The people of Afghanistan are no strangers to the horrors of war and violence. Under the second stint of the Taliban, life has been unimaginably difficult for women, both at home and outside. During the four decades of conflict starting with the Soviet invasion in 1979, many have been forced to flee overseas to live as refugees. In her deeply moving debut novel, Good People, Patmeena Sabit tells the story of one such Afghan family.
Sabit herself was born in Kabul a few years after the Soviet invasion. When she was a month old, her family fled to Pakistan before moving to the United States. She now lives in Canada.
There are many ways to read Sabit’s book. In a world increasingly turning anti-immigrant, it’s a story about an Afghan family displaced from their country and living in exile in America. It’s a story about ruptures within a family as the older generation clings on to their values and a younger generation desperately tries to fit into a new place, chasing the American dream. It’s a story of social expectations and perception, and the wavering views on ‘the other’ and how quickly things can go south. It is a story about gender and identity. Sabit reckons with all these by putting 18-year-old Zorah Sharaf and her tragedy at the heart of the polyphonous narrative.
Like many other Afghans, the Sharaf family fled their country, which had turned into a “graveyard for the living and the dead”, in 1997-98, landing up in a ‘strange’ land they had never imagined in their dreams. First, there was only Rahmat Sharaf, Maryam and their son Omer. Then Zohra, and two others—a boy Hamza and a girl Laylee—came along. In the first few years, like many others, the Sharaf family hoped peace would return to Afghanistan but that proved elusive, and soon Rahmat and Maryam were laying down roots far away from home.
Rahmat Sharaf arrived in America without a dime but refused to drive a taxi to make ends meet, like many of his peers were doing. Instead, he tried his hand at many things, before slowly building a business which brought him enough wealth to buy a lavish family home in one of the rich enclaves in Riverside, Virginia where the Washington elite lived.
Sharaf dreamt big for his children— he wanted the two older ones to be a doctor and a lawyer, but neither was so inclined, and thereby hangs a tragic tale. When Zohra loses her way—and life—in an unthinkable manner, everyone has an opinion on the incident, and the Sharaf family is put under harsh public scrutiny. Sabit uses the Rashomon effect with great skill, telling the story through a bevy of voices, family friends, friends of the children, teachers, Sharaf’s colleagues, their neighbours and acquaintances.
While the larger Afghan community thinks Zohra has been given too much freedom, and blames her parents for not ‘teaching’ her better, her American friends feel she lives in a veritable prison with too many dos and don’ts. This is just one of the examples of how easily people can often misunderstand people.
What really happened to Zohra, who was the “light of the house”? How did she die? Did her family have a hand in it? Is that possible? Sabit focuses on Zohra’s short, eventful life, and with the chorus of accounts by people who knew her, she tries to show how and why things unravelled so badly for her. In her author’s note, Sabit clarifies that though the book is not based on one specific incident, she consulted a number of reports and books on honour killings.
Sabit maps human behaviour at its best and worst, and how women more often than not become easy targets of character assassinations, opening up Good People to a wider readership.
Khaled Hosseini has told the Afghan story in his bestselling books (The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns), so have others such as Sima Samar (Outspoken: My Fight for Freedom and Human Rights in Afghanistan) and Taran Khan (Shadow City: A Woman Walks Kabul). Sabit joins their ranks with this astute book.
Sudipta Datta is a journalist based in Kolkata
Good People
Patmeena Sabit
Hachette
Pp 400, Rs 799