I bought this book a while ago, started it, was confused by the elaborate maps and names of characters and gave up and then picked it up again and boy, was i glad. I loved it. It is one of those books that makes you marvel at how the author got the idea, how Raza Mir executed the idea so perfectly and makes you wish you could write like that.
Imagine this. He sets the scene in Delhi in the times of the 1857 revolution or the sepoy mutiny when the rebels in Meerut, Jhansi, Bengal and other places are hatching a plan to overthrow the British and reinstate Bahadurshah Zafar as the Emperor. Then you pick Mirza Ghalib as your protagonist and assign him a critical role in this mutiny along with many of his friends and acquaintances. And to make things even more delectably delicious, make the instigating event a murder at a mushaira. There is poetry, intrigue, love, passion, patriotism, heroism, chivalry of the old fashioned kind and it all comes down to a beautiful climax - perhaps not the high of a complete victory but the satisfaction of having started and completed something significant.
If I fell in love with the idea and how beautifully Raza Mir conjured it and mixed it with his passions - Urdu poetry and Ghalib (he is the author of "Ghalib; A Thousand Desires, 'An Introduction to Urdu Poetry'), I was totally blown by how he executed it. The words were just right, the descriptions bringing the world alive and not appearing like unnecessary research rubbed off on the reader, the chapters short, the characters clear and full of various shades of virtue and weakness. It made me feel like how I felt when I read 'Grapes of Wrath'. Raza's setting and the story will perhaps remain a tribute to his loves but to me it will be a classic just for the conception and execution. I am no pundit but if it fails to achieve great commercial success or critical acclaim it will be because the setting and theme may have a limited market and nothing else. But that would not matter to Raza who I would think is a bit like his characters - of old fashioned virtue.
The love stories are told beautifully - Zainab and Siraj, Mohan and Hyderi, Ghalib and Umrao, Kallu and Ishrat and even Ramji and Fazilat - and I had this moment when Ramchandra leaves Ghalib for the last time like I did when I read 'The Book Thief'. Raza understands the emotion, the exact space of how the characters feel, does not judge them or want them to be any different. One page where he describes Siraj's withdrawn nature when he is with Zainab is so sensitively written. One line that stayed with me from the book ' what is love but a sharing of secrets!
Raza Mir was my senior at Osmania University College of Engineering and we used to know him then as Mir Ali Raza. He was a well known intellectual, a student leader with a left wing party if I am not mistaken, a cultural and literary powerhouse, and a person who everyone in the college/campus knew of. That he would succeed was a given. He went to one of the IIMs if I am not mistaken again. Many years later I heard that his brother Mir Ali Hussain wrote the lyrics of a song for 'Rang De Basanti'. Raza Mir would not remember me of course but I am so happy for him (I loved the way he mentioned his mother always encouraging him to express himself - she'd be so happy to see this - as would have been his father).
I spotted a couple of typos that Aleph could have done better to keep out - a blot on an otherwise perfect book. I am not sure if I captured anything coherently but enough to say - you will love it if you like old fashioned, passionate people who loved and lived fearlessly.
Read it.
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