Category: Fiction
Publisher: Penguin Random House India (forthcoming)
Rights: World rights available (excluding Indian subcontinent). Translation rights available (excluding Hindi).
In this strikingly vivid portrayal of Kayaloram, a fictional backwater village in Kerala in early ’70s and ’80s, Tales from Qabristan takes us into the lonely heart of the child we have all once been, stringing together fleeting, poignant memories, layers of pain, bursts of laughter and a handful of tears. Tales from Qabristan begins and ends on the same day—the day it rains in bright afternoon sunshine when 23-year-old Farook brings his father’s body to the qabristan behind the mosque in his childhood village.
Memories blur, characters pop in and out. The novel unspools a reel of interconnected memories of the quaint little village, of secret lives, sexual proclivities, and of superstitions.
One by one, characters step readily out of the menagerie Farook has built inside him and tell the readers their individual story of hopes long lost and lives half lived. As the day wears off, more memories pour out of his repertoire: memories of avaricious aunts, daydreaming uncles, and ignorant tribal folks, without whom his pastoral landscape is incomplete. The slow decadence of his family is portrayed through the lives of his three maternal aunts and grandmother, their many struggles and setbacks in life. Farook is an impressionable eight-year-old boy trying to understand the world around his family through the eyes of the adults around him, especially through his mother, who fills his head with stories about men and women who live their lives in tragic ways.
With its language often slipping into magical realism yet finding equal footing in the realms of both fantasy and reality, the novel reminds us that children are capable of discerning extremely complex realities even if they cannot fully understand them.
The author: Sabin Iqbal