Across the Black Waters

Nomi Ali, 12, is among the islanders who must pay a price for the imperial ambitions of the British and the Japanese forces. The prisoners, transported to the island from different cities to serve saza-e-kaala paani in the colonial prison, are meted out soul-breaking corporal punishments: the prison, shaped like a starfish on “paradise island”, is nothing short of hell. To pass through its gates means to never return the same. Here, prisoners are ground, and are ground again every time they witness the violence against others. The convicts settled on the island and their children remain vulnerable — as power shifts, loyalties do, too — and are subjected to oppression. The aborigines, “the true security guards of the islands”, also find their lives entangled in it as the island turns into a theatre of war, with the victorious Japanese forces unleashing a fresh wave of torture on the defenceless civilians, many of them women and children.

We have Nomi (meaning beauty in Japanese), her brother Zee, and their friend, Aye, a Burmese who knows the language the wind speaks — it brings to him stories from around the island. Then there are the Local Borns who live in a village, Aberdeen Square, an overlooked outpost of the Empire. Haider Ali, the father of Nomi and Zee, is a settled convict who has been given a ticket of leave (parole) after he served his sentence. He had hoped that since the Japanese, unlike the British, were “Asians, like us”, life would be different once they take control. It’s not. His family, including his wife Fehmida — she had come to the island along with him and works at the Female Factory, overseeing the section of sewing machines and looms where women prisoners are made to toil — is the first to be targeted by the Japanese forces. Among those serving sentence at the island prison, we meet Prisoner 218 D, who arrives on the island after being on trial in Lahore for conspiring against the Empire. This unnamed prisoner, who was brought to the island chained to another woman, is at the receiving end of some of the most gruesome torture at the hands of Cillian — the terrible jailor “who was born to never die” — her frail body a testimony to unimaginable monstrosity. In the end, when Prisoner 218 D hears about Freedom, the news is laced with another lacerating reality — Partition.

In the novel, the lives of these characters intersect and their destinies get intertwined. Khan is adept at creating worlds that are at once magical and terrifying. She creates a universe out of a footnote of history. Her writing is crystal, vivid. In a novel of such scale and setting, the story tends to get bogged down and stilted by research, but Khan, as the third-person omniscient narrator, maintains a tight control over the narrative.

Early in the novel, Zee asks Nomi, “Mama sides with the British, Baba with the Japanese, whose side are you on?” And, then, he answers his own question: “You’re on nobody’s side okay? Because nobody’s on our side.” In the times fractured by war, taking a side, as many collaborators discover, can be fraught with dangerous pitfalls.

The overarching themes in Khan’s fiction have included personal yearnings that shape and are shaped by larger conflicts, intersections between faith and longing (The Geometry of God, 2008) and identity and belonging (Thinner Than Skin, 2012). The Miraculous… also echoes these themes. It’s a novel anchored largely by characters unmoored from what was once home, either serving a sentence or content with tenuous freedom, besides those serving the two Empires. Sewn into the skein of the novel are the stories of ordinary people — and their unshakeable and steadfast endurance, the “ordinariness of men who committed extraordinary wrongs”, the quest for survival and wholeness, the shapes of tactile memories, and the absences created by the loss of loved ones. The novel, an archipelago of atrocities (hundreds are pushed off the boats into the sea) during the war, lends human terms to suffering, juxtaposing the beauty of the setting with the brutality of the war. Its characters, like the ones in Khan’s previous novels, are weighed with grief and estrangement, both physical and emotional. They carry the burden of memory — and history.