Sunday, July 27, 2003		Books

A work of courage
Rajdeep Bains

Trespassing
by Uzma Aslam Khan. Penguin, New Delhi.
Pages 448. Rs 395

SILKWORMS produce a thread so fine that a mile of it can be wound around your arm. Yet it is strong enough to bind all the characters together in this delicately woven work. Silk, the omniscient thread that runs through the fabric of Trespassing, is also the main cord that brings together the political and the personal elements in the lives of people intent on keeping just these apart.

In Pakistan, a country where violence and bloodshed have become a way of life, nothing makes sense anymore. The weak get pushed by the strong, who in turn have to bow before an even stronger enemy till all borders are blurred and no one knows who is the ‘trespasser’. Sindhis, Pathans, Punjabis, "Amreeka and the Angrez," all vie for a piece of the strife-torn land.

Dia is the 19-year-old daughter of one of Pakistan’s few women entrepreneurs. Her mother, Riffat, is a successful silk farmer and manufacturer. Her father has been murdered, leaving Dia with a feeling of deep anguish and a desperate need to find the culprit. Riffat, herself a rebel, encourages her daughter to be the same. She gives Dia the freedom to choose her own life partner. In a land where women are given no such choice, Dia considers herself fortunate; till she discovers that this freedom, too, is bound by her own past. To both mother and daughter, the silk farm is not only a place of work where they can assert their independence; it is a refuge from a society that insists that they conform to its rules.

Living in a country where all good and evil are attributed to fate, Dia yearns for change. Yet, due to the turmoil in her own life, she desperately tries to create her own space where things remain constant. Daanish’s arrival in Karachi for his father’s funeral threatens her private island. Coming from America, a land of few restrictions, he too chafes under the conventions and formalities of his own society. It takes a silly prank and a handful of silkworms to bring them together.

Dia and Daanish discover a common love for "minor details and small discoveries", that "most people considered trivial". They find how precious love can be in a world where hatred has become the leading emotion. However, the very fate they refuse to believe in conspires against them and they are left with little choice but to bow to it.

Salaamat is a son of a fisherman who comes to Karachi to earn a living when foreign trawlers make it impossible for him to do so in his village. Through Salaamat, the reader is given an unromanticised view of the life in training camps for "freedom fighters". Salaamat is one of the few who join out of a sense of conviction. However, it does not take him long to realise the futility of his convictions as he sees the "men" getting "guns from the Pathans`85supplies from a Punjabi, who in turn imported from Amreeka and the Angrez." The man they have just killed was a Sindhi, so the talk of protecting their own people is just that—talk.

The reader is taken through the changing faces of Pakistan in the early nineties, when America has just attacked Iraq, and Pakistanis are left to wonder if they really know the country they took for their ally. Daanish, as a budding journalist, discovers that America, for all its talk of freedom of the Press, is not much different from the "oppressive regimes" it denounces. The American public is kept entirely unaware of the realities behind the facade put up by the Press during the Gulf war. No one questions the picture of justified retribution that has been presented. It is left to a few people like Daanish to wonder: "The American public has been told that the 40,000 US troops currently stationed in the Saudi desert are there to protect Saudi Arabia from the 120,000 Iraqi troops moving into it from Kuwait. Why haven’t we been shown these Iraqi troops?" Nobody thinks about the lack of talk of civilian deaths, loss of property or the way the suffering of the average Iraqis has been ignored.

Trespassing is a bold and self-confident piece of work that breaks from the dogmas and doctrines of a conflict-torn state. This intricately woven tale leaves us with a sense of deep sadness and anger as we cannot help but become involved in the lives of the various characters so lovingly presented.