References to fascism are so frequent today that it’s easily mocked as a harvest of fevered minds. There’s little doubt, though, that we are in the grip of a powerful need to genuflect. Rightness at such times often boils down to just this: Have we the strength to choose? The choices before us are simple: Will we protest when someone is silenced? Will we disown someone who talks of lynching? Will we protect someone being persecuted? To paraphrase Niemöller’s famous lines, we are being asked every day whether we will speak out even when they haven’t come for us.
The awareness that we live in times that demand such choices of us makes Mirza Waheed’s new novel especially potent. Tell Her Everything is a dramatic monologue for the most part, in the voice of a man, an Indian doctor, who is talking in his head to his daughter, composing the letter he means to write her, the letter that will “tell her everything”. Sometimes, the man addresses the reader to describe what he will put in the letter. Sometimes, he addresses the daughter. But the ‘you’ has a persistent pull, it establishes an uneasy bond between doctor and reader from the very first line: ‘I did it for money’.
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It’s this intimate drawing in of the reader that makes the book so unsettling, forcing you almost into a compact with the doctor. It asks you to judge the choice he made, play out the moral dilemma in your head, decide what you might have done in a similar place. Waheed pushes the reader to the edge by letting the doctor paint the most empathetic portrait of himself, leaving one uneasily aware of how thin that line is between principles and self-interest. We all want money and security. What are we prepared to do to get it?
Robert Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’, that superbly disquieting poem that draws you in and spits you out, disembowelled, came to my mind. Like it, the book is an extended confession, but the good doctor lacks the self-assurance of Browning’s Duke Alfonso d’Este whose supreme ego assured him that his Duchess needed to die. Dr. Kaiser Shah reveals his name only in Chapter 8, but his weakness emerges much earlier.
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And like weak people, he offers constant excuses: his early poverty, his love for his wife and daughter, the life he wants to give them. And finally, that he did what he did because there was no choice: “Someone had to do it. It just so happens that that someone was your dad.” But, of course, there’s always a choice. His anaesthetist friend Biju exercised it, and he asked Kaiser to exercise it, and Kaiser chose not to.
The book is set in an unknown locale, identifiable vaguely as West Asia only because Biju goes off for weekends to Dubai and because we know from newspapers of certain practices in this part of the world. The characters are generic: The Great Judge. The Administrator. But into this anonymous and grey world, Waheed introduces tensions, forces us to ask if one can choose between evils.
Is the electric chair better than hanging? Is a public lashing better than solitary confinement? Is the West with its Guantanamo the apogee of civilisation? We enter a very Conradian area of darkness: on the one hand, West-ordained hierarchies of savagery; on the other, savagery in itself, relative to nothing else. The former doesn’t excuse the latter, but we have to ask also why the former excuses itself.
Power of evil
Superficially, Kaiser has excused himself. If his daughter asks, he says, “I’ll tell her no, I do not feel shame.” It’s true, there’s no shame in Kaiser, just a relentless search for redemption, that someone somewhere will understand that he did what he did for money and because he thought it was more humane than the ‘other thing’.
If his estranged daughter extends this understanding, he thinks he can re-enter the world, not live forever outside the light, “waiting to die”. So he is writing a letter to her, having retired and come to London to a flat facing the Thames.
Can the daughter forgive her father? To ask that is to ask if love and the need to be loved makes us all complicit. Can the reader forgive the doctor? Does the reader care? Or in the House of Mirrors that we live in today are horrors so commonplace that the doctor’s actions have no power to shock or move us?
That is the real question. More horrific than savagery is the making of it into an everyday thing. “The abnormal too becomes the normal,” says Kaiser and in that lies all the power of evil. When the little people can be harnessed to participate in the big crimes and made to believe they are just cogs in a wheel over which they have no control then are Shoahs enabled.
Waheed’s work comes at a time when we have pushed the bar lower and lower about what we can say and do with impunity. This is a simple yet powerful book in itself, but the rudderlessness of these times makes it resonate with an even deeper urgency.
vaishna.r@thehindu.co.in
Tell Her Everything; Mirza Waheed, Context, ₹599