Book Review: The Hour Before Dawn

Book: The Hour Before Dawn

Author: Ajaz Ashraf

Publisher: HarperCollins

Pages: 448 pages

Price: 499

The Hour Before Dawn, senior journalist Ajaz Ashraf's debut novel, is plotted on an interesting parallel. A young man, Rasheed Halim, comes to know that multiple myeloma, a form of cancer that he'd been diagnosed with some years ago and considered himself cured of, always relapses. The discovery shatters Rasheed and takes away his will to live. These events are set in early November 1992, around the time the Babri Masjid movement is rising to fever pitch, threatening at any moment to break out into all-out communal riots.

The two strands proceed alongside and readers are meant to see Rasheed's cancer as a parallel for the malaise of communal hatred gripping society. Religious intolerance is, Ashraf seems to imply, an evil that has the potential to destroy a society just as surely as a cancerous growth kills the human body.

It's a seductive metaphor that works at several levels. Both cancer and communal hatred do their work, for instance, under the radar, wreaking mischief unknown and unseen, until it bursts out one day as a tumour in the human body, or a riot in the case of the body politic. Also like cancer of the human body, religious hatred is hard to root out — police action, like chemotherapy or surgery, can stem the malaise but doesn't quite eradicate it.

In Rasheed's case, love acts as a palliative for his depression, if not a cure for his cancer. Finding himself devoid of the courage to kill himself, Rasheed calls HELP, a suicide prevention helpline, where he gets talking to Uma, a counsellor who turns out to be just the emotional crutch he needs.

But what really takes Rasheed's mind off the cancer is a mysterious pamphlet that begins appearing overnight on the walls of residential colonies across Delhi around this time, marking a countdown to December 6, the day earmarked for Hindus to congregate at the site of the mosque in Ayodhya. Called "Secret History", it is a brazenly inflammatory tract that relates Hindutva versions of historical events such as the fall of Vijaynagara, the battle of Alauddin Khilji and Rana Pratap, Mahmud Ghazni's raid of the Somnath temple, Shivaji and Aurangzeb, etc as a way of reminding Hindus of the perceived perfidy of Muslim rulers and generals, and thereby exhorting them to band together and destroy the Babri Masjid - "the symbol of their slavery and humiliation".

The "Secret History" passages are riveting - peddling half-truths, with the fervour of the rabble-rousing fanatic - but the search for its author, which takes up most of the later part of the novel, is where the novel loses focus.
Rasheed, who had earlier been completely unmoved by the communal tension building up in Mughalabad, where he'd been visiting with his kindly, elderly neighbour Wasim Khan, takes a leading role in the search for the pamphlet's author. He becomes part of a committee set up by a group of concerned citizens to trace the culprit, and realises that his maid, Sheela, was a part of the conspiracy. But she is murdered before he can probe further. From this point on, the novel takes on shades of a whodunit, with the needle of suspicion pointing variously at Uma, Rashid's boss Ashok Kumar Bajpai and his doctor Dr Vikram Rathore, and the resolution hinging on a complex web of textual clues.

Disappointingly, in the latter half of the novel, Ashraf seems to completely abandon the complex of personal and political that occupies him in the first half. Are we meant to see the exposure of the pamphlet author's identity as a resolution that it will pacify communal tensions? That would be too simplistic, given what we know of what happened on December 6, 1992 and its tragic aftermath.