Irenie Eccles has been waiting for her mother to return for five years now. Yasmeen disappeared when Irenie was barely 10, leaving her with only her father, James Eccles, a professor of Greek language and literature at a college in Crawford. Since her adored mother’s flight, Irenie has stayed afloat by maintaining the order and rhythm that Yasmeen had established: cooking meals for her unapproachable, adversarial father, tending to their yellow Victorian house with its claw-footed tub and ghost in the basement, and keeping an eye on the door for Yasmeen’s return. But when one day she discovers a box full of letters exchanged between Yasmeen and the man she had always loved, Ahmed Kakkezai, Irenie realises that her mother is never coming back.

Yasmeen is a daughter’s struggle to understand how her mother came to leave her family for the man she loved. In the process, it is not just her cherished image of her mother that is transformed, but Irenie herself, making this an intriguing coming-of-age tale.

Sophia Khan’s skillful construction of Irenie’s world sets the stage for her quest. The classic elements of a young adult novel — childhood friendship, high school, and that quintessentially adolescent feeling of endless hours of leisure — are rendered afresh, and so convincingly that the reader inhabits Irenie’s universe as comfortably as she herself. Unfortunately, the people around Irenie — her best friend and neighbour Celeste, her father’s friend Professor Faber, the librarian Mrs Winterbourne — do not leap off the page in the way we hope and Khan’s sustained attempts to make them vivid only reminds us how forced they feel.

Sophia Khan’s novel is an absorbing read which has an intricate plot — and therein lies its weakness

Describing the changing season in Crawford, Khan writes: “Perhaps the only signs that spring will be upon us soon are in the high-school halls. It starts in early March when, despite carefully regulated climate control, the air goes soft and warm. The raucous clamour of the hallways takes on a certain fluidity, as though the noise is filtered through a pool of silent water. Girls’ cheeks flush through winter pallor and their suitors strut and preen. So many eyes are glassy, so many lips slip into dreamy smiles. The fluorescent lights seem gentler; the simple smell of wet wellingtons is made complex by the addition of dying flowers, a cloying scent emitted by unwanted Valentine bouquets left in lockers to decay and also, more mysteriously, in the sighs of the girls most starry-eyed. Groundhogs may have forecasted spring for Pennsylvanians two hundred years ago, but in Crawford, adolescent girls are the best predictors.”

Each chapter is prefaced by an entirely skippable excerpt from Yasmeen and Ahmed’s love letters: we can’t tell whether it is Yasmeen writing or Ahmed, and somehow that is the point. Yasmeen is tiresomely described as “perfect” and “charming” so many times that the reader cannot help a reflexive dislike for her. On the other hand, grave, self-possessed Irenie makes a memorable heroine, with her warmth and wisdom. James and Irenie have a perplexing relationship; divided by their loss, they speak only in cryptic bursts, always at cross purposes, evading more than communicating. The people that she really opens up to are her grandmother and cousins back in Pakistan, whom she regularly talks to on the phone, and with whom she has memories of spending her childhood summers. But whether it is James or her maternal family, all the adults needlessly skirt around Yasmeen’s disappearance. With some detective work, lots of travel and by prodding her own suppressed memories, Irenie tries to piece together her mother’s life.

“My father has an evening class this year from six to nine. He likes to have his dinner during the fifteen-minute break he’s forever forgetting to announce. Sometimes he’s waiting when I come at seven; sometimes I catch him by the microwave at home. Celeste doesn’t see why I bother delivering these dinners when my father doesn’t take an interest in what he eats. Just give him a container of leftovers in the morning, she tells me. I like to bring him dinner though. If I can do everything my mother did, perhaps we can pretend she’s still here. She would be there every Tuesday with a hot, fresh plate of food. Even now that I know she won’t be back, I don’t want to let her down. Walking across campus as night falls, I feel as though I’m on a vital mission. The boys with basketballs don’t see me and the perfumed girls push by as though I’m not there. Their world is small, these few square miles, and I am not a part. If they know that there’s anything beyond them, they don’t seem very much to care. World news is a two-keg party in Bleaker Hall; trauma is a ten-page paper some heartbroken girl hasn’t yet begun. If tater tots are served at dinner, word spreads fast and students mass towards the dining hall. They come on bicycles, in sweat suit pants, with binders spewing notes.” — Excerpt from the book

This could be interesting but the problem is that the revelations come in such tiny increments that they are consistently underwhelming. We plod through pages only to have Khan reveal a detail so minor that we have to question whether we didn’t already know that. For example, on the first page we are told that Irenie knows that Yasmeen is dead when she finds the box. Several chapters later, sleuthing in her father’s office, Irenie discovers evidence from which her dramatic takeaway is … Yasmeen is dead. And then she lands in Pakistan and speaks to her grandmother, and realises once more that, yes, Yasmeen is dead.

A plethora of characters — from Yasmeen’s college roommate Claire Benson in Florida to her best friend Shireen in Islamabad — supply Irenie with bits of information about Yasmeen and Ahmed’s relationship but rather than creating the layered narrative that Khan must have hoped for, they merely necessitate the reader’s flipping back and forth to check their understanding of events. At one point in Yasmeen, Irenie’s grandfather is described as writing long, intricately plotted novels which are nearly impossible to read for the tedium that they generate. Though Yasmeen clocks in at 307 pages, unnecessary intricacies are very much a defining feature of this novel.

As action segues into nostalgic flashbacks, oftentimes we find Khan is talking about multiple events from the past without clearly indicating which one is being referred to. This is not merely an artistic conceit; she genuinely muddles up at times, a cardinal sin in a novel that turns on reconstruction of the past. I spotted at least one major flaw: Baby Tamasha speaks of Yasmeen and Ahmed’s romance in terms which would have the reader think that they met in Islamabad when elsewhere we are told that their romance blossomed in the US. This could have been a trivial detail in another book, but with the reader trying as hard as Irenie to piece together the past, obscurities like this seriously undermine the narrative.

Khan is obviously a talented writer, yet the excess of detail in Yasmeen ultimately underscores her lack of faith in the story she is telling.

The reviewer is a Karachi-based freelance writer and critic.

Yasmeen
(NOVEL)
By Sophia Khan
HarperCollins, India
ISBN: 978-9351772767
308pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, June 3rd, 2016