“Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” wrote Emily Dickinson. Especially in times of censorship, a helpful way to look at society at a particular place and time is through the prism of another work of literature from a different place and point in time.
In Asghar Farhadi’s film, The Salesman , when a group of Iranian actors perform Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in Tehran, the play becomes a lens through which the fissures within a marriage, and in contemporary Iranian society, are viewed.
A kind of menace
Another Miller play, the political allegory The Crucible , is about the Salem witch trials in 17th century New England. This becomes the starting point for Sarvat Hasin’s new book, which is a set of interconnected stories about contemporary life in Pakistan.
The book begins with a high-school production of the play in Karachi. “Who even is Arthur Miller? Why can’t we just do Shakespeare?” asks one of the teenage boys. “He’s the one who married Marilyn Monroe,” replies one of the girls. “He also won a Pulitzer,” replies another.
Members of Karachi’s elites, these are the children of shipping magnates, governors, diplomats and army officials. Teenagers now, they have grown up together from kindergarten days.
They now drive to cafés after school to drink Coke, listen to Springsteen and Pink Floyd, and talk idly about the things that teenagers talk about, including paranormal phenomena, witches and djinns. But when the conversation touches upon religion and scripture, they quickly change the subject.
Chudail in the mirror
And then one day, one of their friends disappears. An uneasy silence descends on the group. “It could be someone we know,” whispers one girl to another.
By the time the boy is returned, a week later, the environment seems suddenly different, rife with anxiety and a kind of menace; some element of trust seems to be lost.
“If this is how they’re punishing people now, any of us could be next,” says one of the friends.
Beyond these stray utterances, they are all tight-lipped about what happened. As they try to perform the everyday routines of normalcy, the disappearance becomes one more thing in a list of things not to talk about.
But the darkest monsters will continue to emerge from this silence; years later, the memory returns to one of the characters in a dressing room in a different city, “when It will find her, the chudail in the mirror… there is Rehan, a seventeenth century pilgrim showing off the red welts on his collar bone.”
Unspoken desires
In air-conditioned cars, behind sunglasses, driving carefully through familiar city streets, or in other cities across the world, the characters in these stories try to come to terms with the things they have never spoken about.
In one story, a woman feels stifled when her husband employs a driver to take her around; the story ends with her disappearance.
In another story, a young man takes up jobs in faraway cities to escape his memories: “On the plane out of Karachi you feel as if you can finally breathe again.” In another story, when a man sees a djinn in the mirror, it is a metaphor for his own demons.
Through seven interconnected stories narrated in supple, controlled prose, Hasin explores the ways in which a new generation of Pakistan’s young people, growing up in a conservative society, is haunted by unspoken desires, doubts and fears. And stories: not only the barely-told stories of those who are made to disappear, but also of others who choose to disappear as an act of resistance in an environment where fear is a tool of control.
The writer, who is in the IAS, is currently based in Bengaluru.
You Can’t Go Home Again; Sarvat Hasin, Penguin Random House, ₹499
