Story

In Karachi, Bilqis Ara Begum prepares for the wedding reception of her son Samad. The family has gathered and the servants have been given their instructions. The bride will soon have her hands painted with henna and be helped into her wedding dress and jewels. 

This is not the wedding Bilqis planned for her only son. Kate is a westerner, an Australian from Melbourne. As Bilqis struggles to accept Kate, Pakistan is facing turmoil. The mullahs and the military are in control and an insurgency is beginning in Kashmir. 

Then she discovers her servant girl Mumtaz is secretly meeting a freedom fighter - a tryst that threatens to destroy the girl's honour - and Bilqis is left to examine her own convictions. 
"Set in Karachi in the eighties, Azhar Abidi’s tiny gem of a novel... brings intimacy and insight to such abstract contemporary issues as multiculturalism and globalization."
- Megan O'Grady, Vogue

"Abidi… exquisitely tells the story of [a] woman facing both the twilight of her life and the twilight of her way of life. His storytelling is understated, never melodramatic, as he explores delicate family relationships in the context of cultural intersections: not so much clashes as chasms between Pakistan and the West, and between aristocrats and servants within Pakistan."
- Lisa McLendon, The Wichita Eagle

"A novel as compelling as the best family drama, once picked up very difficult indeed to put down."
- Gillian Wright, India Today

"This novel is a paean to a mother, a sad, belated goodbye, a tale of passing, regret and forgiveness, of a country and a mother mourned."
- Curled up with a good book

"In exacting prose full of incisive observations, Abidi offers a strong portrayal of modern-day Pakistan."
- Library Journal

"Rather than focus on those who leave, Abidi ingeniously tells the story through the eyes of the one who is left behind."
- Jeanne E. Fredriksen, Indiacurrents

"Abidi's greatest triumph... is his insight into the minds of his characters. The manner in which Abidi's characters think, react, speak and conduct themselves make them real as well as unique."
- Amardeep Banerjeee, The Pioneer (New Delhi)

Abidi ... shows us that, just as the adage goes, life happens. In this he bears some resemblance to Arthur Miller, the master of deep but non-judgmental works."
- Akbar S. Ahmed, Dawn

"A fascinating story of cultural and generational struggle, and at its exotic heart, the widow, Bilqis, a most unforgettable character. Azhar Abidi is a captivating story teller. I didn't want the book to end."
- Mary McGarry Morris, author of The Lost Mother and Songs in Ordinary Time

"Abidi evocatively depicts Pakistan's descent into brutality with protagonists who struggle to determine what is most sacred."
- Publishers Weekly

"This is an ambitious, fascinating novel, bursting with challenging ideas and intriguing themes of displacement and duty; complex, compelling characters; evocative language with flashes of poetry and a deep humanity." - Sunil Badami, Sydney Morning Herald

"Abidi's forte lies in his insights into the minds of individuals who must make a constant effort to prevent their 'druthers' hardening into demands or resentment."
- Judith Armstrong, Australian Book Review

"In his beautifully observed, musically expressed, literary realist second [novel], Abidi has returned to Pakistan, the land of his birth and upbringing, to explore the twilight of an era, a class, a country and a life."
- Katharine England, Adelaide Advertiser

"Abidi's strength is his empathy for his diverse range of characters... a gentle and understated novel."
- Shakira Hussein, Weekend Australian Review

"Twilight is notable for the grave eloquence of its prose, for the brilliant long conversations between women, for its sense of the burden of human indebtedness... Abidi aims high, but he is already an accomplished, surprising, exuberant writer."
- Peter Pierce, The Age

"[A] novel about human relationships written in a language that is as transparent and quiet as the fading light of the day. It is a slim book with an expansive theme that will be remembered long after one has finished reading it."
- Shams Afif Siddiqi, The Telegraph (Calcutta, India)

"Virginia Woolf would have approved of the second novel of Pakistan-born Azhar Abidi, now living in Melbourne. It is his “androgynous” sensibility that would most impress her—his seeming ability to see through both male and female eyes. … Abidi has an uncanny ability to present a moment, a scene or situation in its entirety… he draws in his reader’s imagination and senses… an altogether satisfying novel that consistently reaches the heart of the matter."
- Veronica Sen, Canberra Times

