Happy Things in Sorrow Times: A review

Tehmina Durrani’s protagonist rejects the fate of children of war, who did not get ‘another chance’ like her and had no choice in their aging process, socialisation and had to endure the decadent times where God and guns ruled. Guns were the equivalent of Satan and were victorious

Tehmina Durrani’s literary journey has been laced with highs and lows after her first book became a best-seller. The controversial ‘My Feudal Lord’ was received with little empathy for her, as scores of readers were convinced that she willingly imposed the role of Mustafa Khar’s domestic inmate upon herself; mostly because the book does not step out of a narrow elitist bubble and strangely remains an exaggerated account of her personal victimisation. The book exposed her feudal husband, who retained an unwavering tribal stance on the confinement of women that maimed and pillaged her freedom, alienating her from her own family as well as her world; while he kept swinging like a pendulum between ‘socialist Islamism’ and feudalism in his politics. Her resilience and fortitude as a writer can be seen in her second novel ‘Blasphemy’, where she stepped outside of her personal experiences and captured the larger political barbarism of lawlessness. She has also been accredited for writing Abdul Sattar Eidhi’s biography ‘A Mirror to the Blind’, that she extensively worked on for over two years after her first novel. Her fourth book, ‘Happy Things in Sorrow Times’ is a thought-provoking story of a nation, through the consciousness of Basrabia, who is born to the war against her volition during the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan.

The book is a journey of Basrabia to Basra, a motif weaved in by Durrani as the narrative shifts from Basrabia’s overwhelming transience as a cub to her unflinching stance as a wounded tigress. In an attack on the mud huts where Basrabia lived with her family, her mother loses an arm and pleads her to flee for her life. Garbed in her mother’s oversized torn black dress, disillusioned Basrabia traverses the desert, assimilating the language of nature. When she sees signs of life in another refugee encampment, her frail and grief-stricken mind tricks her into defining herself forever in the name of a boy Sher Khan, the Tiger King. Inquisitive and thoughtful, Basrabia disagrees with Sher Khan’s sweeping arrogance and questions his careless schemes of organising an unbeknown revolution squad. While Basrabia laughs at the absurdity of his fairy-tale artillery of feeble children, Sher Khan’s ‘home’ is attacked by the Soviets too. Basrabia parts with Sher Khan, hanging on to his implausible promise of an unrelenting quest for retribution for their land, tells her he would fight for Afghanistan’s honour all his life. She only loses her identity as a refugee when a kind American woman who runs a boarding school for abandoned girls in Peshawar takes Basrabia into her care. She meets a number of girls from other faiths but her mind remains enraptured with the idea of Sher Khan avenging her land one day. Her voyage of self-discovery is limited to two altogether different goals; of understanding God and of finding Sher Khan in insects and rodents. She sifts through an unbiased history, beginning to get rid of her illusions and plunges into self-discovery. Reality strikes again when she discovers that after the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan, there was no difference left between ammunition packages and Afghan soldiers trained by the sole superpower on the globe, the US. She could only conceive of the aftermath and paradox of war while she is taught that humanism trumps all philosophies as the very Afghan identity in her land was at stake. In her world, races, ethnicities and borders blurred and merged into one sentiment of nationalism as her oblique purpose of finding Sher Khan ‘ten mountains away’ and being an avenger’s wife keeps embroiling her as her only passion.

After 9/11, the protagonist decides to stop struggling with reality and illusion and travels to Afghanistan to find out how the Afghans could demolish the tallest buildings in the world when they did not have enough to subsist on

When Basrabia finds out about the insurgent group, the Taliban, emerging against warlords, she gets trapped in illusions again. She doubts the credibility of humanism as an alternate philosophy to capitalism, communism, fundamentalism and extremism, all the forces that disfigured Afghanistan. She laments that other children of war did not get another chance like her and decides to take up her abridged name ‘Basra’ that Sher Khan had given her to derail her status from a human being to “just a woman” and decides to disembark from “another chance” and examine her country’s poverty of stability herself by experiencing the loopholes in the American foreign policy.

After 9/11, the protagonist decides to stop struggling with reality and illusion and travels to Afghanistan to find out how the Afghans could demolish the tallest buildings in the world when they did not have enough to subsist on. Basra’s spirit is crushed when she sees her ailing country in tatters, and there rages a seething sentiment among her populace of demolishing American hubris to dust along after the tallest buildings that controlled their important infrastructure. She makes subtle observations through her new highly educated friends who tell her how books were used for cooking rather than learning by Afghan women. She is forced to hear death ballads every day and sees the real threat to the Afghan identity as the country’s unceasing manipulation by one superpower and then its leftovers devoured by another.

Durrani does not moralise the character to an intolerable degree but the narrative forces the reader to sympathise with the character. Overall, the book is refreshing for its intricate treatment of the Afghan plight and for the art and richness it involves as there are thirty water-colour painting illustrations by Durrani on every other page

The book concludes in a rather unpredictable manner, leaving room for a sequel or an extension of the climax but the hopes of Afghan people of a divine ceasefire and of tiring the enemy through fatigue show that their resolve was not dead. Disappointingly, Basra engraves herself in the last few pages as the “chief” Taliban avenger’s unconditional lover despite Hoor’s leaving her stranded in the world alone. Basra’s character becomes feeble and is shoved into the background by the end of the book. She is relegated to just the role of a woman as Sher Khan had predicted, which is tragic at best. Durrani’s book leaves one with a bundle of innocent questions that an Afghan daughter of war might ask and how she may stumble upon complex answers. It should be appreciated for the onlooker’s insight into the realities of the Afghan predicament as it gives a voice to children of war who were born with the burden of only retaining nightmares. It is a harrowing account of how a child’s eyes see, comprehend, decipher and accept the presence and evolution of spears, arrows, knives, pistols, machine guns, Kalashnikovs, rifles, dynamite, grenades and bombs in their milieu. Durrani does not moralise the character to an intolerable degree but the narrative forces the reader to sympathise with the character. Overall, the book is refreshing for its intricate treatment of the Afghan plight and for the art and richness it involves as there are thirty water-colour painting illustrations by Durrani on every other page. Through these the reader and the author’s miracle child, Basrabia, stumbles upon reality through the cleverly woven world of symbolism that Durrani creates and she can see through the looking glass darkly that the Afghan still had emotions that transcended labels and ideologies even when war was the only thing they understood. I had the fortune of reading this personalised narrative strewn by Tehmina Durrani where one could relate to the conception of haunting nightmares that explode and leave the heart empty. Its instrumental to formulate a new and well-informed opinion over why the Taliban perspective is skewed compared to affluent and resourceful elite.

Happy Things in Sorrow Times

Written by: Tehmina Durrani

Published by: Ferozsons

Pages: 204; Price: 30$ (Hardcover)