Hidden Fires
By Sairish Husain
HQ, an Imprint of Harper Collins
ISBN: 978-0008297497
384pp.

Waking up in the middle of the night to pray on the 27th of Ramazan, Yusuf switches on the television in his Bradford house to see a Muslim-inhabited apartment complex engulfed by flames. The sight ignites a memory he has been haunted by and which he has zealously guarded for the best part of his 80 years.

Miles away in Manchester, teenager Rubi awakens to read up on the rituals of the Fajr prayer on Google, simultaneously guiltily planning a binge for her pre-dawn meal as she also watches images of the same devastating fire. Exposed to a traumatic experience, because of which she has had to change her school and one which continues to shadow her through text messages, she too harbours a memory in the deep recesses of her mind.

Both grandfather and granddaughter live in self-designed isolation, scared, lest the humiliation of their personal sadistic experiences go public. Consumed by the fear of discovery, both have built up impregnable fortresses, and suffering within whose confines, they are strangers even to their own selves. Ironically, both believe they are being brave by not talking about the traumas they have been through.

Memories of fires can be contained or put away for lengths of time, but they never really fade or die. Both the fires and their memories become reservoirs of a cantankerous pain. Howsoever much you try to lock them in or you convince yourself that personal trauma is a private possession, howsoever much you train yourself not to think aloud or convince yourself that the past — though in another country — was a reality that has to be silently borne as a means of granting redemption to oneself, or that you alone can handle the suffering, the pain is bound to resurface one day.

A sophomore novel is a poignant tale of three generations of a Pakistani immigrant family in the UK and about psychological wounds that fester from never being expressed

Then, along comes a person or an event and inevitably the experiences are rekindled to become living........

© Dawn (Magazines)