Murshed's Folly

Broken Milestones, by Manzur Murshed; Florida: Sarasota: FLF Press; 2005; 634 pp; $ 29.95.

The novel is about Yusuf (no surname available as far as my reading, albeit strained, went) who is born, according to the blurb, in a 'small coastal village of Bengal towards the end of the British Raj in India.' Note that 'in India.' He grows up in Calcutta, witnessing, and participating, in the horrors of the Partition riots before migrating to East Pakistan. He studies at Dhaka University and later joins the Pakistan civil service. He marries a West Pakistani woman, a Pathan princess. The great bulk of the novel's action takes place now, with a fairly varied cast of characters, ranging over rural administrative areas and Dhaka, Lahore, Karachi, Pindi. Later there is Murree, Kashmir, London and New York. The book comes to an end on December 16, with the birth of the 'new state of Bangladesh.'

Either Mr. Murshed is ignorant of the current standards of the English novel written by South Asians, or else he is an intrepid, ambitious soul who is not to be denied his moment in the sun. Armed with nothing more than the bent lance of Indian English, or perhaps a variant thereof which may be labeled as CSP English, the author has tilted it full-bore at the windmills of novel-writing to produce this 634-page tome. It is a book that exhibits with aplomb the rustic infelicities of, say, a schoolmaster in rural Bengal:

'I stand up to leave. Nasser shouts from the centre of the room, "Hey where are you going?"

I make the sign of minor toilet. He nods. I leave quickly and Rashidun follows.'

Sign of minor toilet! One is left wondering if that is a coded metaphor for the book. It is, after all, six hundred and thirty-four indefatigable pages of this stuff.

The central character's life unwinds against the vast panorama of national politics, where lest we not get the point, various figures are one or two cards shy of a full deck: 'Sheikh Najib' for example, for Sheikh Mujib, or, (another favourite) 'Iftekhar Ali Sutto' for just guess who.

It is a mystery why all manner, and races, of 'scintillating' women are so smitten with Yusuf. We never know what he looks like, nor does he really do anything extraordinary to merit such attention. Yet they fling themselves at him by the bucketload. Maybe it's the mystique of that absent surname. Maybe all he needed to be was be a joint secretary. But, sadly, no matter how much they desire Yusuf, all of them meet the same sordid fate: entombment in the language of penny dreadfuls. Time and again, 'howling lust engulfs both of us, like the primordial man and woman. We are two beings that matter for the moment, time stops and transports us to that niche where human passion confluences to produce momentary pleasure.'

But all is not lost. There are nuggets to be mined here. To give just one example, if the reader is interested in anthropology, as I am, he/she will be fascinated by the passages about the recruitment interview ('viva voce') of would-be CSPs by members of the Pakistan Public Service Commission. If the rendition in the book is a fair approximation of reality, then one is forced to conclude that it was a harrowingly cavalier procedure. Two questions by the board (and then it's lunchtime and Yusuf is in like Flynn), one of which is: '"But tell me, you are a student of Mathematics principally, yet you write such good English. How?"

"There is no contradiction between English and Mathematics," I say. "I like the study of both subjects. Just as I love the rationalism of Mathematics, I have also been charmed by the infinite variety of the English syntax. I think it is possible to love both."'

That charm must induce mental paralysis, for concern about the syntactic validity, and aesthetics, of that interrogative, monosyllabic 'How?' simply blows through Yusuf's head like wind over empty plain..

At the end, one has to ask: is this what life in the Pakistan civil service was like? If so, it does explain certain things, not the least of which is that all those trendy theories about class and feudalism and the military-bureaucratic oligarchy being responsible for the break-up of Pakistan are just so much bunkum. Lay the blame instead on the CSP interview, and the subsequent academy training. No state, least of all the fragile formulation that was the old Pakistan, could have survived these mandarins.

If the reader is idling her/his engine on a Sunday afternoon, he/she might thumb through Murshed's Folly as a prime example of how not to write the South Asian English novel. Which is too bad, really, for if one discounts the language, there are glimmerings of an interesting read here--the author does display the sharp eye for the odd detail. But then, the tale's in the telling, isn't it?

Khademul Islam is literary editor, The Daily Star.