Category: Fiction
Rights: All rights available
Who hasn’t had the experience of blurting out something that he both means and regrets – of being misunderstood? That is what happens to the unnamed narrator of this novel, an ex- academic and a little-known ‘bhasha’ novelist from the Northeast of India, while speaking to a famous Anglo-American writer at a literary event. The words he blurts out are: “Drown all the refugees”. The rest of the novel is offered by him as his explanation for the disturbing words.
The narrator, who, for reasons that become clear as the story proceeds, does not wish to be identified, narrates the story of a man, Pedro – the son of his nurse and almost a brother to him – who disappears in a bid to reach the phantasmagoric ‘dream’ of the West.
When his distraught mother uses what she considers occult forces to bring Pedro back, he returns to their little world but he is obviously also very different from what he used to be.
What is he now? Is he a ghost, is he a shadow, is he traumatized? What is it that happened to him on his passage to the phantasmagoric Western Dream – or his passage back?
As the narrator tries to get to the bottom of this mystery, he also grapples with his own semi-colonial inheritance, his sexuality, his time in USA, and his memories of his dead Palestinian lover – all of it while refugees in Gaza are being bombed more heavily than London or Berlin was in World War II. The narrator feels his grip on reality slipping, but perhaps it is this slippage that can bring some understanding? For perhaps there is more on heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our philosophies, and perhaps the occult is just an index of our refusal to remember and understand?
This is a gothic novel of unexpected happenings and haunting characters, of shadows without a body or bodies that have lost their shadows, of walls that hold you captive and love that frees you – all of it undergirded by the narrator’s radical demand to his reader: “Do you think pity absolves you? No, pity is something to be offered to a dog lamed by a car, a bird with broken wings, a worm cleft in half. It is better to kill a human being than to pity him.”
The author: Tabish Khair