The beautiful prose of Nadeem Aslam, and what more can be done

I am rereading Nadeem Aslam's Maps for Lost Lovers after, I think, seven years.

I discovered him then in the flush of several other Pakistani authors, and went through everything he had written till then, mesmerised by his commitment to beauty. A commitment that meant shaping his whole life around it, every drifting moment, and not arriving at it every morning or night at his desk after he had shrugged off and hung like a coat over his writing-chair a hectic public life on Twitter or elsewhere. The kind of metaphors that can only rise when one has seeped oneself completely in hours and days of contemplation.

To illustrate, I pick some of them from my reading in the morning today:

• “the laboratories where the microscopes slept like hawks under their dust covers. ”
• “the crowd that spilled onto the street like a nest of termites broken into.”

And this truly great passage on something as mundane as food-preparation:

• 'She prepared for him all the food he had been missing during his years away. Bamboo tubes pickled to tartness in linseed oil, slimy edoes that glued the fingers together as you ate them, naan bread shaped like ballet slippers, poppy seeds that were coarser than sand grains but still managed to shift like a dune when the jar was tilted, dry pomegranate seeds to be patted onto potato cakes like stones in a brooch, edible petals of courgette flowers packed inside the buds like amber scarves in green rucksacks, chilli seeds that were volts of electricity, the peppers whose stalks were hooked like umbrella handles, butter to be diced into cubes reluctant to separate, peas attached to the inside of an undone pod in a row like puppies drinking from their mother’s belly'

For me, the only writer who can transcend this eye for metaphor and beauty is John Banville, but then he transcends every other writer living or dead.

One could fault Nadeem in how this profusion of beauty overwhelms his prose. Like a baroque inlaid panel that overwhelms the eye to the point that one can only barely make out the original frame on which it has been laid. I am not talking of plot here, for Nadeem Aslam is a master story-teller as far as even that goes, too much of it in fact. Not only the broader outline of the story, but even the smaller movements within its various stages. In fact, it is not so much the beauty of his prose as the plot that steps into self-indulgence a little. Too many little things keep happening but that do not really develop the character as much as they could.

And I think herein lies that trifling fault I can find in his work, that his characters are never psychologically alive for me as the other prose-masters'. They are too seeped in beautiful thoughts, not theirs entirely but the writer's. They do all the things that characters do in modern novels - masturbate, fornicate, doubt, despair - and yet remain too ethereal to be entirely real. This is a problem I have myself faced as a writer where certain characters become so much of conduits for that ache for beauty and wisdom that own material and mundane dimensions are entirely repressed. In Maps for Lost Lovers, the two brothers, Shamas and the lepidopterist Jugnu, are cases in point, especially the latter. One can imagine Jugnu only in abstract, a soul too beautiful for this world, but one also imagines that after an hour spent with him in a room, one would walk out dazed and nursing a headache like emerging from a walk around Musee D'orsay - too much beauty on the walls. In fact, nothing that Jugnu ever does in the novel is not a gesture towards beauty and some deep wisdom about the world.

  One thinks of Banville (again) whose prose is, to me in my limited readings, the most beautiful prose in English ever achieved, but whose characters are greatly complex, narcissistic creatures whose slightest thoughts have been shaped by a tremendous amount of research in the field of psychology, as the book John Banville's Narcissistic Fictions: The Spectral Self attests. In Nadeem Aslam's fictions instead, most of the characters' complexities are explained away as their Pakistani identities trapped in an English milieu, and even independently of that, all the damage to the psyche that Pakistan alone does to you; all the contradictions of its overwhelming beauties and cruelties. 

This is a very powerful stimulus of course, but what of all the micro-stimuli? When do the characters stop being only victims of Pakistan and also victims of their own cruelties done to others, their own frustrations of what little they have done with their lives? What are those moments when Mah-Jabin, Shamas, Jugnu, Charag and Suraya stop fluttering about like beautiful butterflies caught in burning air, and stand revealed in their own follies?

And that is why the book remained in my head for seven years as the story of Kaukab, the matriarch who unconsciously sets about destroying the life of the children she loves, her brother-in-law's, and even her own one because she would not give up the Pakistan that she has brought with her to Dasht-e-Tanhaii. The novel is her great tragedy, almost at par with Lear. An ageing woman pining for the love of her children but unable to give up the  prejudices and narrow-vision of the world drilled into her. She is perhaps the greatest character-study of the women from the subcontinent of that first-generation of migrants. 

And this is what Nadeem Aslam can achieve when he frees his characters from the constant burden of beauty (for there are great passages of beauty in Kaukab's everyday and mostly lonely chores about the house). A character fleshed out from not only the macro-forces that have shaped her identity but her own contradictions and cruelties. I think of the character of the judge in Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss, another study in beauty where the only character allowed to be ugly stands out so magnificently human. 

In the seven years I have been away from Nadeem Aslam, something that I aim to compensate for in the coming months, I have often wondered why I don't hear more of this great, great writer of our times. It is a loss to the world, and especially the subcontinental ones, if they haven't seen their own world through the prism of his scintillatingly beautiful mind. Like never having listened to Faiz. And the day he achieves that balance of beauty and insight and psychological complexity I have spoken of, I feel a truly great work for the ages waits to burst upon us.

To end this, I would end with his own beautiful quote from this interview here:

'How to counter the ugliness of the world? To be kind; to never lie; to not be competitive; to ask for forgiveness; to give forgiveness; to just want to make a living, not a profit; to say to someone, “You’ve given enough”; to say to someone, “I think I can give more”; to leave your wealth to the nation at your death, not just to your family; to observe the birds appear and disappear with the seasons around you; to notice how something that happens over the course of a decade in a human life can be over in a week in the life of a moth; to read a novel or spend 20 minutes looking at a picture. I am an atheist; but I believe that Paradise, if it existed, would resemble the books of Italo Calvino illustrated by Persian miniaturists. All this may sound impractical, abstract and amorphous, but I can tell you that I know people who live by these rules. That is where hope is.'