Siyah Heeray
By Sameena Nazir
Maktaba-e-Danyal
ISBN: 978-969-419-118-8
431pp.

Samina Nazeer is a playwright and an actor, director and producer of television and stage plays. She is also the author of Kallo, a collection of Urdu short stories. Siyah Heeray is her first novel, also in Urdu, but it must have been gestating in her imagination for a long time, for it is a sprawling saga rather than a story.

The reader perceives the love the author has for the continent of Africa right from the get go. That love has been translated into a novel which spans centuries as we get harrowing details of the slave trade, the soul-destroying treatment meted out by whites who consider the Africans to be less than human, and the sacrifices made by heroic nationalists to achieve independence.

The story continues to show how later Africans themselves hijack the dream of equality, and corruption and elitism rule the land. There are echoes in the tale of our own history.

The novel begins in Pakistan. The hero, Saleem, is a poverty-stricken denizen of Lalukhet. The year is 1994. His family circumstances have pushed him out of the house and he spends most of his time with street hoods, mainly one called Billoo, and with women of easy virtue. As Nazeer explains, Saleem is being trained in the Academy of Lalukhet, where the motto is ‘Take it, Grab it, Steal it.’

A well-planned, well-executed and easy-to-read debut Urdu novel about ambition and redemption spans from Karachi to Conakry and Dakar and is gripping from the first page

Saleem’s father is portrayed as someone so beaten down by the cares of his world that even his posture droops and sags. Yet, he is a man of principles and though Saleem follows a path radically different from the one advocated by his father, his one fear is his father’s disapproval. It is because of blatant contraventions of the law of the land and his father’s expectations that Saleem is sent off to Guinea in West Africa. His family is to be paid the princely sum of Rs6,000 monthly for his services far from home.

The rest of the book is set in Conakry (Guinea) and Dakar (Senegal). Nazeer has spent 18 years in Conakry and so ably brings the place to life. Her partiality for West Africa is apparent on every page, as she talks of its people, its terrain, its food and even its backwardness.

According to her, the simple-mindedness of the people of Guinea has been mistaken for foolishness by many. In fact, they are gorgeous to look at, lovers of music and dance, content with little, low on ambition but incredibly resilient and very loyal when they meet with genuine regard.

It is in this milieu that Saleem arrives to seek his fortune. He is lonely at first but his Lalukhet Academy training comes to the rescue. Even though he doesn’t know French or any local language, he soon makes a place for himself in Conakry. He also starts making money under the table and dreams of returning to Lalukhet with his ill-gotten gains and starting a business with his friend Billoo.

Saleem’s education in sex and women had started early in Lalukhet. It continues in Africa, where women are much more easily available and forging informal relationships is effortless and socially acceptable. Saleem is always respectful in his dealings with his paramours, but all the women who come into his life have painful pasts. It is men of every complexion, both literally and figuratively, who have menaced their existence. Thus, Nazeer, the feminist, manifests herself.

Saleem starts flying high. The best hotels and nightclubs become his hunting ground. In the free and easy atmosphere of Guinea, he drinks, dances and womanises, while making illicit money hand over fist. The bubble has to burst, and when it does, the woman he loves absconds with all the money he has made.

Shortly thereafter, he hears of Billoo’s death in a gang war in Lalukhet. For a while he seems to lose his raison d’etre, but he pulls himself out of his despair and soon makes more powerful friends, more money and becomes a success again. He loses it all again, catastrophically this time, and finds himself stranded penniless and passport-less in Dakar.

It is both funny and meaningful that what rescues him from his predicament is his ability to cook biryani. But before he is saved, the knocks he receives hammer him into a better person. His rampant ambition gets tempered with his love for the land and for the people around him. He becomes less selfish.

Siyah Heeray is not full of the angst and bathos that many Urdu novelists indulge in as an obligation. Nor does the author take the podium to philosophise. The novel is easy to read, even though it is a serious work. It is well-planned and well-executed and tells a tale that is gripping from the first page.

As the plot unfolds, one learns the history and present conditions of Guinea and Senegal without even realising that one is being tutored. Such information is usually not available in Urdu fiction. The Pakistani part of the story seems so real that one feels the urge to ask Nazeer how many years she has lived in Lalukhet.

In talking about Africa, however, the author need not have devoted a chapter to female circumcision. The custom has nothing to do with the story in hand. Its inclusion seems not only unnecessary but formulaic. The kidnapping and export of slaves is also extraneous to the novel’s story arc, but Nazeer uses a ploy to connect it to the tale being told.

Nazeer’s forte is characterisation. Saleem evokes sympathy from the beginning. The ebb and flow of his fortunes actually affect the reader’s pulse. We want him to succeed and readily overlook his grabbing and stealing. In fact, all the main characters have been given detailed back stories. Because of the vivid delineation of these backgrounds, the characters are three-dimensional and immediately seize our attention and gain our sympathy.

There is a natural flow in Nazeer’s writing and her vocabulary is never pompous. She weaves the stories in the novel deftly. The whorls of the narrative intertwine without getting entangled. Nevertheless, a few questions do spring to the reader’s mind.

Why is the name Lalukhet still used in 1994 when it has been officially changed to Liaquatabad earlier? How can Saleem rent a hotel room in Dakar with no passport and no intimation of bribery? And why is the middle-aged Saleem still in Africa and still unmarried?

These niggling questions aside, Siyah Heeray, an engrossing chronicle dealing with ambition and redemption, is written as a serenade to Africa. It reads like a novel by Pearl S. Buck, where an alien culture is brought into focus empathetically and where the story is so absorbing that one is compelled to read late into the night.

Moreover, Samina Nazeer is neither moralistic nor judgmental in her narration. For this truly refreshing trait and for authoring an engaging historical novel, she deserves congratulations.

The reviewer is a freelance writer, author of the novel The Tea Trolley and translator of Toofan Se Pehlay: Safar-i-Europe Ki Diary

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, December 24, 2023