From my Bookshelf - The Cliffhangers by Sabin Iqbal

This year, I am resurrecting a long-dormant section of this blog. What is a bookworm to do but review books? 

There are quite a few reasons why I bought this book from MBIFL. First of all, I had seen the author as he had been one of the organizers of the writers' workshop that I had mentioned earlier. Also, the novel is set in a place that is close to us - Varkala, one of the most popular tourist spots in the district. I wanted to see how the writer had treated a modern story set in Kerala and I am always interested in seeing how the untranslatable parts of our language and culture have been handled.

Imagine my surprise when Sabin Iqbal turned out to be the father of one of my son's friends! So this time, I had no trouble asking him to sign my book and chat with him a little about his writing habits...

 

And he kindly posed when my son requested a picture...

Oh, by the way, Mr. Iqbal was also the festival director at MBIFL2020!

Due to my backlog of reading material and a certain writing challenge that is underway, I didn't get to the Cliffhangers till two days ago. And once I did, there was no putting it down. 

The novel deals with four young adults: Moosa, Thaha, Jahangir and Usman who live near the Cliff in Varkala. Their friendship was forged in common pain and humiliation in childhood and they still cannot let go of it even at the ripe old age of nineteen and must keep on secretly pestering the perpetrator in retaliation. By this time, the four friends have earned the name of the Cliffhangers. They keep each other company in the all the adventures of youth - love, weed, fights, sports and general mayhem. 

What sets them apart is that they have made a conscious choice to keep away from the polarizing politics and religion of their region. The foursome are not model characters, but they have unique ways of dealing with those friends who they deem to have got the initial signs of the disease called fundamentalism. And very effective it is too - when I read the novel, I dearly wished I could deal with a few friends and relatives the same way. 

Mr. Iqbal's writing is simple and powerful (I know, I know, Premam and Vimal sir have ruined those adjectives for all time to come!), there was nothing that sent me running to my dictionary. But there were some lyrical passages about the beauty of the seaside town that had me wishing I could go to Varkala this very moment and be there to see it for myself. Those lyrical passages are the relief spots in the otherwise hopeless outlook on the polarizing trends that are happening in our state, country and the world over. 

Of the characters, the most memorable for me are Moosa's Mother, the quiet and erudite Vivekanandan, Jonathan Boyce, SI Devan and the foursome themselves. The most memorable scenes are those of the cricket match, the curing of the fundamentalist disease as mentioned earlier, the killing of the white rooster and several others which, if I were to mention them all, would have me writing down the whole story here.  

Mr. Iqbal's novel reminded me of Golding's Lord of the Flies at times although there are few similarities. There is always that sense of impending doom hanging over the protagonists and the little world that they inhabit.

Another thing that piqued my interest is the foursome's repeated attempts to learn English. They failed miserably in their school years, can understand enough English to make out different accents, but don't have the confidence to speak. Mr. Iqbal returns to this obsession of the boys throughout the book. The uniquely Malayali love-hate relationship with English is something about which I could write a whole another post!

My recommendation for what it is worth: everyone should read this book. I would have recommended that it be a college text book for its linguistic and artistic merits as well as its core message, only that textbook committees might vote against it for the racy parts. My fifteen-year old read it, liked it and he was not fazed, but he forbade his 11-year old brother from reading it. 😀

Afterword: As I sat back after reading the novel, I thought about what it is that really holds the country called India together. Going by the nature of the volatile elements in the novel, this country should have been burned, razed to the ground or hacked into pieces by now. Why hasn't it happened then?

The answer is this. There is a silent majority in this country. These people keep their heads down and go about their daily business without trying to separate man from man on the basis of color, class, creed or politics. They understand that all people have the same basic necessities and if everyone cooperates, life can be peaceful and enjoyable. Some of them hold fast to the ideal that all people are equal. Some of them are wise enough to understand that the forces of Isfet and Ma'at (chaos and order in Egyptian mythology) are always at war and one or the other must have the upper hand at times. They bide their time till action becomes the need of the hour. And there are some who have the touch of the Divine and spread acts of compassion and care across all man-made divisions.

There will always be hotheads who are prompted by Ares (forgive me, my kids have transmitted their Rick Riordan addiction) to create unrest and war in the name of whatever they can cook up at that moment. As for me, my prayer is the same as this great son of India's:

Where the mind is without fear
and the head is held high,
where knowledge is free.
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls.
Where words come out from the depth of truth,
where tireless striving stretches its arms toward perfection.
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost it's way
into the dreary desert sand of dead habit.
Where the mind is led forward by thee
into ever widening thought and action.
In to that heaven of freedom, my father,
LET MY COUNTRY AWAKE!”  

-Rabindranath Tagore