Subcontinental Shifts

After staying back in Lahore,Dina Lal takes another decision: to convert to Islam. So,Dina Lal becomes D.L. Ahmed. But the futility of his precautions is exposed the day his wife is abducted from their home. After that,his relationship with Shah sours,the house is divided rather than shared,and the fault lines in the house mirror the ones that divide the two nations. But in this hostile ground,some customs and relationships continue unthreatened. So,to his dying day,Dina Lal receives food from Shah’s kitchen and despite his deteriorating relationship with Shah,he retains affection for his son Javid.

Sorayya Khan’s novel is also the story of Shah and his relationship with his son and daughter and of a surprising bond he forges with his European daughter-in-law,Irene,who looks at her stay in Pakistan as an escape from her native Holland and the memories of World War II. The European interjections,however,feel a bit out of place in a novel that so entirely belongs to the subcontinent.

It is the quiet horror of living alone in a familiar land without familiar faces that Khan draws out best. The family saga of the Shahs is engaging but it is the absence of a family in Dina Lal’s new world that makes for a compelling read.

The passage of time is reflected in the house that gradually goes to seed. As a sweeper’s colony mushrooms at the gate of the house and a colony of car mechanics takes over the lush lawns,the past retreats within the house,living on in dark corners,in the grand billiards room,in the constant stream of letters by the Englishman Smithson containing instructions on “everything from gardening to replacing bricks” and in the “soft and worn Englishman’s chair where he (Dina Nath) slowly regained the strength to feed his agile optimism for the following day.”

Five Queen’s Road stands at the intersection of history and personal memories,a vivid portrait of life as it carries on in all its ordinariness and brutality in the shadow of Partition.