No Funeral for Nazia
By Taha Kehar
Liberty Publishing
ISBN: 978-627-7626-29-7
230pp.

Liberty Publishing is to be commended on their good taste in choosing to print and disseminate Taha Kehar’s well-written and fascinating novel, No Funeral For Nazia, originally published by Neem Tree Press.

The premise of the book is an engrossing one: Nazia Sami, a talented authoress who passes away in her forties, leaves behind a very specific request — her death is to be commemorated by means of a small party as opposed to a traditional funeral. Nazia’s sister Naureen honours her late sibling’s last request to the letter. A number of people whom Nazia knew well are invited to this unusual social event.

Aside from the hostess Naureen and her husband Asfand, those present include Nazia’s estranged husband Saleem, her childhood friend Parveen (Pino), her daughter Sabeen (who has been living with Pino), her publisher Durdana (Dolly) and Dolly’s husband Farid. The guests are informed that they will each receive a certain amount of money if they comply with Nazia’s request that they each allow themselves to undergo a therapeutic session with the final member of the gathering, a hypnotist named Salman Narang.

Partly out of avarice and partly out of curiosity, everyone complies. Salman turns out to be a genuine professional, whom Nazia herself had visited several times at his clinic in Azizabad. This comes as a surprise to many, since Nazia lived with Naureen and Asfand on the affluent side of Clifton Bridge (Sunset Boulevard to be exact), and was not inclined to move out of her comfort zone in order to visit poorer districts of Karachi.

Taha Kehar’s sophomore novel is a meticulously crafted story about a bizarre memorial service for a dead woman in which those attending come to terms with their repressed emotions

Kehar deals effectively when it comes to delineating class differences and tensions; his portrayals of Bi Jaan (Naureen’s long-suffering housekeeper) and her young niece Sorayya are handled with admirable sensitivity. Continuing to follow her sister’s bizarre instructions Naureen makes Sorayya wear Nazia’s wedding sari and even has her coiffed in a manner similar to how Nazia had styled her hair at her wedding to Saleem many years ago!

Hypnotised effectively by Narang, the semi-conscious Sorayya ends up being a type of “Nazia-dummy”, whom Narang effectively uses in order to conclude his cathartic, and often disturbing sessions.

I realise that many readers will draw parallels between Nazia and Daphne du Maurier’s sublimely crafted character of Rebecca. Although both women are dead, their respective presences overshadow the texts that honour them.

However, what is even more disturbing to me is the parallel between Sorayya and Rebecca’s husband’s second wife. At a pivotal point in Du Maurier’s novel, Mrs de Winter is tricked by her malevolent housekeeper into dressing in an identical manner to how Rebecca had attired herself at a fancy-dress party prior to her death.

Kehar’s move turns out to be no less grotesque and traumatic than du Maurier’s; fortunately, Bi Jaan is a benevolent housekeeper (not to mention a caring aunt) and ends up saving the day as well as saving her niece.

Prior to Bi Jaan’s heroic move, however, the hypnotherapy (which takes place in Nazia’s bedroom, with Sorayya lying inert on the dead woman’s bed) reveals a number of ugly secrets. I will not spoil the intricate plot by indicating who was having an affair with whom. Suffice to say that Nazia was both promiscuous as well as bisexual (one can understand her not being able to control the latter point, but harsh though this judgement might seem, there is no valid excuse for the former).

Her husband, a passionate MQM activist in his youth, had left Karachi (and hence had left his wife and infant daughter) in order to protect himself from the dark side of politics. In spite of the fact that Saleem is a thoroughly unpleasant character, Pino has always been obsessed by him, and consistently deludes herself into believing that they are meant for each other.

Dolly and Farid’s association with Nazia is revealed to have been far from wholesome, and perhaps the saddest notes in this mournful literary dirge are struck by the reader’s growing awareness of the point that Sabeen despises her mother for a variety of messy reasons. Nazia was also responsible for driving a wedge between the childless Naureen and Asfand.

In a moment of supreme black humour, I found myself wondering whether matters might have been alleviated in Nazia’s past by a series of cathartic menage-a-trois moves! I then began to understand why the author decided to throw a hypnotherapist into the mix — it was a less salacious solution to problems caused by sexual and emotional energies running amok.

In essence, the novel is about how the dead have the power to ameliorate certain issues which have gone horribly wrong over the course of their lives. This isn’t a ghost story or a murder mystery, although it produces the chills associated with the former genre and is as carefully structured as the best of mystery novels.

Nazia’s letter outlining her raison d-etre for this party (read out to a stunned audience by Naureen) and her farewell note to the characters are eerily similar in tone and placement to the famous voice-recording and concluding letter of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. But as opposed to Christie’s novel, which ends up being littered with dead bodies, Nazia’s friends and family exorcise their demons (by and large) without having to give up their lives and join Nazia in the realm of the ghosts.

Much credit for this needs to be given to Narang, who genuinely believes that hypnosis can bring repressed tensions to the forefront of one’s existence, which is a necessary move when it comes to dispelling such tensions. Indeed, in one of the rare, hilarious sentences of the book he calmly tells one of the other characters that he is a hypnotist, not a murderer. His main aim is to make people feel better; to be fair to Nazia, this was also the aim of her ostensibly hare-brained scheme.

In spite of several of the characters emerging from the sessions feeling cleansed, I found it very difficult to like, or sympathise with, any of them. Pino is so much at the mercy of the men in her life that she resorts to underhanded tactics in order to win them over — in her own way she is as manipulative as Nazia, though far less intelligent.

Dolly is too prone to taking the easy way out, even if it means damaging both herself and others. Asfand neglects his wife, and Farid allows himself to be neglected by his wife. Naureen treats her servants shabbily, and the amoral Saleem has no qualms about treating everyone shabbily.

The hero and heroine of the piece end up being Salman Narang and Bi Jaan; therefore, the novel subversively applauds the superior morality of the lower middle class, while mercilessly exposing the flaws of the elite.

Kehar writes with grace and undeniable sophistication. His prose is both palatable as well as meticulously organised. He negotiates the realm of the otherworldly and the domain of the mystery genre with a skill of which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself would have been proud.

Universally acclaimed as the brilliant creator of the Sherlock Holmes tales, Doyle was also an ardent researcher and writer when it came to the supernatural and paranormal. I found Kehar’s novel so mesmerising that I read it twice, and then found myself seriously asking myself if Taha Kehar might be a plausible reincarnation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Under hypnosis, I am convinced that I would be compelled to say “Yes”!

The reviewer is associate professor of social sciences and liberal arts at the Institute of Business Administration. She has authored a collection of short stories, Timeless College Tales, and a play, The Political Chess King

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, October 20th, 2024