Mirza Waheed's new novel is inked with the trauma of the displaced

MIRZA WAHEED’S PREVIOUS book Tell Her Everything (2019) pivoted around a father-daughter relationship. In his latest book, Maryam & Son, he inverts the dynamic to mother and son. In both books the children emerge through the shadows, as the light shines brightest on the parent. In both, Waheed shows how morality falls not suddenly or dramatically but in measured ways; and the aftermath of these changes on a family.

Tell Her Everything was about a surgeon’s insidious acts of brutality. He tries to reckon with his deeds by confessing to his daughter in a letter. Maryam & Son opens with the dramatic line: “Maryam Ali found her son missing on a Monday morning in early February…” It is a morning that rends her life into a ‘before’ and ‘after’. She must question all that she knew before, she must reevaluate all her assumptions.

Maryam, a British-Indian, and Ashfaq Ali, an Irish-Indian, are parents of Dilawar Ali, a British national from East London. As the book maps the four months that Maryam, a school chef, waits for her son to return, we learn Maryam’s story. It is a life of multiple losses, but filled by her beloved younger sisters. Dil was 13 when Ash suddenly died. Maryam soldiered on, determined to not let grief undo her teenage son. When her son vanishes Maryam must again deal with a loss. While death brought finality, the disappearance leaves her with the disquiet of unanswered questions.

The police inform Maryam that Dilawar Ali was spotted on a video from Iraq and is likely a member of ISIS or one of its affiliates. As a Kashmiri, Waheed, who has a son and daughter and three sisters, and now lives in the UK, is well versed with the world of exile and the migrant. He knows the turmoil of being seen as a suspect in one’s homeland. He knows the humiliation and anger of being beaten by a man in uniform for the ‘crime’ of riding pillion with his friend on a cycle, which happened to him growing up in Kashmir in the 1990s. Even if Maryam & Son is not based in Kashmir, its storyline is inked with the trauma of the displaced and the minority.

The novel’s tension lies within Maryam. She cannot believe that her silent studious son, who spent all day on his computer, is capable of evil. Her bafflement at the situation reminds one of the Miller parents of the 2025 Netflix series Adolescence. Like the Millers, Maryam too must ask herself, what do the cops know that she doesn’t, can she trust the cops, did she know her son, and what is her son capable of. Unlike Adolescence, Dilawar is largely absent from the novel. We see him through his mother’s eyes and memories. His absence ensures that the focus remains on the mother, and that the son is missing both from life and the text. As Waheed writes towards the end, “She missed the old Maryam but she knew that woman belonged in a different world, and this Maryam, Mother Maryam, was the one left now.”

Tell Her Everything was a more fine-tuned novel as it maintained a palpable tension. In Maryam & Son, Waheed uses the word ‘terrorist’ sparingly. It would have been best not to use the word at all. The absence of the word would have heightened the unsaid. Too much of the storyline is given away through a news bulletin, which is too easy a plot device for a sophisticated novel. Beyond these quibbles, the book, and Maryam, will long remain with readers.