The Pakistani, Abroad

You will have heard of the locks which bind the walls of Paris’ lover’s bridge, testament to love’s young flame; their keys are thrown into the Seine, as Karachi-born Londoner Aamer Hussein reminds us in his eponymous story, the last in a collection of 13 modern-day fairytales which read like a cycle of prose poems. 37 Bridges and Other Stories burns bright—if predictably—at these moments; when Nermin, a Cypriot friend of the Pakistani narrator, tells of throwing away all her keys, keys whose locks have long been lost.

These journeys are ends in themselves, linked by Umair, a Pakistani who has settled in London, even when he is not tangibly present. Five are confidently translated from original versions and from Urdu, though the trajectory begins unevenly—with The Man Who Stood Still, which follows a lost lover whose stolen belongings are magically returned to him off his whirl on the London night bus, and Two Old Friends on a Stormy Afternoon, a dialogue between two friends which is overly didactic on current events. With the third tale, Singapore Jay, about a young boy’s brief time at a boarding school in Ootacamund and his infamous falling- in with Jay of the title, the narrative finds steady ground. Here, the narrator’s father begins his flight from Karachi and escape into dreamlands with the Nilgiris. And here, as Hussein describes how the boy’s time as a rebel is eventually written off so he is once again the principal’s younger sister’s only son, we are made intimate with the particular culture of the Pakistani abroad: that privileged individual who pines for home but is utterly at home in new lands.

When Umair is questioned in Nine Postcards and Nine Notes, he makes one of many assertions: ‘“Do you still feel Pakistani,” the Venezuelan to my left asks me. “I do, when I feel anything at all.”’ A dialogue interspersing excerpts from postcards and a notebook (the latter written by Alev Adil), this teeming story features photographs from its wanderings. We see the barrel of wine which Faiz signed; Sanlúcar, where Umair’s blue- eyed sister lives, with her promise of a frangipani tree which will one day remind him of Karachi; the Alcázar, which Umair and Refika, his dear friend, visit after being forced to abandon plans to ‘find the heart of who we were, this long-lost European Moslem civilisation’, Seville proving easier than Granada. Refika describes how they struggle to differentiate Islamic from Catholic, ultimately deciding, ‘It didn’t seem to matter. I couldn’t imagine anyone actually living there.’ Later, Umair tells the Venezuelan who asks Muslims to show their loyalty to their new countries, “I guess I’m a Muslim in Europe too… And foreign everywhere I go.” This thumbing of the nose (‘With one desultory gesture I dismiss an uncongenial conversation.’) is perhaps the best response to unpleasant stereotyping. The real stuff of life, dealt out in luscious sequences full of langoustines and wine, is the author’s real concern, overlaid with politics in Umair’s wonderful ‘ink of manzanilla’.

Hussein’s natural territory is modern global life, as seen through the vise of our impulse for roots. Over mezze and arak, through the simple yet chilling fable of Ahmar and Anbara—whose princess must kill to find her prince—and Love and the Seasons, a mock saga of international student life in England, he sings of an all-embracing contemporary culture. His cosmopolitanism is accomplished and valuable, allowing for untidy assimilation—though he manages one happy ending, in the almost misleadingly simple The Swan’s Wife, which cleverly plays the myth of Lake Manasa’s swans against the urban myth of friends resisting benefits. The diptych Knotted Tongue, of two dead women, is less satisfying, if more suitably dire. And The Entrepreneurs, featuring a sequence of unreliable oddjobsmen whose biryani and provenance prove elusive, is the strangest bird of all, reminiscent of early British Indian writing in its social commentary.

The conjoining of fable and modern Muslim is carefully constructed in this unusual work. Yet the power these narratives call up often dissipates, much like the trails the lovers’ keys leave behind; poignant, but in some ways pointless. Perhaps Hussein, author of two novels and several short story collections, anticipates some of the disappointment when he insists that ‘even love at first sight was retrospective’, that ‘If every spark became a fire, we’d be burning all the time’ (Love and the Seasons). And so, beautifully produced 37 Bridges can seem precious at times, while it thrills at others. Hussein’s tidy, rhythmic prose has the memorable cadence of Urdu literature, full of night air ‘warm as blood’. Like Urdu, whose ‘sounds that, like its letters, reach his eyes, reach something in his inner ear that the other languages he knows don’t reach’, these stories arrive at readers’ hearts and breach the perimeter, even if we don’t always quite know how.

37 Bridges And Other StoriesAamer HusseinbooksLove and the SeasonsThe Swan’s Wife