Dark places, well lighted skies

IT'S not everyday that one gets to review a book written by a namesake, for Manzu Islam, a.k.a. Syed Manzurul Islam, is a mita, a hamnam of mine, although the 'zoo' in the middle of my name gets shortened to a less emphatic 'zu' in his. Living and working in two different places separated by seven seas and thirteen rivers, the two SMIs, through the trick of their (almost) identical names, nevertheless share in each other's praise or blame. Thus, I have been congratulated many a time for the brilliant The Ethics of Travel and the short story collection The Mapmakers of Spitalfields, while he has received accolades for 'also writing in Bangla': Apni Banglateyo lekhen? Bah! I wince when someone thus assigns wholesale my short stories to him, but bear it with a grin, especially when he has to answer for the charge of fuzziness: ki lekhen anek shomoy bujte pari na.

Whether put off by such charges or not Syed Manzurul Islam now writes under a new name, Manzu Islam, thus simplifying matters for us, and affording English tongues some relief from unaccustomed pronunciations. It is under this surgically-shortened name that he has written a book which promises to join the front ranks of a sub-genre of diasporic literature--that of the Bangladeshi diaspora. However, as I shall argue, Manzu's work is not diasporic in the stodgily post-colonial sense given to the term by the collective labour of the likes of Bharati Mukherjee. For while Burrow is substantially about the Bangladeshi community in London, it is not a simple recounting of the crises of identity and marginalization of the community, and the conflict between its desire to return to ethnic purity and a recognition of the imperatives to merge with the mainstream. Nor is it an account of the resolve to keep its cultural and semantic codes intact within the community boundary, and the wish to go beyond the boundary and appropriate elements from, and impose its own codes on, the master code. Burrow is also not primarily a narrative of displacement, since that would assume a firm 'place' to begin with, which may, through vicissitudes of fortune, turn shaky, thus leading to displacement.

Manzu's legal and illegal immigrants are ship jumpers and adventurers, students or visitors who turn into moles upon expiry of visa terms or join the subsistence level workforce with permits, and restaurantwallahs/workers who have landed on England's shores seeking fortune. They do bring their sense of displacement with them, and a nostalgia for lost origin, but the community's daily struggle, if anything, appears to be aimed at finding a foothold in the largely alien and inhospitable land.

Manzu's novel does rework some typical elements of diasporic literature into its narrative frame--the rediscovery and (re)production of identity, representation (of that identity) and resistance (to master codes attempting to erase or subsume that identity), for example, but his emphasis, to the extent there is one, is on the inscribing power of history--personal, familial, local and national--which problematizes the question of identity and embeds it in the tangled roots of colonialism. Burrow, despite being almost exclusively set in East London, straddles the two geographies of London and Sylhet and the two time frames of present and past. It ends without the hope of any future, thus turning our eyes back to the past, to the origin of the community and the beginning of an individual history of migration, exile and (possibly forced) return.

While being a work about the struggles of Bangladeshi community to survive throught the eventful 1970s and '80s in the face of tough immigration policing and violent attacks by the National Front, Burrow is also a story about an individual's growth, his coming of age, his attempts to harness the artistic self with the increasingly bitter social and political self; about falling in and out of love; about coming to terms with the life of exile; about roots pulled out of native soil and transplanted in an alien one. There are also elements of fantasy and surrealism and fragments of myths (Daedalus is a recurrent icon) as well as symbols and metonymies (digging; the subterranean world of sewerage tunnels of London) that are woven into a fairly routine tale of immigrant experience, but one which appears, at times, quite bizarre and out of the world.

It is this shifting of mood and perspective, the mix of realism with fantasy, psychology with workaday reality that takes Burrow away from a diasporic focus to one that is essentially revealing of the dusky interiors of a man driven by uncertain desires and inherited passions. For Tapan, the protagonist of Burrow, is both himself with all his youthful love of women and the bonhomie of friends, as well as the family's obedient grandson who is made to drive his roots into the soil of the 'most beautiful land on earth' dreamt of by his grandfather. In the end, the grandfather, the model Orientalist subject, is defeated by the same British bureaucracy he so proudly served, while Tapan the uncertain individual with a Daedalian dream floats back to the surface, clinging to the fragments of his self. Whether Manzu manipulates his narrative to this end or not, in the end, it is not the saga of Orientalism revisited and the diaspora reinvestigated that remains the final impression of the novel, but the protagonist's personal tragedies and triumphs, his search for his freedom, his becoming a free agent, that steals the limelight.

