The little piece of life

Aisha Sarwari debut is a patterned, protean narrative that is tragic, painful and yet inspiring. It astonishes and overwhelms.

Heart Tantrums, an exceptional memoir, is both a story of lived reality and a meditation on grief, isolation, and consolation, evoking the profundities of human endurance amidst adversities. The degree of difficulty in writing a book of this sort – with its characters still fluttering in the open – must have been hugely challenging and disruptive. But a life that continuously oscillates between being a good girl and a bad woman, disruption has been at the core of the life lived. Deliriously inventive and viscerally moving, Aisha Sarwari debut is a patterned, protean narrative that is tragic, painful and yet inspiring. It is a beautiful, worded memoir that astonishes and overwhelms.

This is the memoir of an immigrant girl who considers her teen years to be the worst in the universe, as she didn’t get the desired emotional protection of her ami (mother) when she deserved it the most. The twists and travails of her momentous journey transformed a socially and physically battered young woman into a formidable feminist voice in Pakistan. The protagonist endured systematic family oppression all through, her husband’s contribution being a broken tooth, broken jaw, and broken hip. Confused and anguished at her condition, she instead steers away to stay sane, stay employed, and stay a mom to two beautiful girls. Forgiveness remains her stellar character. 

Heart Tantrums is a moving, immersive and nuanced portrait of a tight-knit social world whose ill-perceived values promote oppressive behavior from its dominant constituents. Such behaviors are gendered from an early age, young girls are made to clench their urethral sphincter so that their pee doesn’t generate loud noise; taught to walk noiselessly without dragging their feet, told to avoid loud gulp when drinking water; and farts were wholly taboo. Forced to settle into strict a gender role, women are made to play performance monkeys. The book rejects the idea that gendered role and domestic servitude can save the day. 

In this multilayered memoir, Aisha reconstructs her world piece by piece to showcase its glaring cracks and deep crevices. ‘I was deeply unsafe in my own home, away from my family and very coercively controlled in my day-to-day life’. Much of what she experienced in life not only settled in her milk teeth but revealed in her permanent teeth as well.  Pain ought to be fought through with more teeth, she declares, else victimhood becomes a dwelling. All she wanted was to be wanted without being needed, being happy in her own terms and because of herself as an individual. One might wonder if a perceptive and aspiring person is seeking more than her genuine share of identity from the society? 

Aisha comes out as a writer who uses power of words to narrate vicissitudes of her life – on losing her father at an early age in Uganda; compromising freedom under an extended household in Kenya; and. trying to fit into a completely different culture in Pakistan. On top, the trauma of losing a man she loved to a personality-altering brain tumor was overwhelming. It is an honest, but haunting memoir for the immediate family members. But all that the writer is asking of them is to try again because life isn’t as perfect as a movie. 

Heart Tantrums is a beautifully crafted memoir, worth reading for the manner in which it is narrated with honesty, clarity, and purpose. Such is the power of the narrative that somewhere in her world of hits and misses, there remains a small opening for everyone to reflect upon. At the end of the day, there are more questions in real life than shinily packaged answers. Struggle is supposed to build character.

Heart Tantrums
by Aisha Sarwari
Penguin, New Delhi
Extent: 479, Price: Rs. 699.

First published in Deccan Herald on Oct 29, 2023.

Witness to unfolding moments of life

There is nothing more beautiful than an unfinished tale as life, like democracy, is a fight that ought to be played by each one of us with all the weapons that one can find.

There are multiple encounters, stories on nature of human thoughts and emotions unfolding under the clouds of uncertainty and change. Drawn from different segments of society, with drifting perceptions on life and belonging, the seven characters in Clouds weave a grand story of city and village in the dream world of Bombay. The divorced Parsi psychotherapist Farhad finds love in Zahra; and discovers accidentally before taking a flight to San Francisco that Hemlata had experienced love (and marriage) as a kind of moisturizer whose effect didn’t last long. Elsewhere in the city, the ailing Odia couple of Eeja and Ooi relive their golden past in the company of Rabi who is a proxy to their son Bhagban, whose electoral battle is aimed at securing political power to lead the democratic struggle of the Cloud people from the stranglehold of a mining company. Each of these half-a-dozen characters create stories that cast distinct reflections on life, lifestyle and survival.

Brilliantly evocative, Clouds is an encounter with mortals, their transient loneliness, entrenched traditions, and changing cultures, that cast a mesmerizing spell on what one may think about life. There is nothing more beautiful than an unfinished tale as life, like democracy, is a fight that ought to be played by each one of us with all the weapons that one can find. ‘If you don’t fight for your share, somebody else will take that they can use.’ As much as love and private life of human beings, religion and politics has been transformed into products that can be bartered.

Within the moralistic, fatalistic and somewhat monotonic frame that defines most Indians, the author draws imaginative contours of regional identity amidst growing cosmopolitanism. The characters don’t preach what they perceive but leave it for the reader to take away meanings from their respective stories. Built upon the scaffolding of Arjee the Dwarf, Chandrahas’ first work of fiction, in which a desolate young man sees the image of his own condition in the clouds that hover above, Clouds is a novelistic structure of multiple narratives which are trapped within the limitations of its perceptions. After all, man’s best and even his worst is neither bright not dark, but always in self-doubt. Life is made of a cloudy nature, of dreams and shattered realities. Within the plenitude of life, each of the half-a-dozen characters generate surprising patterns about isolation and (dis)continuity of human existence.

Taking pleasure in the variety of human encounters, Chandrahas creates a fascinating mosaic of conversations that are as much real as reflective of human nature. His style is fresh, revealing and entertaining, intense and mild, unfolding the otherness of others through stories of love, sex, faith and belief. Clouds offer the continuity to the uncertainty of lived experiences. No wonder, under clouds the look and color of the world is only a trick of light. The truth of human condition lies within the horizon of its perception, whatever be it. Truth is anything but a subjective reality, caught in the time warp. Nobody can be as happy as they think they can be!

Farhad fleeting sexual encounter with Zahra fulfills a bodily desire, the search for happiness remains a work in progress; Hemlata’s self-doubting single status deserves to be heard, engaged with, and respected; Baghban’s quest for political identity comes at the cost of his ailing parents, and their unstinted faith in Lord Jaganath; and, Rabi’s self-sacrifice in favor of the Cloud people bequeaths promise of a cosmopolitan future. Each character is a victim of his/her decisions, in a world of unattainable future. It is a work of fiction that has politics and development at its core, transformation and change viewed through the inevitability of human existence, and death. In his figment of imagination Chandrahas draws contours of reality, of lived encounters that carry the everydayness of emotions about somewhat failed expectations from life, and yet characters tread on in search of understanding the moods of the city, its people, and their politics.

‘Amazing how ruled, regulated, routine our lives become without us knowing it, even inside what we take to be our spaces of pleasure and freedom’. In Clouds, there are footprints of an emerging new talent. If there was another kind of storytelling waiting to be discovered, Chandrahas Choudhury has brought it up with his deft touch of perception and imagination. He is an author whose work will be keenly awaited.

Clouds
by Chandrahas Choudhury
Simon & Schuster, Delhi
Extent: 280, Price: Rs. 669

First published in Deccan Herald dated Feb 11, 2018.