In his first book, The Collaborator, Mirza Waheed spun a stunning story, thinly veiled as fiction, of the hapless Valley and its hapless residents. Here, he tells us a tender love story. The serious young man with fine features and a talent for papier mache art, naqashi, is Faiz, a Sunni. The girl is the beauty of her hamlet in Srinagar, the angel-faced Roohi of the restless heart, a Shia. They fall in love of course, and their sweet, tentative courtship plays out against the ill portends of a place where guns have begun to speak loudly and crudely, drowning out the sounds of life, of the river flowing swiftly by.
The Book of Gold Leaves (Penguin/Viking) is every bit as compelling as The Collaborators, only more gentle in tone given its provenance. It is so full of imagery — the land, the city, the mountains, the chinars and poplars, the people, the dress, the food — you get the feeling that Waheed is writing in the manner of a pointillist, painstakingly adding in the most minute details. As Faiz flees the military, his eyes fall on the gold of the boulders sitting in the middle of the silver swathe of rushing river, and he
immediately wonders how he can translate the sight onto papier mache. Striking imagery.
This is a story fraught with excitement and set for disaster, but of course. Even as the reader becomes slowly assured that the Shia-Sunni divide is one that can be and is breached and that the real foe is what —fate? Those who would lay siege to this beautiful land? — our attention automatically goes to the characters who feature in ways big and small in the couple`s lives. Because by then we know what each one does will impact the lovers.
The Soldier`s account is a bit too pat, more for form`s sake, one feels but this is the kind of book where the Soldier is quite clearly not one of the good guys. May hellfire descend on them, says a schoolgirl bitterly, without realising that it is in the nature of hellfire to burn up everything in its path.
Waheed handles the flight of Faiz across the border, his training, and his return with such a tender touch, as he does when he describes the all too brief honeymoon the youngsters get to enjoy before reality throws its suffocating, midnight black mantle on them again. As the love story draws near to its predetermined devastating climax, the reader takes it all in with a fast-beating heart.
At one point, Roohi recites a poem by Parveen Shakir:
We ought to have met
In another kinder time
In pursuit of attainable dreams
Below a different sky
Upon a different earth
We ought to have met there.
And the reader can only sigh in helpless understanding.
Sheila Kumar worked for the Times Group and now writes for many newspapers and magazines on matters concerning just about everything under the sun. She has had her short stories published in as many as six anthologies.Sheila’s first book, a collection of short stories titled Kith and Kin (Rupa Publications) was released to very good reviews.