Book Review by Somdatta Mandal
Title: Homecoming
Author: Omair Ahmad
Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books
From the title of this novella, Homecoming, one can guess that a particular place becomes the focal point in the unravelling of the story, and that place is none other than Lucknow, seeping in past history, a promise of grace that the city was famed for, and a unique brand of Nawabi culture. The novel opens with a ‘Prologue’ where we are told that Hassan’s wife Samina has decided to leave Lucknow after she discovered that a small monument with a grave had been destroyed and the calligraphy over it had been vandalised. From that vantage point, Omair Ahmad, an eminent novelist, tactfully gives us the entire history through rendition given by three characters – Hassan, Ahmed Sahib and Sam or Samina narrate the story in four independent segments.
Hassan originally belonged to a Reddy family in Hyderabad and was of mixed parentage with a father steeped in communist ideology. His father married a Muslim lady from Patna. After several years, when they quarreled and fell apart, Hassan, a dentist by profession, left for Lucknow in search of a stable job. That became his home for almost twenty-five years. After years of trying to belong to Lucknow, once a city of poetry and grace where he had hoped to find something of the father he had lost, Hassan meets a kindred spirit—Ahmed sahib, an elderly man of quiet warmth and dignity, although diminished in circumstance. Unable to pay his professional fees, Ahmed sahib accepts Hassan’s proposal to show him around the city of Lucknow with the hope that it would become his home and gives him the gift of unspoken friendship. He believed that the city was too close to him. Sometimes, he thought, everything had changed, and sometimes he thought nothing had. In the company of this man, the city opened itself to him, parting ever so slightly, slowly making him its own in a way he had not felt in all the years he had lived there.
Ahmed sahib himself was an abandoned son, had no siblings, no wife or child, but was still connected to a wider family. It was through his connections with an extended family that the novelist depicts the lifestyle and stories of old Lucknow with its begums, kothas, tawaifs, courtesans, old havelis[1], music being practiced by so many great artists, intricacies of inheritance etc.
The third and the most significant protagonist is Sam or Samina, who was born in Lucknow, though she didn’t know that, and as an orphan went to live and grow up in London with her aunt and uncle. In college she fell in love with Urdu calligraphy and the Lucknawi style, and she managed to receive a fellowship from the Royal Historical Society to go to Lucknow to study calligraphy on the tombs of the noblewomen there.
Her aunt used to receive a letter once every six months from Badinani in Lucknow, from a great aunt called Begum Waheed, who briefed regularly about the myriad people she still thought of as her family, even if she hadn’t met most of them. At first Sam was afraid because she felt she was entering a world where everybody was an aunt or uncle, or a great-aunt or great-uncle. But gradually she becomes slightly more stable.
Hassan and Samina meet and gradually fall in love with the machinations of Ahmed sahib. When Ahmed sahib dies, the two of them felt orphaned once more. Hassan concludes his narrative by telling us that he was no longer the man he had been before he met Ahmed sahib, before he learned of all he was to so many people. It had taken a year after his death for him and Samina to discover each other, and when she offered him her name, he knew he could never let her go. The concluding lines of the novella are striking:
“I will let Samina rescue me from Lucknow, as her parents were once rescued by exile, and go haunt another land. I think Ahmed sahib would forgive me, I think he would even approve.”
Spare, nostalgic and moving, Omair Ahmad’s new novella is a meditation on love, lost and gained, dwelling on ideas of family, home and belonging. A wonderful read and the novelist should be congratulated for it.
[1] Kothas– brothels; Tawaifs– courtesans; Havelis– old palatial houses
Somdatta Mandal, critic and translator, is former Professor of English at Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, India.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Click here to access Wild Winds: The Borderless Anthology of Poems
Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles