Stories of Migration and the Never-Ending Search for Identity

Migration and the subsequent never-ending search for identity form the core of the 14 stories in Anjum Hasan’s latest collection titled A Day in The Life. The theme is set right from the first sentence of the opening story, “There were no new ideas to be found in the city so I retired last year to this small town—an experiment to see if I could live in a house with a tiled roof that sometimes leaked and little storybook windows that muffled rather than let in light.” As the narrator lives and explores his new town, he discovers the same race of life amongst the townspeople, the same angst and intolerance that he thought that he had left behind, hidden beneath the monsoon-fed exuberance of wilderness marching right up to the doors of homes in his new town.

In ‘The Lady with the Dog’, the Swedish Karin meets an “enormous African mama completely swallowed up by her black burka but for her eyes” and wonders if the woman would discover a new side of herself in her new home. The unnamed narrator in ‘The Stranger’ surely discovers a new side of himself and the knowledge that perhaps he may be living at a time unsuited to him. This dichotomy of existence is a recurring motif in the anthology. For Jaan, in ‘Sisters’, this is revealed when Jamini arrives at her doorstep to work for her, an immigrant from another state who has left her village to seek a better life in the city.

“When they walk out on the roads…Jaan sees the great and general agitation of the city, while Jamini sees a lone woman selling guavas that are ripening fast in the sun, and so liable to be bargained for…she points out the man standing-with sawdust on his pants, looking new to the city-a carpenter from Bihar?—who would perhaps, for a reasonable price make the bookshelves Jaan wants.”

In many stories such as ‘The Stranger’, ‘The Lady with the Dog’, ‘Bird Love’, ‘Father, Son’, ‘Godsend’, ‘Sisters’, migration in the physical sense creates remarkable situations for its characters while in stories such as ‘Sisters’ (again), ‘Yellow Rose’, ‘I am Very Angry’, ‘The Legend of Lutfan Mian’, ‘Little Granny’s Song’, the internal journey of the characters lead them towards paths that require them to rise above themselves. In these evocative tales, Hasan’s pen captures the nuances effortlessly, words forming silken ropes of imaginative prose. Some of the lines remain with you long after reading, “The sick, huddled in bed, are small and particular; they are the punctuation marks in the prose of life”.

In many of the stories, we meet narrators who are ever accommodating until they face unexpected situations from which they now will have to devise ways to escape. Murthy in ‘I am Very Angry’, Punitha in ‘Bird Love’, Nur, the poet in ‘Father, Son’ are driven to behave in extraordinary ways quite opposite their usual temperament when they are edged out of their comfort zones. Hasan makes sure that they do so with aplomb, not allowing any feelings of guilt to tiptoe around them. When Murthy tries to make sense of the explosive arguments his new neighbours were having at regular intervals, he eavesdrops without any qualms, while in ‘Yellow Rose’, Gulfam’s irritation towards her mother, likewise, comes without self-censure and Punitha in ‘Bird Love’ embraces eggs in her vegetarian kitchen without questioning the new rules she was creating for herself in her marital house.

However, threaded beneath the calmness, a vein of anger throbs, threatening to break open and spill blood. But even when blood spills over as it does from the narrator’s nose in ‘The Stranger’, the anticipated eruption does not occur. Hasan makes sure that the anger of her characters is one that is subdued, controlled and snuffed out quickly before larger disturbances tear through the facade of civility.

So when Murthy marches to his neighbour’s house to register his annoyance against their loud disagreements, he finds his anger getting sidetracked, while Nur’s irritation with her husband cannot compete against her worry regarding his whereabouts and Karin knows better than to argue with her son when he decides to move to the country of his birth.

Hasan’s reluctance to yield to the violence of anger does not, however, stop her from touching upon the provocative temperament of current times, “I have to lock my fingers behind my back to stop from hurting her”, “He’s the kind of citizen who throws his garbage on the street, plays Honey Singh loud enough to wake the dead, prays vociferously … but will happily run his four-wheel drive-over a beggar” “…at the first sight of a raised lathi, the men break up and flee, some slinging stones they seem to have been hiding in their fists”.

The sheer beauty of the prose weaving the narratives together sometimes becomes a distraction turning attention away from the stories themselves. The attention to detail may at times slow the pace but the elegant sentences definitely create vivid settings for the reader. With timelines ranging from pre-independence to present day, the worlds recreated in this collection are both quaint and familiar. The tapestry of tales woven together in this new collection focuses attention on the minute rendering of lives, putting into spotlight small details which mostly go unnoticed but are nevertheless ones that lend clarity and depth to the larger canvas of life.

Fehmida Zakeer is a freelance writer based in Chennai.