Love and Longing in Lahore

That’s where female protagonist Fatimah — mute after acid dripped into her baby mouth during an attack on her prostitute mother by her doubting father — comes from. Given away by her mother to three prostitutes living in a haveli. That’s why Shabbir, the male protagonist — the moulvi’s victim of sexual abuse and priest in the making — is the way he is. Victims falling in love on a sad, trapped street of Lahore. Don’t dismiss Gauhar’s story because it is sad and she loves to inject detail in the smell of all that festers on the street. We know the smell, it rises from sad, trapped streets all the way from Amritsar till Bombay and the small towns in between.

The treat is in the writing; it is vibrant and cinematic. She makes you get up with Fatimah in her tiny room watching the progress of the sun, you wince at the ritual yelling and complaining from the old prostitutes, fill the hamam with Fatimah, stand and feel the dappled sunlight of the neem tree in the courtyard at the beginning of winter. “In winter, the lane was streaked with dapple-grey sadness. On days like this the many round containers fattened with multicoloured sweets squatting on top of the glass counter in Gulrez Khan’s shop seemed out of place, like children’s laughter at a funeral.’’

The street is inhabited by society’s forgotten: A transvestite who teaches little girls rhythm before they are sold in the Gulf, a Kashmir widow, old prostitutes, a handicapped circus artist lured from the bank of the Euphrates by a British Indian Army soldier who abandoned her, a new victim of the moulvi in the backdrop of “twelve-year-olds from the mosque at Rahimyar Khan taken to Kashmir to fight the war against the infidel.’’

Gauhar’s reader is a step behind the character walking down the gali, meeting all its residents, feeling the lecherous gaze of the make-up seller, realising the cruelty of the video parlour guy’s seduction. She drags you along till you are hooked to the story and willingly look for what lies beyond the light of the streetlamp. You want to meet Fatimah’s mother Mumtaz who still sells girls to sheikhs. Fatimah and Shabbir’s secret love wraps itself like a translucent tendril around the thorny bramble of society, repression, growing up and pain in Lahore’s backyard.

With the Indian reader, the author scores more in making us identify with the scent of wet earth in August.