Raja Gidh – راجہ گدھ

A huge thanks to Parhai Likhai for sending me this beautiful book. I loved reading it so much! Here’s my review of the book (it contains SPOILERS. Read it on your own risk):
The shortest way to describe this novel would be to say that it is a study in madness and death, and the correlation that these two enjoy, in living beings. I say living beings because humans are not the only subject of this book. As its name indicates, Raja Gidh – The King Buzzard, it is as much about the quest for the reasons of madness in birds as it is about humans. And the way Bano Qudsia juxtaposes the two together is simply amazing. In fact, she does not just limit it to a mere comparison, sometimes the characters themselves metamorephose into either the greedy buzzards waiting for its prey to die and present itself as its hearty meal, and sometimes into the prey themselves, slowly giving up on life as it becomes too burdensome for them.

Qudsia’s characters are surrealistic – you can only relate to them if you have ever spared a moment in your life to really contemplate your existence or the usefulness or the futility of it. They way each of them looks at the concepts of madness and death, or sometimes suicide, and how they interlink the two is just awe-inspiring.

I love Qudsia’s female characters and there’s an abundance of them in this novel. They are bold, real and complicated. They are not afraid to demonstrate their abilities to think, reflect on life and its complexities, and evolve. Neither do they shy away from showing a raging appetite for sex and/or food. I love the author’s comments on the similarities between hunger for food and sex and how the society seems to take the show of appetite for one by women to be indicative of the craving for the other. This, by the way reminds me how Mohammad Hanif has totally stolen this concept from Bano Qudsia to adorn his novel Our Lady of Alice Bhatti. Another total rip-off that I spotted was how Mohsin Hamid has directly copied the dynamics of the relationship between the protagonist and one of the female characters of this book and shamelessly pasted them in his book, The Reluctant Fundamentalist. The character traits of the two female characters, and the dilemma that they suffer from are just too similar: both of them suffer from the loss of their beloveds, both exhibit withdrawn, semi-mad personalities. Similarly both the male protagonists fall deeply in love with the women pining after other guys who are either dead or gone. And both try to reinstate them by pretending to act like the guys they love while having sex with them. I don’t know if you agree with me on this or not but the similarities between the two are two striking to ignore. No wonder Pakistani fiction writers always seem wary of their Anglophone counterparts.

Leaving Anglophone Pakistani writers at whatever they are doing and coming back to the original, I would like to say that this one sent me on a complete emotional roller-coaster ride. I would term Qudsia’s writing as violent. I do so because she has the ability to jerk you awake from your oft-times self-induced and much-coveted emotional slumber and make you stand face to face with the emotions you have been clearly trying to ignore for a long time. I cried on so many places in this novel not because what was being described was overly tragic but because how sensitive and sense-awakening it was. It was like someone was poking and prodding all the deep places in my heart that I keep safely hidden away. Oh it felt painful! Yes, it did! But at the same time, so very blissful! Having your heart poked at feels really good sometimes especially if the one who’s trying to split it open is none other than maestro Bano Qudsia herself.

I would like to discuss the characters of the book a bit more because I’m so not done yet. The protagonist Qayyum is one of the strangest and non-herolike characters I’ve ever read about in a book. He goes on about life in a casual sort of a way, having no particular goal or direction in his mind. His only redeeming quality is his ability to show great compassion for people who are in need of it. But the writer constantly reminds us that he belongs to the family of the buzzards and therefore we keep questioning his intentions all along. We ask whether those seemingly acts of love and selflessness spring out of the goodness of his heart or from his constant inner wish to satisfy his emotional and spiritual greed by feeding off of other people’s exhausted and decaying emotional beings.

The female characters that frequent his life define different phases of spirituality and madness of it for him. Simi, the girl belonging to the elite class who he falls desperately in love with, is the first one to enter his life and taint it with madness. They enjoy a give-and-take relationship with each other in that he provides with a substitute for her lost love by pretending to be her lover when they have sex, while she provides him with the hope that she would finally fall in love with him, which she never does bt the way. In a way they both use each other as they slowly trotter their way to madness.

The second woman that enter his life is a crude, lower-class woman the human-buzzard uses to assuage his sexual desires all the while hoping to achieve some kind of spiritual elevation in the process, while she uses him to conceive a child she so desires as her infertile, good-for-nothing husband cannot provide her with one.

Amtul, the old and withered prostitute belonging to the middle class, enters his life just because they both are in a desperate need for companionship. Despite her being a prostitute, they don’t share a physical relationship with each other. They are just there for one an other to fulfill their much greater need for human companionship. And since he doesn’t, or cannot, cosume her emotionally, they both forge a bond based on camaraderie and equality. And therefore, they both fall into the category of buzzards; they cannot feed on each other yet they both are aware that they are of the predator lot.

The fourth and the last woman that graces the stage of our protagonist’s life is his wife. This one he hopes to dump all his emotional baggage on and emerge as a new man altogether, ready to take life seriously after all. Unfortunately, she’s not having any of that as she’s already in love with another man and is carrying his child as well. Our hero, however, isn’t overly bothered by it, exhausted as he is by life and its challenges. He accepts his defeat here too and lets the woman go with her lover. He decides to live his life alone after devouring on so much emotial-meat of others.

I absolutely loved reading this novel and can’t wait to read more books by the author.