"Abidi's controlled prose and solemn agenda, the muted resolution of which he contents himself in Twilight, are of a higher order. [It] is a clearly delineated attempt, in restrained expository prose, to get at the truth of separation: can goodwill and intelligence overcome difference and dropping out? ... Showing himself capable of Olympian feats of empathy... Twilight is a stately dance, back and forth across the ocean, into and out of mismatched mindsets, vivid and solemn, the work of an able philosopher."
- Cath Keneally, Australian Literary Review

"A skillfully crafted tale of Mohajir disenchantment in Zia's regime... A soulfully rendered evensong of a dream turned sour."
- Khushwant Singh

“I read [this novel] in Istanbul, feeling the characters and the places by my side. Abidi ponders questions of belonging, love and loss in a world of shifting grounds and ever-changing identities, of memories lost and recaptured. In this vivid microcosm where the story of a mother and son is told with a brisk pace and sharp observation, we also encounter a nation’s tragedies, beauties and strengths, and realize what a good novel makes us recognize: The pain and glory of being human.”
- Elif Shafak, author of The Bastard of Istanbul

"Azhar Abidi writes fluid, sometimes poetic, prose. His concern is with the conflict between familial and cultural expectations and traditions. The conflict and love between mother and son is superbly drawn, and the evolution of the story is carefully executed. The author takes his time; this is not for lovers for action but rather those who relish deft use of language and polished storytelling."
- Sue Bond, Courier Mail

Friday, August 15, 2008

Extract

Dinner was served at eight o’clock.

Bilqis Ara Begum, matriarch of the Khan family, cast a contented look around the table. Her brother and sister, her niece, her son and his new wife were all sitting there, waiting for her to say the benediction, the Bismillah: ‘Praise be to Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful.’ She said it in a whisper, a furtive, almost bashful gesture of faith, and the family fell silent, concentrating on their meal. Bilqis had ordered her servants to cook a bhujia with spinach and potatoes, a kofta dish, kebabs, a chicken curry and another bhujia with okra. The kebabs were laid out on a white china platter in the centre of the table. The rest of the food was served in beaten brass bowls to keep it warm.

The Khan family had gathered for the wedding reception of Bilqis’s son, Samad, who had recently married an Australian girl of European descent. The wedding itself had taken place in Melbourne, but the couple had flown to Karachi to give Samad’s family in Pakistan a chance to meet the bride. Mahbano, Bilqis’s sister, her husband and daughter had flown in from Lahore and Bilqis’s brother, Sikander, who had rooms at the Sindh Club, had driven over in his old white Mercedes. It was March 1985, and spring was nearly at an end. The reception was in two days’ time.

Bilqis presided over the table with a sovereign but kindly air. She watched the guests as they ate, and coaxed and cajoled them if they resisted. The last rays of the sun, streaming in through the window, emphasised her Mughal features—the small mouth and chin of her aristocratic mother, and the high cheekbones, hooked nose and long, arched eyebrows of her father. She was a tall and elegant woman in her late sixties. She wore a white shalwar kameez, her hair was grey, swept back and held by pins. She had stopped dyeing it when her husband passed away. Her skin was fair and slightly freckled. The back of her hands showed a web of veins. Her wrists were small, delicately fashioned, and her fingers long like those of an artist or a pianist. The way she held up her head, her straight back, her gestures, the way her stern face broke into a smile—all these expressions, at once light and graceful, and quite without affectation hid successive generations of breeding. They were not so much acquired as inherited, and as much a part of her fibre as flesh and bone. But if they revealed the origins of her patrician forebears, they also concealed a conservative streak, a moral pride that the turbulent times had transformed into an inflexibility of manner, a disdain for change and a nostalgia for lost glory.

