Zari Zoon’s is a world torn asunder by tragedy on an inconceivable scale; by a barbaric, deliberate human act. She is jolted out of her sheltered, comfortable existence as the younger daughter of Kashmiri parents, a happy bride-to-be, into strange worlds. Worlds in which she resorts to inflicting self-harm to ease her pain, where the ghosts of hallucinations watch her every move with critical, accusing eyes, giving her not a moment’s peace, day or night. “Are they replacing us?” They demand of her. “Who is this? Have you forgotten me?” Or they “glare down at her — bulbous eyes and halos of streaming hair.” The world is a senseless, meaningless place, where Zoon is left questioning why she survived: “Too many mornings she would wake up thinking she was back home, only to remember that that world was gone.”

The protagonist of Soniah Kamal’s first novel, An Isolated Incident, struggles to regain balance in a spinning universe and to start to live again. “Help me God, Zari prayed as tears joined the blood. How am I supposed to balance a life torn between those who are here and those who are forever gone.” Hers is a journey that must, indeed, begin with but a single step. Kamal is brilliant at drawing this searing picture of pain with deep sensitivity. You can almost hear Zari’s ragged breathing, time after time, as she fumbles to put some sanity back into her existence. Life must go on; there is no other choice.

Zari, after the death of all her immediate relatives — parents, fiancé, and all in between — is passed along among distant family here and there (since the unanimous decision is that she must leave Srinagar). There is the uncle in India, followed by the aunt in Pakistan, followed by the Nabis — “distant relatives” in the US. Just how distant, we are never told. Kamal’s realism is scathing and sharp. Take Zari, for instance: “that’s why she’d come here, to America, to their house, wasn’t it, to heal? But how was that going to happen? By babysitting Miraage? By going for Salsabil’s exercise classes? By writing in that rainbow journal his mother had handed her?”

As the 18-year-old girl is absorbed into the life of the Nabi household, parallel narratives emerge. After all, Mr Nabi, too, originally hails from Srinagar. Hence the intertwining of storylines, from Srinagar to the US, and back again. Veiled family secrets beg unravelling, with Billal, the restless-at-heart adventurist happy to oblige. Billal, who cannot seem to focus on his college studies, and despairs of the comfortable life he leads. This very existence is what his parents strove to give their children, we learn, leaving behind their homelands — Kashmir, and Pakistan — for better lives.

Billal, however, is a bit of a rebel with a cause born of a childhood visit to Srinagar. It is the memories of that solitary trip that haunt him; of how his dada’s sister, Mauj ji, regaled him with heroic stories of his grandfather, the “freedom fighter”, instilling in the little boy a seed that grew: “you are Abdullah Nabi’s grandson! Make your dada proud. I swear you are his spitting image”. This cause that Billal takes upon himself is given impetus by Zari’s very presence — Zari, the victim; Zari, whom he finds himself irrevocably drawn to. Her wrongs must be righted, and who better than Billal himself to avenge the gods?

Love and war merge, and Billal takes off to become a freedom fighter, not having a glimmer of an idea what may lie in store. A flight to Pakistan and a ride across to a training camp in Afghanistan are the precursors of his Kashmir quest. Billal’s naivete would be touching, if it didn’t come across as jarring given the grave nature of his quest: “He was alarmed at the thought of assassination, hijacking, and hostage taking”. Some benefit of doubt can be given to the 19-year-old born-and-bred American, who could not have imagined the horrors of life in war zones. He is quite the confused, angst-ridden, immature teenager who wants to change the world: “the whole idea of ‘amounting to something’ was not as clear here as it had seemed back home. Now that he was here, ‘amounting to something’ increasingly appeared to simply mean keeping sane and getting out alive.”

The novel has gruesome details aplenty. Darker aspects of the story are sketched in intense detail. World peace or the lack of it, and the great plan of the universe as well as faith being tested and re-tested or rejected are all underlying currents. Time, fate and destiny are recurring concepts too. And the intricacies of the Kashmir dispute, as it stands today, are laid bare. As the story spirals towards its closure, you are kept hooked on to whether a tragic end awaits.

Kamal’s beautiful use of language is what carries her story. Her prose is poetic. People, at one place, are described as “radiant, piping hot with life”; there is a “rosy blue day”; a roof “the colour of wet oak leaves”; and so on. As a novel, though, there are a couple of things that seem a bit askew — one, the plot skids over timeframes. You want to be given some sort of time references. For example, how long after coming to the US does Zari get married, how long after the traumatic events of her life does her process of healing begin, and so on.

Second, the book having some minor errors and typos required a last edit. Take, for example that there is no “Intercontinental” hotel in Islamabad (there is Pearl Continental in Rawalpindi), or that the character called Nazeer is spelt as Nazir once.

Ultimately, though, what Billal seeks in the outside world is his inner challenge — to be able to make peace with the worlds outside, with all the demons and turmoil, conflict and warfare of our times. And so, more than anything else, this rests as a coming-of-age story, for both its main protagonists — 18-year-old Zari, and 19-year-old Billal. One has seen too much of the world, the other too little.

“Zari didn’t want to go but there was nothing to stay for, nothing left to protect and yet, there it was, an iron padlock clasping shut the front door of her house and blushing shamefully under her accusatory gaze. Soon, trees her parents had planted would be pregnant with fruits for picking, fruits which would go from ripe to rotten and fall and bruise the overgrown grass. Soon overgrowth would swamp the stone walls, take over the brick flower borders, weasel onto garden furniture and ensnare the delicate pattern of the wrought iron grille. A few seasons and the dwelling would fall to wild, a haunt daring children to touch its gates and survive. The home Zari’s parents had tended, the grounds they’d preserved, the gardens they’d nourished, all gathered in their cheeks a dirge of a farewell that followed Zari long after she departed, leaving behind the sum that had been her life.”

— Excerpt from the book

An Isolated Incident
(NOVEL)
By Soniah Kamal
Fingerprint, India
ISBN 978-81-7234-532-7
400pp.