The first thing I did after turning the last page of Silken Gazelles, the third book by the Omani author Jokha Alharthi to be translated into English, was buy a copy of Celestial Bodies, her first book to be translated into English. (Her second translated book, Bitter Orange Tree, is apparently unavailable.)
This should tell you better than my mere assertion that Silken Gazelles, translated from the Arabic by Marilyn Booth, is worth reading. And that brings me to the second thing I did after putting down my copy. Alharthi, who won the International Booker Prize Prize in 2019 for Celestial Bodies, is known for writing novels with strong women characters. This is true of Silken Gazelles, too, but the novel cannot be categorised simply as women’s fiction. It cuts across gender, nationalities, and cultures to settle on the universal human feeling of a nagging emptiness even in the midst of a full and active life. That way, Silken Gazelles, in spite of foregrounding women’s experience, is more than a feminist novel.
Silken Gazelles
Simon & Schuster India
Pages: 258
Price: Rs.699
Silken Gazelles centres on three women, Ghazaala, Asiya, and Harir. It opens with Ghazaala and Asiya, who grew up together in a small village called Sharaat Bat. The two were more than friends. They were “milk sisters”, the newborn Ghazaala having been suckled by Saada, Asiya’s mother, at the same time she was nursing 10-month-old Asiya. By the time Ghazaala’s mother was able to take her child back, Ghazaala was emotionally attached to Saada and Asiya, spending all her days with them from the moment she woke up until bedtime, delighted in being led into adventures by the strong and brave Asiya.
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The girls were 8 years old when Asiya’s family fell apart with her 3-year-old sister drowning in the irrigation canals around Sharaat Bat. This child, born after a series of miscarriages, had not so much been wanted as craved. Maddened with grief and guilt, Saada died, and Asiya, who went through a complete change in her personality, left the village with her father. Soon Ghazaala’s family left the village too. And the two girls never met again.
A book about choice
Much later, Ghazaala makes a new friend, Harir. By now she is the divorced mother of twin boys and works as an accountant. She has never forgotten Asiya but has no idea how and where to start looking for her. But once, as she listened to a radio programme in which religious leaders provided advice to callers, she heard a woman ask: “If a person commits a grave sin as a child, does God wait and punish them when they’re an adult?” That voice was the one she grew up with, Ghazaala is convinced. It was Asiya’s voice.
The novel cuts across gender, nationalities, and cultures to settle on the universal human feeling of a nagging emptiness even in the midst of a full and active life. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement
Ghazaala is in an online relationship with an Iraqi man, but he cannot provide what she wants of him. It was the same with her ex-husband, a violin player in the royal orchestra. The violin player wanted only his music and the lifestyle of a musician, not involvement with the mundane details of everyday life. Soon Ghazaala will find a new obsession—her boss at the office, a married man with two children—and her sense of self will be in danger.
Meanwhile Harir, married, with a little boy of her own, spends a lot of time in Bangkok, where her mother has had surgery for cancer and her father occasionally drops by. Distraught by her father’s lack of interest in her mother and bored when she is not tending to the patient, Harir daydreams about her childhood in the house by the sea, recalling the stories she was told about her grandfather in the pearl-diving business and remembering the people who inhabited the house, as well as the horse whom she adored.
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She also remembers a strange girl in college, a girl covered from head to foot, gloves and all, who never spoke to anyone, never reacted to anything, was near-invisible to everyone. Curious about this girl, Harir had once followed her to her room in the college campus. Inside the room was a mirror fully covered with brown paper, on which was pasted a photograph of a little girl who could not have been older than three. Later, this silent girl would hold an overwrought Harir’s hand as they walked around the college. But then she vanished. Her name was Asiya.
At this point, you are convinced you know what comes next and you look forward to it. Who does not like a happy ending? But as you read on, you realise that whether or not Ghazaala and Harir learn that they have Asiya in common is not what this book is trying to reveal. Why Asiya is the way she is now is also irrelevant.
Silken Gazelles uses familiar tropes of women’s fiction to throw the world of the book wide open so that readers will find themselves contemplating their own lives again in the light of the knowledge that life must be lived, no matter what—but how it is to be lived is entirely up to them. This is a powerful understanding, and it comes in the quietest of ways, in this powerful book about choice that should not go unread.
Kushalrani Gulab is a Mumbai-based freelance editor.
