RENOWNED and critically acclaimed Canadian author Kim Echlin’s new novel, Under the Visible Life, has a pleasant and rather lyrical surprise right at the beginning. Her last book, the award-winning Disappeared, reminded one of a heart-rending tragic play with its final act in war-ravaged Cambodia. In Under the Visible Life, the lives of two women with very distinct and different ethnic backgrounds seem to be parallel to each other as they shape the narrative. The compelling novel is a double-billed musical journey which begins on the right note in a city of many surprises: Karachi. What sounds familiar to us soon begins to acquires shades of amazement and wonder as the story picks up pace and we see the figures literally acquiring lives of their own almost to the point of being ready to step out of the pages, against a carefully delineated background of the Beach Luxury Hotel and Clifton in Karachi the way it once used to be.

No Memory Is One’s Own Alone is the name of the first section and the opening sentence is enigmatic and inviting: “What she is I am.” As you move forward to get an idea of what this means, the compelling narrative takes a grip on you even before you realise it. “My mother ran away with my father from Lashkar Gah when she was eighteen and gave birth to me in Karachi, the pearl of the Arabian Sea,” It is only the escape story and the city which are discernible as the narrator, who is without a name as yet, begins her story as essentially that of her mother, the bright-eyed Breshna who moves “with great energy and gracefully.” We are told that her parents’ favourite place to go dancing was the Beach Luxury Hotel and in a few crisp brush-strokes we are introduced to her father, “handsome in an American way, with his shaved-smooth face and his hair short and parted to one side. There was a little stoop in his shoulders that was from tallness not humility, and he was enthusiastic to see or try anything new. He liked to wear a narrow tie, unusual in the heat of Karachi.”

We read this immediately after the swift-moving and seemingly cruel story-line has informed us about the child ready to pick out tunes since she was three, and a tragic fate hanging over their heads: “from the beginning my parents were teetering on their own brink. I did not have them for long. They were murdered when I was thirteen.”

The first few pages set the tone of the book, which is at once clear, precise and touching in its own way. Mahsa is named after the moon and can say thank you in three languages but “not care in four languages.” She and her parents are equally at home watching To Kill a Mockingbird and the qawwali from Barsaat Ki Raat. However the recording she makes for her abbu was soon to be lost, like her city itself: “I do not know what happened to that record. It is lost to me, just as the Karachi I grew up in disappeared.” As the chapter ends, we knew that we are one with Mahsa and have watched our city disappear right in the front of our eyes. It is a grim reminder but very unnerving to read about such happenings in a novel which was after all, written in Canada.

As Mahsa learns to come to terms to terms with her predicament, we realise that her household is holding her captive and the only reality for her is that of the past in which the city seems to come alive: “The Hotel Metropole on Merewether Road filled a whole block, as if an elegant cruise ship with white walls and great rounded corners had run aground in Karachi. On the street level were Pan American’s wide offices selling tickets to the world. Inside was the ballroom with crystal chandeliers sparkling over the polished dancing floor. Elegant waiters in black jackets served tall drinks with umbrellas and small tumblers with ice and tea in tiny china cups. Women wore silk and big clip-on earrings and perfume and men wore Western-style suits and shiny leather shoes and narrow ties and there were many languages in the room. My parents danced rockabilly and it was the first time I heard Harlem doo-wopping and ‘You Belong to Me’.”

The period is captured perfectly but you cannot read it without a lump in your throat, realising that soon places like the Metropole will be found only in the pages of novels such as this. A few pages later, we come across Pakistan, the seat of the fateful murder, described “as if [it] were just another American frontier.” Karachi is, however, not the main focus but only the location where a family’s tragic events begin to unfold. Mahsa tries to liberate herself from her oppressive caretakers through music, but is able to break free much later when she has to give up her tender, young love and enter into a loveless marriage with a much older man approved by her uncle. It is in Canada where she is able to liberate her music and her life, finds her lost love and prevent her daughter from reliving the tragedy of her own mother, the “Mor of Pashto”. Here she finds her parallel life in a gifted young girl who lives through a different but no less tragic set of circumstances. Ultimately music is not only a solace but the real bond between the Afghan-American and Karachi-bred Mahsa, and Katherine who has a Chinese father and a black lover. A diversity of origins and musical influences, it is their friendship with each other that moves them to literally face the music together.

Katherine’s tale is told in alternating chapters, cutting across and moving along similar lines with Mahsa. It is no less compelling and vivid but I must confess that I was sorely tempted to turn over the page and peep into Mahsa’s life, as her tale had me desperate to find out what was happening next, and then I was unfamiliar with some of the jazz music which formed the background to Katherine’s story. However, Katherine’s story opens a very different life experience to its readers.

Like two distinct but well-balanced arcs, the lives of the two women parallel each other through their talented and happy childhood, troubled adolescence, lost loves, the anguish of marriage, careers, finally attaining old age to complete a perfectly described circle of honour, friendship, ties which bind and fetters which need to be broken.

Under the Visible Life

(NOVEL)

By Kim Echlin

Hamish Hamilton, Toronto, Canada

ISBN 978-0670065325

348pp.