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Shamsie's book is pure fun. Its
strength derives from her assured hold on her characters and her
skill in revealing them to the reader in driblets of insinuation
and allusion. Not a novel in the conventional sense, this book
weaves filigrees of the characters'stories into a pattern of
human nature itself in its varied forms. Shamsie creates lives,
not the usual fictional characters, in her quiet gently ironic
style. She is a miniaturist to her fingertips. Shunning
grandiose denouements, she opts for the evident, the familiar to
work their magic on our imagination.
Though we get
to know of the inner struggles of the main players such as
Mariam Apa, Dadi, Samia and Bajji, it is the funny side of their
natures that Shamsie brings to our deeper attention. Mariam
Apa's elopement with the family cook Masood may have alienated
her from the Darde-Dil clan, the old and young Starches
may have their reasons for their eccentricities or Dadi her
grouse against Taj, the mid-wife's mother-yet they are depicted
with a total lack of animus on the author's part. They bask in
the author's pleasure in her memories of their sustaining
domesticity.
A book of
family memories must always have the spine of an intimate
community that girds the shenanigans of its diverse characters.
The feudal setting of Darde-Dil provides such a
community. Repugnant to our present refined sense of freedom,
the palace offers a vantage point from which we view the world
outside.
A London-based
Pakistani, Kamila Shamsie evokes this place with the touching
lovingness of an innocent recalling childhood delights. The
place becomes significant to her and to us because the Partition
of the country forces the ancestors to migrate. The pain of
partition is consoled by the small quandaries (the unobserved
'salt ' of the title) of daily existence which are taken for
granted.
This
ordinariness becomes significant, becomes symbolic of the
flavour of little miracles (the 'saffron' of the title) that
sweeten their lives. The shadowy lives of Timur, Sulaiman and
Akbar (the latter is the narrator's father) and their more
shadowy narratives, the restlessness of Aliya and her cousin,
Sameer and the penumbral existence of Khalil (Cal, as it is
punned) provide the fulcrum propelling these narratives.
In one sense
the novel is about identity, about who we are and what happens
to us once the taken-for granted supports give way. Shamsie, at
home in traditional Urdu and modern English literatures, shows
no strains of what is fashionably called in-betweenness. This is
why she delights in looking at the oddities of her people
without attempting to slot them into types. She uses this
knowledge to mock, satirise and to hold up for irony all whom
she bathes in the golden light of her humour. One who can pun on
Iago and Othello ('Ego of Hello') or Prufrock ('Prue Frock') and
many other characters from the literature of the master race,
can afford to be generous towards the relics of her own social
past.
Shamsie has brought to her own
ancestors the energies of a humane novel that is also a
searching emotional large-heartedness. For a promising writer,
this is a major accomplishment.
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