fiction - Murder in the Mohalla
In Aamina Ahmad’s stunning debut novel,“The Return of Faraz Ali,” a police officer is asked to cover up a young girl’s
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Murder in the Mohalla
In Aamina Ahmad’s stunning debut novel,“The Return of Faraz Ali,” a police officer is asked to cover up a young girl’s death in the red-light district of Lahore, Pakistan.
By Omar El Akkad
April 1, 2022
THE RETURN OF FARAZ ALI
By Aamina Ahmad
In the early 1980s, not long after President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt was assassinated, my father was walking home from work one night when two soldiers stopped him. They were young, bored. They decided to give him a hard time.
Your papers, one of the soldiers said.
At the time, my father worked as an accountant at a hotel in downtown Cairo, which meant he was technically part of the tourism industry, and so was afforded a little more freedom to be out at night, to move, to exist. He handed his paperwork to the guard, who, without looking at it, tore it up.
Your papers, he said again.
It’s tempting to think of broken systems — systems of government, of class, of all the great and small ways we allow our lives to be ordered — principally as agents of cruelty. There’s a stickiness to cruelty: Once inflicted, it hangs around, an intrusive houseguest through the years, through generations, feeding on memory. But cruelty is much too democratic. The weak too can be cruel, and so can the poor, even if only to one another. The real engine at the heart of broken systems, the most insidious, burrowing thing, isn’t their cruelty: It’s the way power obliterates consequences, the certainty that those responsible, by virtue of how deeply the game is rigged in their favor, will always get away with it.
The vacuum where consequences should be is the setting of Aamina Ahmad’s quietly stunning debut novel, “The Return of Faraz Ali” — stunning not only on account of the writer’s talent, of which there is clearly plenty, but also in its humanity, in how a book this unflinching in its depiction of class and institutional injustice can still feel so tender.
It is 1968 and a girl named Sonia, only 11 or 12 years old, has been killed in Shahi Mohalla, a neighborhood in Lahore, Pakistan, known for its red-light district. A midlevel police officer, Faraz Ali, has been dispatched to cover up the crime. Doing the dispatching is Ali’s political power broker father, Wajid, though the two have never had much of a relationship. Ali’s mother, Firdous, works in the Mohalla, and Wajid had the boy taken away from her at a young age, to be raised in the city of Jhelum by Wajid’s own extended family, so that he might have a future.
Now that future is coming into clearer light: Wajid explains to Ali that there was an “accident” in the Mohalla, presumably instigated by one or more important men, and if Ali can simply make sure the girl’s body is quickly buried and no police report filed, there’s plenty of career advancement waiting for him on the other side. It shouldn’t be difficult; it happens all the time in this place. Unfortunately for almost everyone involved, the officer tasked with making all this go away is possessed of something like a conscience.
This, in the broadest sense, is the plot of “The Return of Faraz Ali,” or at least its opening gambit. Given that perhaps the most exhausted narrative container in American cultural life is the murder investigation — the constellation of CSI: Someplaces and The Girls on or in the Wherevers — it would be easy for readers and booksellers to categorize this story as something in that vein. But Ahmad has taken on an entirely different kind of storytelling. Over the sweep of the novel’s middle, and especially in its quiet yet crushing conclusion, the fullness of the characters and their intersecting lives makes this far more than a murder mystery.
The novel hops around in time, first back to World War II, where a younger Wajid, serving as a soldier of the British Empire, has been captured and thrown into a decrepit P.O.W. camp in Libya. There, he finds himself reconsidering his decision to abandon his illegitimate son in the Mohalla. Eventually, the story casts forward to the myriad violent aftershocks of Partition, the birth and fracturing of nations, the countless lives trampled in the process. Where the novel sags, it’s when the narrative broadens from its tight focus into intergenerational saga. But it is a short interlude; the characters are too real, as is the violent collision of their scheming and resignation, the depths of their wanting.
Ahmad — who was born in London and teaches creative writing at San Jose State University — puts up no Western-friendly guardrails along the sides of her story. In this way, the novel has the self-assuredness of “We That Are Young,” by Preti Taneja. There is no overt explanation of which time of day the Fajr prayer takes place, or how many stops the train makes between Khulna and Gwalior. The implicit message to the reader is simple: Be in the place or don’t; no one’s going to translate the signposts.
It is difficult to write a novel like this one and not contend with a spectrum of violence. There is immense misery in this book. Ahmad has done her research, and the world she constructs — where women in the Mohalla are grateful for the birth of a daughter because the child, by means of the work she will inevitably be compelled to do, represents a kind of retirement plan for the parent; where the killing of such a child is treated as an unpleasant inconvenience — is fictional, but tethered to the world as it was, and in some places still is. Throughout the novel, as Ali struggles to reconcile his morality with the orders he’s been given, all while chasing the familial past to which he has been denied access, the purest form of misery reveals itself as inheritance, a passed-down thing.
At the line level, Ahmad has a habit of wielding softness against the most grotesque scenes, giving them an intimacy anything louder would likely wash out. Early on in the story, while trying to quash a protest, Ali beats one of the young demonstrators to a pulp: “There was relief in the way the boy’s face opened up to him, its contours, its ridges caving in so easily, as if he wanted nothing more than this, as if he were being freed.”
Ahmad’s compassion and deep care for the psychological and emotional nuances of her characters never wavers, no matter how monstrous or self-interested or defeated they become. It remains as Ali suffers the punishment for refusing to follow orders: exile to eastern Pakistan on the eve of Bangladeshi independence, his bright career prospects snuffed. It remains as Ali’s sister, Rozina, once a diva of some renown, navigates the barrenness of life out of the spotlight. It extends through generations and transformations of place, all the way to a devastating final chapter, fully human, fully engaged with what makes us human, no matter the size of the wounds or the immunity of those who inflict them. The powerful might often escape consequences, Ahmad shows, but life without these is its own kind of poverty, its own miserable inheritance.
Omar El Akkad is the author, most recently, of “What Strange Paradise.”
THE RETURN OF FARAZ ALI
By Aamina Ahmad
339 pp. Riverhead Books. $27.
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