Exploring an evolving culture through humour
Nain Sukh’s latest novel explores the melancholy of modern life in the absence of nostalgia and is dedicated to healthcare workers
Nain Sukh’s latest offering is a short novel. The author has dedicated it to nurses, doctors and other health workers for not shying away from sticking their necks out during the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s a chronicle of a death foretold. Paradoxically, the novel is also an X-ray image of the mental illness in the upper crust of the society in Lahore.
The narrative revolves around a middle-aged man, Akram, who lives in one of the many gated communities that have sprung up throughout Lahore. Such growth is comparable to a cancer affecting the body. Akram’s character can be seen as a city hiding beneath layers of its past and present. A bleak or uncertain future awaits the inhabitants, whose identity has been shaped by superfluous notions of things and ideas. Through looking at Akram the reader is led into the lives of others who are or have been in Akram’s life.
The non-linear narrative opens as Coronavirus begins to shut down everyday life in Lahore and beyond. Nain Sukh has brilliantly used the Covid-19 device to probe and expose social inequities, inequalities and hypocrisy. Chapter after chapter, the author shows that the double-edged sword of modernity cannot be avoided. Even the puritanism of Punjabi language activists cannot hold off mingling with English and Urdu. Access to education and economic opportunities, or the lack thereof, ushers strange bedfellows.
In concise chapters that are easy on the eye, Nain Sukh adds comic touches to the absurdities of modern life in a country that is a hodgepodge of modern and pre-modern ways of thinking and getting things done. In one scene, there’s a tragi-comic exchange between Akram and his Christian neighbour during one of their routine strolls.
Akram admits his ignorance when saying he didn’t know Christians could belong to the Jatt caste. The neighbour jokingly remarks that Akram could still call him a chuhra if it pleased him. Several instances of similar comedic brilliance counterbalance the oppressiveness of death lurking on the other side of the fence. His humour allows readers to digest the overall unfairness of life. Read More…
