In his book Encounter, Milan Kundera noted that most famous fictional protagonists have been “childless.” Another thing that is easier to note is that most fictional protagonists are ‘young’ as well. Old characters are rare to find in fiction and, if they come at all, they are secondary to the main characters.

Certainly there are exceptions, such as Honore de Balzac’s Old Goriot and the 90-year-old hero of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Memories of My Melancholy Whores, or Joseph Heller’s Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man.

In his new novel Dasht-i-Imkaan [The Realm of Possibility], Asghar Nadeem Syed has come up with not one, but two main characters who are old and have led full lives.

Aanas is a retired professor of history and his wife — the second main narrator — is a fiction writer. The novel starts with the disclosure that Aanas is suffering from a neurological disorder because of which he doesn’t remember the times and places of his memories. He can, however, still narrate the stories of his life.

The wife, being nosy, is very keen to know these untold stories and when two names pop up in her husband’s recollections, she pays special attention. One name belongs to a European girl, the other is African.

Racy gossip, illuminating details about foreign lands and an interesting narrative about secrets between husbands and wives make up Asghar Nadeem Syed’s new novel

In due course, the wife gets caught up in her own reveries. She remembers her own flings with some men, especially an Indian painter. At one point, she says — and this may be the most intriguing revelation of the novel — that “a husband and a wife hide so many confidential things from each other, things they could never have hidden in any other relationship.”

So here we have an old man and an old woman, both of whom with the kind of colourful past that makes for a good novel. But that would have made this a usual story.

What is unusual about Dasht-i-Imkaan is that most of the stories that the husband remembers are about our writers, some of whom are dead and some still alive. Famous literary figures such as Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Ustad Daman, Josh Malihabadi, Ahmed Faraz, Intizar Husain, Qurratulain Hyder, Khalida Hussain, Abdullah Malik and Zaheer Kashmiri come and go in cameo appearances. There are some other characters as well who are not named, for instance, a former television producer who marries a foreign lady and leaves her with a child.

Syed is, in fact, brimming with memories about writers these days. He recently wrote some sketches that were published in Urdu literary magazines, and some of them are sure to stoke controversies. If we read the sketches and this novel in one go, we can see similarities in style and, well, intentions. It seems that Syed is using his main characters to give vent to some of his thoughts about some writers, thoughts that he could not have expressed otherwise.

The husband and wife protagonists of Syed’s novel have spent their lives in the intellectual circles of Lahore and are familiar with all the stories and gossip circulating about writers and intellectuals. Most of these stories are about the real people who are, or were, contemporaries of the author and some of these personalities might still be alive. It is, therefore, a dangerous path to tread, but Syed has mostly been successful in hiding his characters in the garb of fiction.

With Syed being the playwright of such immensely successful television drama serials as Darya [River] and Chand Grehan [Lunar Eclipse], one would have expected a lot of twists and turns in this novel as well. But the book does not focus on building up to a climax. Rather, it unfolds stories after stories, the way olden daastaangohs used to narrate.

As in a daastaan, some stories are interesting, others less so. Aanas the historian is concerned about ‘wrong history’ as well, which is being circulated in the country through textbooks. His reminiscences often guide the reader to that history which he deems correct, and which he had actually tried to correct during his younger days. More than the character, the voice of the writer is louder in this correcting business.

The old couple is also very fond of food and loves drinking. They drink everywhere they go, and they drink at home as well. With no foreseeable financial worries and no religious sort of regrets or compunctions — often the case with most Pakistanis in their old age — they are content to sit with a glass in hand and remember the good old days.

Initially somewhat jumpy, the narration flows and becomes more interesting as it goes along. Syed saves the best for the very end, when the historian recalls his experiences of studying in Heidelberg and London and meeting two women — cue the two names that caught his wife’s attention. Also interesting are the instances where the fiction-writing wife goes to the Maldives to see one of her male friends, and when she meets the Indian artist who wants to paint her nude.

The wife keeps her own memories hidden from her husband, while he opens up his chest of remembrances to disclose his two extramarital affairs. What happens after this revelation? Readers would do well to find it out for themselves.

With racy gossip about our literary circle, some illuminating details about foreign lands which the protagonists have visited and an interesting narrative about matrimonial hide-and-seek, Dasht-i-Imkaan is a novel sure to satisfy a reader.

The reviewer is a poet, fiction writer and translator. He won the UBL Prize for Fiction for his debut novel Chaar Dervesh Aur Ek Kachchwa and has recently translated Arundhati Roy’s book Azaadi

Dasht-i-Imkaan
By Asghar Nadeem Syed
Sang-e-Meel, Lahore
ISBN: 969-353364X
286pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, February 20th, 2022