A summary of the plot recounting the main events and developments of the novel, would seem rather ordinary and would reinforce notions of diasporic struggle for identity. It is at the more complex level, however, where the focus shifts to the interior spaces of the main characters, that Burrow begins to live up to the metaphorical possibilities suggested by its title. Tapan Ali, the grandson of a Bangladeshi man obsessed with everything British (he once served the British with fanatic loyalty), finds his stay in England uncertain as his funding has stopped with the grandfather's death. A fellow student, Adela Richardson, offers to marry him to solve his immigration problem--partly because she likes him, but mainly because this would clinch her overriding passion in life: betrayal (in this case betraying 'her family, her class, her nation and her history').

Although sounding like a tall order, the betrayal theory works for a while, the two even get into a nice, marital groove, but then things begin to take an uncertain turn. The Home Office suspects the marriage to be one of convenience, and sits on a decision on Tapan's immigration status while the couple goes through the ritual of staying married. There are moments when their relationship displays true understanding and love, even passion, but Adela's betrayal runs its due course. She begins to look for a way out, allowing the marriage to drift on to the rocks. The inevitable soon happens--they are separated, but not before Adela conceives, which, incredibly, escapes Tapan Ali's attention, despite tell-tale signs (Adela's vomiting and morning sickness).

Tapan falls back on old friends who are a suitably-arranged multicultural mix. But, in moving out of Adela's life, he moves into East London, the epicentre of Bangladeshi immigrant community and the diasporic encounters. There, he gets involved (at first involuntarily, then willingly) with a group of Bangladeshi youths fighting the skinheads and BNP. Progressively, he gets tangled up in the intricate web of relationships, kinship conflicts and survival games that define the Bangladeshi community there.

He develops a relationship with Nilufar, a maverick who leaves her rather conservative family in search of an identity. Tapan Ali, without any immigration status, also seeks an identity. First he turns into a mole, then an activist-mole and then a mole on the run, living out his days and nights in safe houses and hideaways.

In the life lived as a mole Tapan discovers East London for the burrow it really is, and the burrow civilized British society (not least represented by its faceless immigration department) cannot avoid but lets be, and the burrow his own personal/familial history is. Manzu loves contrasts and subterranean comparisons--the burrow that Tapan the mole has to dig is balanced by an anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist burrow that one of his comrades, Masuk Ali, digs under the streets of East London with the ostensible purpose of reaching the Tower of London in order to retrieve the Koh-i-Noor diamond stolen from the Mughals by the British, an act which now stands for restoration of the pride of an entire civilization.

There is another burrow that the anti-British revolutionary Vatya Das had dug in his village to evade arrest, and into which he disappeared with the inveterate skill of a field rodent. Vatya Das's digging was a revolutionary act of defiance and resistance while Masuk Ali's digging is an archaeological excavation for the lost roots of their nation and history. Tapan Ali soon realizes that the burrow he has to dig and inhabit as a mole is neither one or the other. If anything, it is akin to Bombay Bill's world of 'dark places.' Bombay Bill, incidentally, is a throwback to the British Raj. He once served in 'Hindostan,' and cannot forget his privileged position in that imperial context, although now, without a family or a source of income, he is made to haunt the dark tunnels of London's other underground. Imperialism revisited--or rather re-excavated--in an ironic and quirky sense.

To end Tapan's (and Burrow's) story--he decides to give up on his moleship and is conveniently caught by the immigration police. Despite the help from Sundar and Nilufar, and inactivity on the part of Paltu Khan the police informer (or 'source' in Bangladeshi terminology), Tapan does not evade arrest. He attains a beatitude of sorts as, in the end, his Daedalian desire to fly overpowers his more practical urges, and lifts him to the sphere of pure imagination. His deportation only brings the story to a full circle, but, in between, Tapan has changed. From a man contaminated by his grandfather's proto-Orientalist dream, he has turned into a free agent, one who can decide his own fate and act accordingly. The story of course has many other twists and turns: it tells us about the problems of adjustment faced by immigrant families, about the subculture of charlatans, fringe dwellers, venerable babas and pirs, about nobility and courage as well as betrayal and greed; about gang wars, drugs; about fear and love; about belonging and not belonging. Burrow is a novel that begins abruptly with Tapan's dream of a horseman galloping towards him through mist, holding a sword in his armoured hand--symbol of imperial might--and ends predictably with a reality check: of immigration policemen swooping down on him, and Tapan Ali disappearing into the mist of non-existence. The crocuses in his dream wilt and shed their colour as Tapan stands on the debris of his life and lost time, trying to come to terms with it.

Within the bigger frame of the Bangladeshi diaspora, Manzu has woven his tale of one man's emergence from the subterranean world of fear, rejection and loss of selfhood to a world of light which may, or may not, in the end signal his transcendence, but certainly seals both ends of a burrow of shame, ignominy, and shifting identities.

Syed Manzoorul Islam teaches English at Dhaka University.