A Place Called Grief

SABIN IQBAL’S NEW BOOK Tales from Qabristan revolves around a boy named Farook who loses his father—Mohammad Jamal— to lung cancer. “How can prayers help a dead body? Or, the soul that has left the body?” Farook mutters to himself, as he prepares for the burial in a daze, letting his mind wander. Childhood memories rush forth to fill his void and the novel.

Much of the story unfolds in a picturesque ancestral house in Kayaloram, in a village located 20 kilometres from Kamana town, south of Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. Using descriptions that would give tourist brochures a run for their money, the author sets up expectations of an idyllic childhood. Iqbal’s craft is evident from how the same expectations are subverted as the novel progresses and the violence lurking beneath is gradually unravelled.

Iqbal, a journalist-turned-literary curator, author of the novels, The Cliffhangers, and Shamal Days, dwells at length on the experience of circumcision that haunts every boy in the village like a “nightmare”, because the procedure is done without anaesthesia. The agony that boys undergo during this rite of passage has rarely been discussed with such candour. The boys disguise their shared pain with macabre humour, wondering if the community barber who considers the task his “birthright” secretly “liked to rub young penises”. The author offers insights into how patriarchs-in-the -making deal with their own vulnerability.

Their speculation appears to come from experiences of sexual abuse by trusted elders. Farook confides that the son of his mother’s distant relative, who was 10 years older than him, took him to a granary, made him lie on his back and then undressed him. “My fingers shivered. My heart hammered… I hated him for doing that to me,” shares Farook. The author deserves applause for addressing the sexual violence that boys face within the family because this subject is typically shrouded in silence.

Equally horrific is the author’s description of a woman who experiences marital rape. Her husband—compared to a bull “ripping her apart”—has the audacity to insinuate that his wife was not a virgin when he married her. The husband also blackmails her and demands ₹50,000. Incidentally, he is Farook’s uncle. This is only one example of why the book is difficult to read. It unblinkingly shows us how cruel society can be.

The kind of patriarchal violence that is normalised in this milieu comes across forcefully when Farook feels grateful for the fact that his father, unlike his friends’ fathers, does not hit him or his mother. The bar for a father’s love is so low that it is equated with absence of violence. The author also shows, with tremendous skill, how children observe their parents’ relationship. Farook remembers, for instance, the time when his mother asked his father to go to her university and check if she could collect her graduation certificate. His father said, “What for? To use as a wrapper?” On another occasion, when his mother was offered a job, his father told the employer that he needed his wife at home to take care of the children.

This book is a goldmine for readers interested in psychoanalytic interpretations of literary texts. Farook’s discovery of his own sexuality, his voyeuristic observation of adults having sex and subsequent imitation of the act with a cousin despite no understanding of what it really means, his description of incest in the extended family, his frequent rumination about the pleasure that his parents derive from each other, and the Oedipal subtext, are hard to miss.

This is a book about the strange places that grief can take one to, inside the inner recesses of one’s own mind, revealing more perhaps about the living than the dead.

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