbian Fiction, a fact that leaves the reader duly impressed and slightly baffled. Baffled because the novel begins with and moves primarily around the phenomenon of immigrant angst and for the larger part, the lesbian factor is incidental and casually relegated to the sidelines.
It’s just another day for Nasreen, Nas to her friends, a Toronto-based Indo-Canadian burnt-out psychologist, who fills her days by listening to the woes of her patients and attempting to counsel them. When she is not doing any of these, she is visiting her own counsellor and venting steam in an attempt at personal catharsis. Evenings see her headed home, to a lonely spinster’s pad. She has just lost her mother to a terminal illness and her widower father hovers around her solicitously, trying to coerce Nasreen into accompanying him on a vacation to India. Nasreen, who is just out of a shattered same-sex love affair, is still to come to terms with being done with Connie. To get her mind off heartbreak, her pal Asha persuades Nasreen into joining Gujarati classes, conducted by the comely Salma in her modest home, and Nasreen acquiesces. And thus the stage is set in Doctor’s debut novel, Stealing Nasreen.
Complex web
Unknown to Nasreen, the janitor at her place of work, Shaffiq, is fascinated by the reserved lady psychologist. He watches her covertly even as he tries to fit pieces of Nasreen’s life together using bits of her trash as clues. Salma reacts with a strange exuberance to her new student even as a freshly hung up painting begins to talk to her…..The author spins a web of relationships between the various characters that quickly weaves itself into a tangle, threatening to suffocate everyone in its tenacious grip.
Doctor fearlessly leads the reader into every crevice of her characters’ lives, no matter how dark, musty and claustrophobic it may be inside. There is a sense of familiarity as one reads about people who go to make a living abroad with stars in their eyes, only to meet with disillusionment and crippling ennui. The author handles the minutiae of difficult and diverse lives with an exquisite finesse and one finds oneself wishing that she had continued in the same delicate vein and not rushed into a cataclysmic confrontation between the characters, with their confusing sexual orientations.
Nasreen, as the simmering, dutiful and brooding protagonist is immensely identifiable, as are her tradition-bound father, Bashir, with a penchant for frequently breaking into Hindi, and her breezy well-meaning pal, Asha. Salma is the surprise package with layers to her overtly behenji personality while Shaffiq, caught in the crossfire between his homeland and a foreign land, his wife and muse, is infinitely empathy-worthy. The spidery webs binding and cleaving human relationships lie at the core of this novel, and Doctor spins the most perfect yarn. It is vaguely ironic however, that it is in sketching the mundane moments of her characters’ lives that the novel takes on a magical poignancy but things fall just a little flat when details of lesbian romps get under way. The author is adept at sketching the shapes of loneliness, particularly of the kind prevalent with Indians living in foreign lands, and her prose resonates richly with the hybrid lingo typical of non-resident Indians.
In her second novel, Six Metres of Pavement, Doctor takes a wild audacious leap, visibly and joyously coming into her own. This is seriously good writing here, such good writing that it hurts. The prose is punctuated with the most delicious silences, the characters display the most eccentric twirls and loops and the tone of the novel, is never, never quite predictable. Such a breath of fresh air!
Ismail Boxwala can never forget the day he accidentally left his little daughter in the back of his parked car and the toddler baked to death in a hot, locked car. His wife has moved on, he must now live down his ghastly mistake and reclaim his life but 20 years down the line, the tragedy still looms large in Boxwala’s mind and he is unable to come to terms with his guilt. He opts instead, to drown himself in alcohol and pick up casual strangers for one-night stands.
Celia, a Portuguese-Canadian widow, still clad in widow’s weeds, comes to live next door, with her married daughter. Ismail and Celia, each miserable and lonely and separated by six metres of pavement, begin to spy on each other from their respective windows and a strange stilted friendship springs up between the two unlikely characters.
Recurring theme
At a creative writing class, Ismail meets queer activist Fatima, young enough to be his daughter and like in the previous novel, the three sets of relationships, unwittingly, entangle themselves into an odd ball of snarls. Once again, loneliness, the tug of loyalty for one’s homeland and traditions, tragedies that never get erased with time and the precarious nature of parent-child equations form the crux of this novel. The endless solitude of widows and divorcees and tradition-minded parents’ complete inability to accept a child’s gay nature are brought out achingly by Doctor. There is a sense of exuberance in the reader when the 50-year-old, flower-eyed Celia moves out of her married daughter’s grip and takes charge of her own life; likewise one can only cheer when Fatima’s parents realise how special their daughter is, despite her so-called deviant romantic affiliations. The author captures the multi-cultural flavours in the lives of her protagonists adroitly, never overdoing it and risking falling into potholes of stereotypes.
There are subtle parallels running between the protagonists of both novels. Both Nasreen and Ismail are perennially self-doubting personalities, prone to deep negativism and who react to situations rather than choosing to create situations of their choice. Their insubstantial personalities are cleverly and indirectly etched by their interactions with the stronger characters around. The novels are more about the aloneness of being, the humdrumness of routine and of relationships torn and mended rather than the sexual orientation of the characters. True that in both novels homosexuality and heterosexuality meet in a penultimate collision with the entire cast gathering in a carnival-like setting, but it would be doing the novels a grave injustice to categorise them as lesbian fiction. Why build fences around two splendid works of fiction, hold up strident placards of identity….? Instead, why not set the books free by simply defining them as two exquisitely written novels that deserve their place in the highest rack of one’s book shelf, where no visitor can ever filch them?
Finding Nasreen and Six Metres of Pavement are a must-read, irrespective of whether one is gay or straight. It’s a filigreed world that the author is creating painstakingly for the reader, one full of illumination, shadows and intricate patterns. Two novels with as much good sense as soul…
Finding Nasreen, p.220, Rs.295; Six Metres of Pavement, p.376, Rs.295; Farzana Doctor, Rupa & co.
