R afaqat Hayat’s second novel, spanning 670 pages, in a dusty, gritty realism-laced, somewhat ornate Urdu, borrows its title from a Sindhi word, loosely meaning ‘wanderer’ or ‘vagabond.’ After having finished the tome, one feels that neither word captures the spirit of the novel, not even the chosen Sindhi word fits the life of the protagonist, Qadir, which the reader follows from early childhood to young adult when he commits a murder. Although we see him a lot walking the narrow lanes, he always has a roof over his head.
On the one hand, this is a story of a son, the only child; of his very violent and oppressive father; and equally affectionate yet spineless mother, both equally illiterate. This denies the boy his dream of continuing his education beyond tenth grade. On the other, it could be read as a blueprint, barring a few affluent neighbourhoods, of the entire country that has failed to enter the modern age where law and order guarantee personal rights and agency.
The novel is set in a small, very conservative town in the interior Sindh. The generally oppressive nature and, if one may say so, backwardness, of such places was very effectively explored by Hayat in his earlier work. In some ways, seems like a full-fledged thesis based on his earlier anthropological essay.
There is nothing wrong with that. Many major fiction writers have probed a particular landscape novel after novel, trying to touch the essence of a place and time inhabited by the people close.