The enormous chandelier hanging over the table gave her dining room an imposing and rarefied air, but its light was dim and the old Empire furniture in the adjacent drawing room was already lost in the shadows, mute witness to the hunting scenes on an immense Persian carpet where tigers and deer had come to life and were fleeing the arrows of a handsome archer who galloped serenely on horseback across a meadow strewn with flowers. A narrow glass table was cluttered with family photographs in silver frames, which occasionally included a famous face, here a politician, there an author, all gone now, scattered to the winds. The shadows also camouflaged signs of decay. The once springy carpet was balding in patches and there was dust inside the mahogany and glass cabinet that held captive a Dutch flower girl, missing her porcelain arm when some servant, lost in a daydream, had let her slip out of her hands.

Bilqis turned to Zainab, her niece. Mahbano’s daughter was a cheerful young woman with sparkling eyes. She wore a black shalwar kameez of her own design, the lines of her dress long and flowing. The subdued colours drew out her fair skin, the thin waist highlighted her tall, slim figure. ‘You must eat, my dear,’ Bilqis said in an affectionate tone reserved for indulging children. ‘Don’t misunderstand me, but you look a little anaemic. What are you afraid of? I oversaw the cooking myself. Not that one should eat to excess, but you barely touched anything. What, do you mean to refuse me?’

Zainab relented but Bilqis gave the recalcitrant a final glance, a rejoinder and an acquittal. ‘A fine girl,’ she was thinking as she ladled out the chicken curry on her plate. Why had her son not married her? Such marriages strengthened families and kept them together. Their children would have been beautiful, the match perfect, mending bridges and settling scores. It was just one more of her dashed hopes, misplaced and improbable. Marrying cousins was no longer in fashion, Bilqis reflected. People would frown upon it. A first cousin was like a sister to Samad. The relation was too close, too familiar. And besides, it was too late.

Zainab’s nemesis sat next to her. The girl’s name was Kate. She had brown shoulder-length hair. She had painted her nails and wore lipstick, but her make-up was subtly done. If she had any blemishes, they were not visible. She looked older than Samad, although she was a few years younger. Western women always looked older than their age, Bilqis thought. She looked at the gentle swell of her chest, the line of her nose, the chin and the eyes and the distance between them—all these details were inspected for the hundredth time. She was outspoken and a little too confident, attributes which were not becoming in a daughter-in-law, but at least she was not presumptuous. She was genuine and courteous. She thanked the servants each time they brought her something. To please her mother-in-law, she wore bangles and plaited her hair in a braid. Slim and attractive, she looked at everything with fresh curiosity, like a child. Bilqis was quite taken by the girl’s charm, but her concerns had not been excised from doubt. From time to time, old prejudices emerged from the shadows. The girl was pretty, but there was something incongruous about this prettiness, as if she were a succubus in disguise. History was littered with tales of foreign sirens who had ruined good men. Had Cleopatra not rolled at Caesar’s feet, he might not have died on the stairs of his Senate. And were not the fires that raged in the Middle East lit when Delilah lay with Samson?

‘I remember the last time I came, there was a badam sapling in your driveway,’ Mahbano said to her sister. ‘It’s not there any more. What happened to it?’

‘It’s still there,’ Bilqis said. ‘I had it replanted next to the plum tree, because it gets more sunlight there. You can see it from the drawing room.’

Kate listened to the conversation with relative ease. The family conversed in English for her sake. Sometimes they lapsed into Urdu, but there were so many English phrases thrown into their speech that she understood generally what was being said.

‘What’s a badam tree?’ she asked.

‘An almond tree, if you like,’ Bilqis said, ‘Almonds do not grow in Karachi, so badam tree is actually a misnomer. It’s a wild unnamed fruit that grows on that tree, like the green fruit that grows on my Virginia creepers along the side of the house. They look like grapes, but they aren’t grapes. You should never eat them.’

‘I love it when the blossoms come out.’ Mahbano said.

‘Would you like to take some seedlings back with you? There’s a nursery I know that’s not far away. I could arrange for the chauffeur to drive you there.’

‘You make it sound all too easy.’

Bilqis allowed herself a pause, knowing that after hiring and dismissing a number of gardeners Mahbano had taken up the spade herself. Her sister’s hobbies never lasted long. ‘You’ll need manure,’ she said.

