A cross between reality and fantasy
Reviewed by Shalini Rawat

In Haleema's Words
By Fatima Ahmed Rupa.
Pages 431. Rs 375

As most of us cross the threshold of youth, we search for meanings to whatever life serves us. The author on the other hand has to grope in the mind’s recesses for words to shine a light. The pictures that turn over and over of what has been, could have been or could be are apparently not enough. She has to flesh them out with words.

We are all heroes of our own stories and in our telling of it lies all the drama. There is so much that Haleema has to say. But words fail her. She tries to picture them, paint them, string them but words are an umbrella on a stormy monsoon night. The umbrella is an unruly child and fails miserably. So do the words.

Fatima Ahmed's maiden voyage in novel writing is a cross between her lived life and a fantasy. The protagonist, Haleema (a journalist like the author), tries in vain to chalk out her own destiny. Instead she slips into mediocrity, which is what happens to most of us once we fulfil our greatest ambition (or totally give up on it).

Ever so often we come across indeterminate souls who exchange the boredom of a routine family life and all its squabbles for the vacuity of bachelorhood; who push away people and wallow in loneliness; shut their doors to opportunities and drown their souls in patchiness. Life has come to them on their own terms and now they do not know what to make of it.

Haleema too starts out an unsure heroine who feels claustrophobic in her dying aristocratic joint family where the joints have all but come loose. She is on the verge of becoming a three-dimensional character. She arrives in Mumbai to follow her dreams but loses perspective thereafter. Her multiple flings that include a businessman, a hippie and a ‘liberated’ man are smothered under layers of la-di-da that could have made for some very lyrical prose.

This ‘verbal deluge’ by the protagonist’s own admission, is her undoing. The italicised and embroidered prose passages, which could have taken the story to newer heights, collapse under their own weight. Sample this, "My dreams have begun to susurrate (incorrectly spelt ‘sussurate’ in the book) with waves lapping up alien shores. I long for boulevards chattering in foreign tongues. For flaky winters wrapped in furs. For the swish of silken skirts under crystalline chandeliers." The story has all the elements of romance, drama and thrill to it but all the same the protagonist seems to be absent while life is happening to her as Haleema admits, "My life seems far away, happening to someone else, with me having no say in it." The protagonist has hitched her wagon to the ominous patriarchal world that feels like walking on thin ice. In her time there were few avenues available to women for freedom and none if the experiment went awry. If Haleema were a real person, she would right now be walking through the corridors of a guru's remote ashram wondering where she was when it was time to live — and searching for the right words to talk about her emotions.

HOME