Book review: 'The Fatwa Girl'

The Fatwa Girl
Akbar Agha
Hachette
244 pages
Rs325

Much as we try to bring to books a liberal mindset, it is a trifle unsettling to know that this simple love story was written by a middle-aged man and a former Pakistan Foreign Service officer at that.

However, this very fact informs the story through and through. Dollops of liberal-toned opinion are freely, sometimes gratuitously offered to the reader through just about every character. While this does not jar too much by and large, it is — I have to use the U word again — unsettling, when the young couple who are at the centre of the novel start to pontificate on Pakistan’s problems, external and internal. Here, some amount of credulity shows through.

The novel is curiously unsophisticated and after a bit, the novelty in this wears off.  It doesn’t help that the editing is none too sharp, with grammatical as well as continuity errors cropping up here and there. Moreover, the palpable vein of contrivance that keeps peeping out from this capsule of life lived in Pakistan detracts from the story.

There is a faint tinge of Devdas without the booze. This young man’s Paro is the fatwa girl who loves him (in a somewhat careless fashion) and leaves him to marry a feudal lord of sorts. His Chandramukhi is the proverbial tart with a heart of gold, who he succeeds in reuniting with her long-lost family. The author does not tell us if the family welcomed her or spurned her — that would have been good character closure.

OD-ing on comparisons — India, the US, Shias vs Sunnis, and all the usual suspects besides — parts of the book stand out for clarity and coherence, like why a fatwa against suicide bombers won’t work, and a well-set piece on political manipulation at a public meeting. The fatwa girl’s sinister husband is being taken to task for corruption in the public system, even pelted with eggs, till he masterfully raises time-tested but effective bogeys of Zionism, sectarian violence and religion. By the end of his rousing speech, the people are roaring in support.

Other parts are inadvertently funny in their irrelevance, like the hero’s grandfather’s encounter of the sexual kind with members of the Children of God, the villain quoting tracts of Hegel — unconvincingly, and the hero’s brief run-in with the Taliban. It’s that contrivance factor, again.

The Fatwa Girl is a listless read but we must laud the author’s niyat. Peace on earth and goodwill to men is the leitmotif. A Pakistani Kite Runner this book is not.