Mahbano was seven or eight years younger than her sister and looked more youthful than her age. She liked telling people that living in Lahore had kept her young. Lahore had everything going for it, charm, culture, architecture—white Mughal minarets, pink Edwardian facades and, once out of the city, orchards of orange trees and chequered fields of green and gold all the way along the Grand Trunk Road to the foothills of the Himalayas. The town of Murree, the old hill station of the Raj, was a day’s drive away. One could leave the seething plains in the morning and wake up to the sight of snow on faraway peaks the next. Where could one go in Karachi except to the beach where the water was like mud?

‘Young Chambeli performed at the Alliance Française last night,’ Sikander remarked. ‘The whole of Karachi is rushing to see her. It is an open air show under the stars. The mosquitoes suck you dry but everything is hush-hush and clandestine, which makes it exciting. I half expected the police to barge in at any moment and bust us. You should go before the mullahs put a ban on it. They will come around to it sooner or later.’

Bilqis wondered if he had had a drink before dinner. She tried not to smile at his fondness for dance, and for whisky, of which she disapproved. ‘I used to see the girl dance when she was a child,’ she said. ‘Her mother was known to me, you know, but courtesans of those days were not what they are now. The fault does not lie with them. It lies with the times, of course. She is delicate and has the good taste and impeccable manners of her mother. She charmed you?’

‘Well, at my age and with my vices, all daughters of Eve look charming. I was perfectly enchanted!’ said Sikander good-humouredly. He was the middle sibling, a tall, straight-backed man with a thin moustache who retained a passing likeness to the greying Clark Gable. He was dressed in a white short-sleeved shirt and wore smart khaki trousers. A graduate of the Indian Military Academy, he had fought with the British Indian Army in Italy and Burma during the Second World War but resigned his commission after the Partition of India in 1947. A journalist of some repute, he had never capitalised on his looks or his fame. It was a matter of everlasting dismay for Bilqis that he had remained a bachelor, but he was a content and happy man. He played cards with his friends, drank a little and pounded away his regular columns for The Dawn on a typewriter. Marriage would have intruded on his habits.

‘Well, there is something to look forward to,’ Bilqis remarked, turning to her sister. ‘I haven’t seen her performance yet, but she learnt Kathak at her mother’s feet. She dances very well. You need an outing. I’ll take you if your husband doesn’t. We don’t want him to suffer for our sins now, do we?’

The sting in this last remark was meant for Shahid, her brother-in-law, who was late for dinner as he had been offering his prayers in a room upstairs. A stout man, he now waddled across the room in his starched white shalwar kameez, with feet splayed and meaty arms rowing by his side as he took his seat between Sikander and Zainab.

‘Did I hear someone mention me?’ he asked, glancing around the table.

‘My sister was suggesting that you might take me to a dance,’ Mahbano said.

‘Then I will, of course.’

‘But do you approve of it?’ Bilqis asked.

‘If you approve, then how can I disapprove?’

‘Oh father!’ Zainab groaned.

‘Now don’t be waylaid by these women, Shahid,’ Sikander said. ‘If you go to hell for their sake then who’s going to plead for sinners like me?’

Bilqis watched Shahid plunge with zest into his plate of koftas. He rolled up his sleeves, murmured ‘Bismillah’ and began eating with the proprietary air of someone who knows that his star is rising. It was widely known that in a few months he would become a member of the Provisional Assembly and in a few years he would be a minister in the straw parliament that the stone-faced newsreader on the state-run television station insisted on calling the National Assembly.

Bilqis did not doubt his piety, but she had to avert her eyes from his face where there had materialised the characteristic callus that comes from the Muslim practice of prostrating the forehead onto the ground five times a day. A lifetime of prayers was usually required for the callus to appear, although in his case, it had already arrived in middle age. Not that there was anything untoward in its appearance. After all, didn’t the Irish nuns at Loreto House teach her long ago how the stigmata manifested themselves on the bodies of saints overnight? It seemed still quite a coincidence that beards, bruises and other hallmarks of piety were appearing among the populace at the same time as mullahs were rising to power.