In a narrative that swings back and forth within the years of World War II, Uzma Aslam Khan presents a richly imagined universe containing the young Nomi and her brother Zee, and their friend Aye. These three children are Local Born, the offspring of prisoners transported to the Andamans. In a territory that is a penal colony, even when prisoners have worked off their sentences, there is no coming out of prison. Ex-convicts are given a plot of land to farm and live on and women arrive from the mainland, either prisoners or settlers, to breed a community that will supply and serve the prisoners and their jailers.
The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali is a classically constructed novel. There are the three children at the centre, and a web of threads between them and their community.There are the threads, fragile and taut, marital or professional, between those who were once prisoners and those who were not.
Then there are the inescapable threads connecting the white colonisers with the islanders, Indian and Burmese. For those who live in the Andamans, it doesn’t matter what flag the colonisers fly. When the Japanese invade the penal colony, the islanders are left to shift for themselves, either making terms with a gun held to their heads, or suicidally spying for the Allies. The atrocities build.
Rings true
Khan weaves all these histories into her story of Zee, a boy hunted down, tortured and executed by Japanese soldiers because he made them look foolish, and no soldier can forgive that. The story travels before and after the killing, and from one perspective to another. The characters are vividly drawn, and their voices ring true.
Zee, always at the top of his class, is enamoured of his teacher, Mr. Campbell. In the midst of recalling all his own mistakes, Zee’s father, Haider Ali, regrets the boy’s infatuation — “the wrong in believing in those that wronged them.” Aye looks on his own ailing father with pity but little else. It is his employer, Mr. Howard, who has colonised his mind. Nomi must grow up in the shadow of her brother’s death, with parents who in their grief have ceased to see their other child.
The woman known as 218D, transported for having shot a British officer, draws the mainland into the novel, with her memories of Delhi and Lahore. She is also the focal point of the children’s complicity in the actions of the adults. It is because of Nomi’s fear that 218D is first given exemplary punishment, and Aye is later forced to participate in the force-feeding of 218D.
Shakuntala, widow of an Englishman, once navigated colonial hierarchies on the mainland between Hindus, the “Black Portuguese”, and the white English. Life with her husband in the Andamans was supposed to be an escape, but she faces new dilemmas. To protect her own daughter from the occupying Japanese forces, she agrees to help run their “comfort station” or wartime whorehouse. The Japanese doctor she works with brews tea for her. She wonders whether he is spying on her and considers “the ordinariness of men who committed extraordinary wrongs.”
Savour the words
She is not the only one on the island wondering whom to cooperate with. The subcontinental freedom struggle only occasionally glances at the Andamans. The INA is allied with the Japanese but does not monitor Japanese activities on the islands. The British appoint spies and assign them tasks but cannot protect the native spies. Ultimately, each islander risks being shot as a collaborator by whoever happens to win the war.
Khan’s prose slows the reader down to retrace and savour words. Here is Haider Ali, caressing his sleeping daughter’s hair: “He kept stroking, slowly, because love was the opposite of haste.” As we might expect with a novel set in an island, the narrative tightens as the author fills in the lights and shadows. Aye and Nomi grow up under Japanese occupation, suffering violence and the ceaseless threat of more violence. The islands are declared “liberated”, but the islanders are starved, worked to the bone, tortured, killed, till the surrender of Japan.
One day, maybe, the nations that fattened on other nations will tender an almost-apology for the mining of the seas around the Andamans, the quinine experiments conducted on prisoners, the force-feeding of hunger strikers, or the war-time blockades that starved their colonial subjects along with their enemies. These will, like the Jallianwallah Bagh massacre, be described as “regrettable incidents”, as if they were incidental to, rather than inherent in, the larger colonial enterprise.
Meanwhile, if we are to strive for a more just world, we need to hear the stories.
The writer is author of Three Seasons: Notes from a Country Year.
The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali; Uzma Aslam Khan, Westland, ₹699
