Hidden Fires
By Sairish Husain
HQ, an Imprint of Harper Collins
ISBN: 978-0008297497
384pp.

Waking up in the middle of the night to pray on the 27th of Ramazan, Yusuf switches on the television in his Bradford house to see a Muslim-inhabited apartment complex engulfed by flames. The sight ignites a memory he has been haunted by and which he has zealously guarded for the best part of his 80 years.

Miles away in Manchester, teenager Rubi awakens to read up on the rituals of the Fajr prayer on Google, simultaneously guiltily planning a binge for her pre-dawn meal as she also watches images of the same devastating fire. Exposed to a traumatic experience, because of which she has had to change her school and one which continues to shadow her through text messages, she too harbours a memory in the deep recesses of her mind.

Both grandfather and granddaughter live in self-designed isolation, scared, lest the humiliation of their personal sadistic experiences go public. Consumed by the fear of discovery, both have built up impregnable fortresses, and suffering within whose confines, they are strangers even to their own selves. Ironically, both believe they are being brave by not talking about the traumas they have been through.

Memories of fires can be contained or put away for lengths of time, but they never really fade or die. Both the fires and their memories become reservoirs of a cantankerous pain. Howsoever much you try to lock them in or you convince yourself that personal trauma is a private possession, howsoever much you train yourself not to think aloud or convince yourself that the past — though in another country — was a reality that has to be silently borne as a means of granting redemption to oneself, or that you alone can handle the suffering, the pain is bound to resurface one day.

A sophomore novel is a poignant tale of three generations of a Pakistani immigrant family in the UK and about psychological wounds that fester from never being expressed

Then, along comes a person or an event and inevitably the experiences are rekindled to become living nightmares. The original fires burst into flames of suffering, fierce, haunting, and manifesting in abnormal behaviour. Closure, it appears, would always be an impossibility.

In Hidden Fires, which is Sairish Hussain’s second work of fiction, we become co-travellers in the very quick-paced but intensely beautiful trajectory of two individuals who are decades apart in age, time and space and are stubbornly determined not to share their pain. The fear of censure and reprisal conspire to make suffering work its lonesome way, even as the two bleed internally, relive their traumas and keep up pretences.

The delicacy with which Hussain makes them finally discover a closure in their strife-torn relationship is what makes Hidden Fires a delightful, hard-to-put-down read. When chance brings them together to live under one roof, old man Yusuf and Rubi, the chubby teenager, become even more aware that they are totally at odds in terms of culture and upbringing, lifestyle and social ideologies.

The one born and bred in the rural poverty of a Pakistani village, where his family migrated after the division of the Subcontinent, sticks to his desi chai, long Punjabi conversations on the telephone with his distant relatives and Clint Eastwood movies.

On the other hand, there is Rubi, born to his son, a first generation migrant, and his British wife, lives for food deliveries and is all about alternating between “dark glam makeup and bold black lipstick and a music culture that makes no sense for her Grampy.”

A confused, hurt Rubi comes armed to the hilt with a rebellious mindset, to live in Grampy Yusuf’s conservative Bradford house when the sudden death of her British grandmother Nanna in Greece requires her parents to go abroad to arrange the funeral.

Already burdened by the disconnect in her parents’ life because of her mother’s debilitating emotional and physical state and her father’s total involvement with his job, Rubi would have much preferred to stay alone in the sanctuary of her Manchester home. That is where she was used to fighting her personal demons through an unnatural, addictive, compulsive obsession with her YouTube channel.

Yusuf who staunchly believes that he has only survived the tough life of an immigrant worker burdened with a traumatic past because of his ability to lock memories away in the remote corners of his mind, where even he himself cannot bear to peek in, is initially at pains to make Rubi feel at home.

It does not take long for him to be driven to distraction as his friends variously advise him how to bring Rubi to her knees, so to say. Basically well-intentioned yet propelled by personal demons of false pride, the two spend the first few days in self-inflicted purgatory, mumbling under their breaths, criticising the other’s behaviour.

It takes one of Yusuf’s recurrent nightmares and Rubi’s cowering reaction to somebody being bullied in the park to make them both realise that the other needs help, that the other is harbouring a secret, which needs to be shared.

Memories of fires can be contained or put away for lengths of time, but they never really fade or die. Both the fires and their memories become reservoirs of a cantankerous pain. Howsoever much you try to lock them in or you convince yourself that personal trauma is a private possession, howsoever much you train yourself not to think aloud or convince yourself that the past — though in another country — was a reality that has to be silently borne as a means of granting redemption to oneself.

Thereafter develops a beautiful, healing relationship, which Hussain chisels with the remarkable sensitivity of a gifted, perceptive writer. Both protagonists tread gently into each other’s zealously guarded domains, altruistically respecting the other’s right to privacy, shedding silent tears of remorse at not having seen the light earlier. The pace and sensibility and manner in which mutual trust emerges is almost ethereal.

The denouement comes late and after much pain and pathos, but Rubi’s heartfelt whisper “Grandpa, I am here. I am here, Grandpa”, and Yusuf’s comatose response, “Its Rubi, my girl. She came back for me”, builds up unshakeable faith in the ultimate healing power of loving relationships.

While the development of Yusuf and Rubi’s personae are the main focus, the author does not let it all happen in a vacuum. The script of Hidden Fires moves deftly between the trajectories of other family members, each carrying their own cross with bravado.

There is Rubi’s father, stoically bearing his wife’s descent into a debilitating disease, trying his best to be honest in work commitments and convincing himself that he has protected Rubi. There is his elder brother in distant Dubai, ostensibly living a life of complacence and yet very conscious of his duties to a father who has roughed it through life.

There is Fauzia, the vivacious sister, with her hardline ideas of how children are to be brought up, and how Yusuf must live out his widowhood. There are Yusuf’s friends, who like him had migrated to Britain because of financial difficulties in their motherland. The whole builds up to provide a very real life picture of the travails in immigrant lives.

Through crisp divisions of text in short chapters named after all the actors of this pulsating, poignant family saga, Hussain draws graphic mind maps of people who speak more to themselves than to people who matter in their lives. The use of tightly knit brusque sentences, of chapters that move back and forth in time, of alternating the main discourses and dialogues with italicised undertones to build up images of buried trauma and hidden stories, must make Hussain the master of a somewhat innovative style of writing.

Hidden Fires is written with a master class sensitivity that makes light shine through the darkness, that makes love overcome doubt, that introduces laughter in the most tense situations and, of course, shows how Eastern familial ties take shape in a Western landscape.

It all leads to proving that blood is thicker than water. And that it takes two to tango.

The reviewer is a freelance journalist, translator and creative content/report writer who has taught in the LUMS Lifetime Learning Programme. X: @daudnyla

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, July 7th, 2024