Sometimes all a boy needs is a kite so that he can fly. Because of the kites, young Gibran can game everybody and exist, if only for a while, in a space outside their control. The legion of elders he faces is formidable. There is his father, a Jamaati (of Tablighi Jamaat), who wants him to become a hafiz; his mother, who tries the soft and the firm way to turn him into the good son, just as his sister is already the good daughter; and his Hafijji, who routinely canes him for the sake of his soul and his distracted study of the Quran.
The kites also stand in for Gibran’s dreams, which soar and never peak. Being with the kites, however, means he can be alone with his thoughts and come to terms with his family, society, and the oppressive systems through which elders teach faith and determine his relationship with his god.
Invariably, circumstances force him to participate in his family’s life and its unravelling. One morning, a few days before Ramzan, a neighbour rushes in to say that his father is on TV as a suspect in a terror plot.
“Wherever he is, I hope Gibran is fine,” is a response author Mohsin Khan of Lucknow has been getting since the publication of his remarkable first novel, Allah Miyan ka Karkhana. It was translated from Urdu into English this year as Allah Miyan’s Workshop (HarperCollins). Like Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, Bibhuti Bhushan Bandopadhyay’s Apu, or Khaled Hosseini's Amir in The Kite Runner, Gibran’s coming-of-age story transcends time and place. It will live on as a novel about how the manner in which a family falls apart can be turned into a question for society.
“There are kids like that everywhere in Gaza, Syria,” says Khan. “To me they seem from the same khaandaan….”
The book has received the Bank of Baroda Rashtrabhasha Samman; it has been translated into Hindi, English, Marathi, Sindhi, and Persian, while translations into Punjabi, Dogri, and Kashmiri are under way.
Questions to God and universe
Presented with tenderness, humour and satire, the world of a Muslim neighbourhood in a small town of the Awadh region of Uttar Pradesh – it seems set between the ’90s and the 2000s, with the detail of the mobile phone first showing up in the neighbourhood backing this timeline – is seen through a teenager’s journey from early childhood into adolescence. This passage is structured throughout the novel by a particular literary device: the questions Gibran has for God, and they usually come in twos.
“Why did Allah Miyan who made the hen make the cat?” he asks his Hafijji after a cat snatches their hen away. And “if there was a cat, what need for other [birds of prey] like crows?”
“Allah Miyan, who surely knew that children feel cold bathing in winters…why did he keep Fridays in winters?” Or, could he not have made them warmer, he mutters, as he speeds up his bucket bath on a Friday morning so as not to be late for namaz.
“When everything happens by Allah’s will, then why did He get Abba to make a lopsided stool for you?” he asks his mother when, after his father’s carpentry, the stools are apportioned: his father keeps the best one, and his mother, the one with the defect.
All through the novel, Gibran asks questions and waits for answers. His elders promote a path of less questioning and passivity. The only exception is his Chachajaan, the well-educated family rebel and his father’s elder brother who takes the children in, despite his wife’s disapproval.
“Gibran is a madrassa student, and the household he has grown up in is strictly religious. So, everything he hears about faith settles deep in him. But, at the same time, an ordinary child's natural curiosity keeps pushing him towards questions that run against what home and society expect of him. The novel is really the story of that struggle. The reason why he asks so many questions is that the responses he gets from society, gives birth to contradictions in his mind,” says Khan in a telephone interview from London.
Showing the mirror
Allah Miyan’s… storytelling is nuanced and taut. It releases its pleasure slowly, moves deeply and connects the events of the novel to the present. This unsentimental tale brings to the fore how children fare when a parent is deemed suspect by the state, and their ostracisation by close relatives and neighbours that follows such news.
Khan shows Gibran demonstrating unnatural restraint in his changed circumstances. For instance, he waits for his cousins to cry first when Chachajaan’s dog Qitmir dies of grief after Chachajaan's demise as he feels it wouldn’t be right to show his emotions for a dog that isn't his, in a home where he doesn’t feel welcome after his uncle’s passing. The novel, however, holds out hope that human kindness can reside in unforeseen corners — it is Hafijji, surprisingly, where Gibran finds another short-lived refuge, when his aunt throws him out of the house.
To the calamities that pile up in the novel, the author drops another ticking bomb. Turns out the children’s mother is Pakistani. Why was this necessary? Couldn’t she have been from Barabanki, one asks the author.
“Would you have paused had she been from Barabanki?” he asks. “All that is placed in the novel is from the air…. Indian Muslims are told to go to Pakistan… For years they have had to live with the fact that the two countries won’t mend their ties even though the relationship is so many years old. The reference makes the novel’s canvas big….”
Khan and author-translator Maaz Bin Bilal say they have both faced bouquets and brickbats for the novel. The Bank of Baroda prize has had to fold up after it was given to Khan.
“With 'Allah' in the title, the novel lends itself to simplistic and harsh Islamophobic responses, while there is enough in the novel to displease orthodox and conservative Muslims too,” says Bin Bilal. The work of translation is stellar. As he explains in a postscript to the novel, he has followed the child Gibran’s narrative tone of a carefree child forced by circumstance to “become precocious and grave” and crafted his sentences accordingly.
Does the end of the novel then signal Gibran’s taming? The novel's closing line — “Try as hard as you might, only what Allah Miyan wishes will come to pass.” — holds both things at once, says the author.
“On one level, it’s Gibran’s own statement of faith. But underneath that, the same line is also a satire of a society that hides behind ‘it’s God's will’ to avoid trying, avoid asking, avoid taking responsibility — the same passivity Gibran has fought against until the end,” he explains. “So, the ending doesn’t reject faith — it exposes the false resignation that people pass off as faith. In that sense, Gibran ‘growing up’ doesn’t mean falling in line with everything the elders said — it means learning to live with the capacity to keep questioning.” That, Khan and his novel appear to suggest, is, indeed, the way to be in Allah’s workshop.