Review of What is Saved - Batori hui Khushiayn

 Review of What is Saved

Life Stories and Other Tales
What is Saved -Batori Hui Khushiyan
Aamer Hussein
Red River, 2023
PP 175

Let me begin with words from the Afterword.
“Way back in 1998, my mother handed me a red diary containing jottings, about her singing lessons, intertwined with brief snatches of her personal life. I knew I had to do something with it, but it was not until 2018 that I found a form. My mother approved, and, The Lady of the Lotus emerged, from the past with her songs and her words.” Says Aamer Hussein, the consummate, polyglot British Pakistani writer, in the afterword of this absolutely enticing book.
Hussein’s books include the story collections, The Blue Direction, Insomnia, 37 Bridges, and Zindagi se Pehle, two novels, Another Gulmohar Tree, The Cloud Messenger, and a collection of essays on Urdu literature, House of Treasures.
  
‘Inevitably, the question of form seems to lead the question of roots and origins.’  Says he.
Needless to mention that the form that he found, makes intriguing reading. With his mother’s songs and words,   Hussein has managed to weave an enchanting tapestry- a mesmerizing symphony.
The moment one lays one’s hands on the book, one is bewitched by the graceful saree-clad figure adorning the cover, and the unavoidable question that follows is,” Who is this beauty?”
One soon comes to know, that she is the author's mother.  She is also the girl listening to the song of the dove on her terrace in Badayun, and later the dove call from the boughs of a flowering jacaranda in Islamabad.  [Dove, p 47].
In the pages of the book, we also make the acquaintance of Shaikh Rafiuddin Siddiqui, [Rafi Uncle, Mamu Mian], the author’s mother’s maternal uncle, whose book of short stories, Kehakashan was published only after his premature death at the age of thirty-three. [Pp 51 -53]

Aesthetically designed, and published by Red River and flawlessly edited by Sucharita Datta- Asane, an award-winning writer and independent book editor, this beautiful compilation of biographical essays, fiction, memoirs, and poetry, follows the writer’s journey as a writer, his joys, friendships, sorrows, travels, and travails, the vicissitudes- the Agony and the Ecstasy of a multi-layered life.
In the back page blurb, Ruth Padel, British poet, novelist, and non-fiction author says,
“Aamer Hussein moves through the literary cultures of East and West like an undersea river surfacing in unexpected places…the heart of his own writing is the short story, but he blurs and fuses genres,  criss- crossing  lines between memoir, and fiction in a lightly worn, but radical hybridity …”
Let me confess, I found this brilliant fusion of essays, auto-fictional stories, and memoirs, a sensory delight.  A heartwarming juxtaposition of the past and the present, which instantly forms a connection, impacting the reader profoundly.  I read with great fascination, the Lake, wanting to dive into the lake’s depth, with every lyrical word of the writer.
 The Blue Bead [Neela Moti] was a story that completely swept me off my feet. The innocent question of the child, “But my kite?” Kept hammering at my head and heart long after I had finished reading the story.
The publisher, designer, and editor need to be applauded wholeheartedly for this creative innovation - an edifying genre- fusion, which is elegant, thrumming with a lyrical cadence and pulsating with something which can only be described as soul-stirring and sublime.
 Shahbano Alvi, the founder and publisher of the independent publishing House, Ushba, calls the book a ‘tapestry of excitement’ [p173]. “Aamer’s stories take the reader into another world- a world that is poignant yet vivacious. His words weave a colourful tapestry of the mysteries of the subcontinent, into the modernity of the Western world; “
 The lines from the concluding lines of Hermitage clung resiliently to me, and I kept going back to them and reading and re-re-reading them, like one possessed.
“Now there was a voice rising above the plain chant of the other singers, rising, soaring, dipping, improvising, a voice with hoarse, low notes, and clear, plaintive upper notes, and he yearned to tell Siddhant that the voice that he heard each morning, his master’s voice made his heart lurch, his limbs tremble, his lips seek out new words and sounds, and his voice break with a yearning that until now, in his young life, he had never known.”[p63]
 But wait, before emerging, I stopped in my tracks, as something, fell into my ears.
it was the ‘dove’s call from the tree’s upper branches’  [Dove, p 47] This dove had kept the girl of the story, company on the terrace under a stone pavilion, in her old house in Badayun,  while she wrote couplets in a notebook. Years later, it was this invisible companion that had again reappeared in Islamabad, as she stood looking out of a window, at a flowering jacaranda, making her wonder ‘how its plaintive song could ever have seemed to her to be the harbinger of joys to come.’ [p 47]

 

 

The book is all about music- the music of words, the music of love, and the music of life.
When one reaches the last page, it is pristine musicality that one finds oneself drenched in.
 And one hopes that the music could play on.
And on- For, isn’t music the food of love?

 

I emerged from the embrace of the book,  highly enriched and rejuvenated, wanting to tarry a little more in the pages, inhaling the compelling cadences, the lyrical narration, the vivacity, the poignancy, and the underlying haunting melodies.  
I can clearly see the Plum Tree, he writes about in February.
“It’s in full bloom, pink-white blossoms, pointing to the sky, or tilting to the earth. The sun’s in your eyes, but your body knows the moves: curve hip to the left, mobile phone aimed at the tree, curve shoulder to the left, bend knees:  and you’ll have the images you want, though they will always surprise you with an unusual pattern, an unexpected trick of the light.” [PP 87- 79].

Let me confess,  this book provided me with images with unusual patterns, dazzling me with unexpected tricks of light, the thread of love and compassion effortlessly running through all stories, tugging at my heart.
Here I cannot resist the temptation of quoting from the Editor’s Note.  In his stories,  “the resonance is of the tanpura string held back, taut, slowly released to let its vibrations echo through the pages.”

A book you put down, pick up again, put down, pick up again- and then read anew, finding a new spark, a new light lurking between words.

An Absolute Must-Read.