Some novels begin with journeys and others end on such a note. Zaheda Hina’s novel, All Passion Spent (Na Junoon Raha na Pari), translated by Neelam Hussain, strikes a different note. It is almost with the precision of a cinematic shot that the novel opens as the frame freezes on Birjees Dawar Ali stepping out of an elevator onto the polished sheen of Italian marble in a hotel lobby. The opening scene also brings in another journey, her first trip to the city and at first its details mingle with those of the second, but then the past opens up. It is the sensation of returning a second time and the memories of the past journey which determine the pace of the novel and the past as well as the present begin to unfold almost simultaneously.

Birjees the prodigal returning to Karachi gives way to the rain soaked Birjees who follows a lost brooch to land up in the Cowasjee household. She is searching for her lost relatives in the burgeoning city of Karachi, in the days just after Partition.

“What if the brooch hadn’t been lost — or having been lost — she hadn’t found it — what would have happened then? So many ‘ifs’! Maybe that was what life was about — an aggregate of random, meaningless ‘ifs’. Yet each ‘if’ was replete with dire possibility — each one containing an endlessly unravelling saga of dread before which one was abjectly powerless — over which one had no control.”

Birjees soon discovers a terrible secret, the story of the lost daughter of the Cowasjee family, and slowly her own story also emerges. Living in a joint family in a traditional Muslim household, she loses her beloved father and feels homeless when her stepmother decides to sell the old family mansion. Different from many stereotypical characters, Birjees is no ideologically motivated or politically inspired zealot headed towards the newly created state of Pakistan; rather she decides to go to the new country to meet the cousin she is in love with.

Described as stubborn and headstrong by Pervaiz, the person for whom she crossed the border and came to a strange land, Birjees emerges as a strong character, a woman of substance. Pervaiz is an opportunist who wants to marry for wealth and social connections and casts aside Birjees. For him, Pakistan is a land of opportunity and he wants to make the most of it. His character reminds me of Safdar Bhai in Khadija Mastoor’s Aangan and of some of the characters in Qurratulain Hyder’s Sitaharan and Housing Society who find a new world in Karachi and want to quickly make the most of it. Mastoor’s Safdar Bhai was an idealist, a Romantic figure for whose sake Tehmina, his cousin and the older of two sisters, put an end to her life. He is a changed man when the younger sister Aliya meets him in Pakistan, and she rejects his offer when he tries to shift his attention towards her.

Birjees finds refuge in a Parsi family and it becomes her second home. The Parsi characters are described in loving detail. The novel carries an air of mystery but soon enough you realise that this is not the mystery of a crime thriller or a whodunnit, but of times past and never regained, irrevocable and unredeemable. This sense of loss informs the ending of the novel. As Birjees travels to the airport to leave Karachi, there is a hint of the unfulfilled and the unsaid: “The final boarding call broke into their space; shaken, forsaken by words, they stared at each other — was this then all there was to life? A handful of days and a fistful of nights of unspoken desires awaiting recognition. Two solitary souls looked at each other and succumbed to Time’s beat.”

Fiction writer and journalist, Hina is well-known in Urdu circles for her short stories characterised by a strong sense of history and rich, multi-layered style. Several threads run though this short, intense novel — of Partition, Karachi, the life of the minorities, all sketched against the central love interest. Both the writer and the novel have been particularly well-served by the translator who has preserved the literariness of the original without being pedantic. “And thus was unfolded the tale of her long journey — a journey marked by betrayals and severities of loved ones and the kindness of strangers. It was a tale more strange than any to be found in the Talism-i-Hoshruba, for the protagonists of this dastaan were the shifting sands of a once safe and familiar geography made unfamiliar by the legerdemain of history and bewitched and held in thrall by time.”

It is this dastaan which is so beautifully recaptured in this powerful novel.

The reviewer is a writer and critic

All Passion Spent (NOVEL) By Zaheda Hina Translated into English by Neelam Hussain Zubaan Books, New Delhi ISBN 978-8189884901 167pp. Indian Rs225