Named a Granta Best of Young British Novelist and shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction for her novel Burnt Shadows, Karachi-born Kamila Shamsie is a novelist to reckon with and to look forward to.
A God in Every Stone opens in 515 BC, with Scylax, a Greek explorer, setting sail to explore the course of the mighty Indus. He is charged with this expedition by King Darius who honours him with a silver circlet, engraved with silver figs and leaves. The circlet is lost to history and the hunt for it and lives of those that hunt affects, is the core of the story.
And then it’s July 1914 and Vivian Rose Spencer, a young Englishwoman is at an archaeological dig in Turkey with her father’s old friend, Tahsin Bey. As they peel away at the layers of history and discover the Temple of Zeus, she also discovers love. Unfortunately, World War I comes knocking and she must leave him and go back home, with a promise to meet after it is over. Back in London she works as a nurse, constantly trying to be the son her father never had.
Far away in India, Qayyum Gul is fighting in the British Indian Army, in awe of the glamorous West. He loses an eye at Ypres and with it, the rose tinted lenses. Vivian and Qayyum meet on the train to Peshawar, not knowing that they will someday have an unbreakable connection.
In Peshawar, Vivian waits for Tahsin to make their assignation and she spends her time teaching young Najeeb. Set in pre-partition India, the Pashtuns, Dogras and Sikhs are like brothers and Peshawar is a part of British India.
The first half of the novel strolls along at a leisurely pace, the second half is a page turner. Almost as though Shamsie suddenly looks up at the clock, realises she’s overshot her brief and hastily ties up the loose ends. Her prose is magical and every line draws you in and leaves you wanting more, be it the description of a crocodile-filled Indus or the pain of a war wound. She writes delicately, befitting the times, skimming across the specifics, hinting at the intimacy between Qayyum and his friend Kalam, the brotherhood, the friendship, the need, or Vivian and Tahsin’s love, unspoken, unexpressed. Even Vivian’s relationship with her protege Najeeb, that of a young British woman and an adolescent Pathan boy is unorthodox, yet develops so naturally. Shamsie prefers to subtly show, rather than tell, how a thoughtless word here, an unconsidered gesture there, a chance encounter, can change a life irreparably, be an unintentional betrayal.
In many ways it is reminiscent of James Michener’s The Source, with the tale set around an archaeological dig, the history within, the stories surrounding it. A battlefield in France, the streets of London, cantonments in colonial India and a dig in Turkey, Shamsie weaves history into the narrative with a skill, understanding and compassion towards each of those varied cultures that few can lay claim to. Her voice is evocative and one is deeply and illogically nostalgic for a time never experienced. The smell of jasmine scented streets, spice bazaars and wet khus blinds. The novel is epic in its range, a spiral narrative that begins and ends in 500BC, the central portion set against historical events from 1914 and 1930.
The plight of those forced to fight their own, as a consequence of being in the British Indian Army, the Khudai Khidmatgar non-cooperation movement, the Kissa Khawani Bazaar Massacre, Shamsie’s novel encompasses many complexities. And as the last page turns, one feels like a rapt listener on The Street of Storytellers, Peshawar. Bereft at the end of the tale, much richer for it.
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