Book review: 'In Haleema’s Words'

Book: In Haleema’s Words
Author: Fatima Ahmed
Publisher: Rupa
Pages: 431
Price: Rs395

The first person narrative turns tyrant in artist Fatima Ahmed’s novel about a young woman finding her feet in the modern world. We are in the territory of what Henry James would call “the darkest abyss of romance” with a heroine who pronounces herself “too nervous even for dignified silences” and chooses instead to opt for a “verbal deluge”. Haleema flees the coop in the sixties, shedding her conservative joint-family upbringing in Hyderabad to join her childhood friend Parvati in Bombay. She takes the reader with her to Goa, Amsterdam, and finally to London, carrying the baggage of meandering prose-poetry, interspersed with flashbacks to demonstrate the “callous” nature of her family and its impact on her life.

The dangers of the “romantic privilege” of the first person that Henry James cautioned about in his preface to The Ambassadors are all too evident here. Haleema is an artist and a closet-poet who pens down, and stuffs her mattress with, observations. Her unrestrained, unedited notes are of a piece with her running commentary that makes up the four parts of this novel. Her notes, in her words are, “so much language, such a cackle of wit, humour, anecdotes, parables, puns, quips… Some night, it may tiptoe into my indolence and demand to be inked into an anthology of the irrational.”

In Haleema’s Words is a celebration of Haleema’s sensitive disposition and free-spiritedness. There is no analogy too trite. “I am a stray leaf. Poised on the edge of the wind.” Nor is there any comparison too far fetched to bring Haleema’s individuality to the forefront. “I never ride astride a camel, but foot it alone on fringes of caravans.” Had the writer shown Haleema struggle with an honest day’s work as an artist it might have been easier to credit her with the artistic temperament.

Much like a struggling artist, however, she moves from city to city with the financial and emotional support of her friends. Her friends Parvati and a shadowy man named Sameer want only to see Haleema shine. Parvati keenly awaits Haleema’s loss of virginity, even dictating that a hippie is the best candidate for this business. The next step appears to be Haleema’s much-awaited union with an Englishman who calls himself Harlem. There, Haleema is pulled up short by a nature more laissez-faire than hers and finds herself forced to reassess her needs.

The plot may be skeletal but there is little doubt that the main feature of this novel is meant to be the writing. Unfortunately the writing does not hold up to scrutiny. Descriptions of people, places, or things are loaded with out-of-proportion emotions. When describing her admirer Sameer, Haleema finds that she has gone overboard by conjuring up savage hordes, dynasties, copper gongs, and yak butter lamps. She tries again. “But his mouth is cruel. Evokes dust from enemy hooves. Cracks whips over captive backs. Ties bleeding arms to thorny bushes.” Even the innocuous street scene at Marine Drive is not spared. “Feet scrambled, mouths blabbered, farting cars raped the road.”

To bite into a burger is to take off on another flight of fantasy. “Burgers scaled low on health but saved time on consumption. I find a round, hot burger sexy. Awaiting my lascivious teeth in its flesh. It enjoyed my bites of intimacy but lacked the altruism the open turkey sandwich was filled with.”

In Haleema’s Words has a strong personal style that could have been improved with stronger editing and more attention paid to the pitfalls of the subjective.