afaqat Hayat’s second novel, spanning 670 pages, in a dusty, gritty realism-laced, somewhat ornate Urdu, borrows its title from a Sindhi word, rolaak, 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 to an author’s heart.

One could say the same thing about the forlorn-ness and unrequited-ness of love in much of Naiyer Masud’s fiction to his obsession with and sadness because of the changes, political and cultural, taking place before his very eyes in his beloved Lucknow.

Speaking of Masud’s fiction, ’s beginning does feel heavily influenced by a Masudian touch of claustrophobia. Thankfully, Hayat ventures into territories Masud avoided, such as sexual explicitness of language and context; and violence, linguistic or otherwise. Speaking of violence, the protagonist’s childhood is marred first by being a witness to a scene of visual violence as he catches his father in an act of being intimate with someone other than his mother. This is followed soon after by criminal domestic abuse.

Young Qadir’s sexual awakening at a young age also has a Masudian touch, though, in Masud’s hand, it mostly metamorphoses into emotional or romantic longing. Hayat displays several other influences such as noted Urdu writer Ikramullah’s fascination with sexuality and its silent sign language. Surprisingly, though, it’s a Dostoyvskian touch that explodes in the sections where Qadir and Marvi get caught dating each other, ending their so-far innocent romance, leading to the roughing up of Qadir by her brothers and culminating in the utter humiliation of Qadir’s father, who is admonished for his uncontrolled sexual escapades and punished in the most medieval manner by having his face blackened while being paraded with his hands tied behind his back, not to mention spending three nights in a jail-like room in a mosque and hearing his crime being publicised through the mosque’s loudspeaker. Rafaqat Hayat deftly shows the unavoidable intertwining of religion and medieval tyranny directly tied to sexual suffocation.

Qadir is thoroughly devastated. Just when he thinks this will bring father and son closer, things actually get worse. Against his will, the son is taken off school and sent to Hyderabad to become a mechanic. Hayat is at his best when he makes the reader follow Qadir’s emotional survival and his witnessing of Hyderabad’s underbelly: a toxic mix of hashish and sex with transvestites, which he shies away from.

A good novel must not suffocate under its ownweight. ,it seems, just manages to avoid that fate.

I believe here the author privileged his own moral bias over that of his character’s. This is a poor choice for a great writer. Next, on a whim, Qadir returns to his small town, only to fall in love once again. This time the target of his affection is Soomal. She is also a target of his father’s lust. Events don’t go as planned to say the least. As things come to a head between the father and the son, the results are painful. In the end more than two people get hurt seriously yet a bit clumsily, as if one were watching Deewar or Shakti, not Oedipus Rex.

This is a big novel; big in its generosity to open up some important questions. Although the author explains the linguistic demarcation of the small town between Urdu-speaking minorities and the native Sindhi-speaking population, the author, and by default the protagonist, through whose voice we come to hear the entire narrative, end up using a higher register that could very well be spoken in Lucknow, Karachi, Allahabad or Lahore, a few local words being sprinkled here and there notwithstanding.

That is important to take note of because throughout my reading I waited for a turn in the story that would propel Qadir towards improving his language and/ or getting introduced to literature. Nothing of the sort happens. The author has force-fed his own diction to the protagonist. The language uses Qadir in speaking to us is not that of an only child of uneducated parents in a small, backward town. We also do not see any indication of whether Qadir went to a high-class Urdu medium school. In fact, we are told, being poor, he finished his high school at a poorly funded public school with bad, cruel teachers.

From there, he went straight to a mechanic’s shop. The register of language can only go lower there. It’s a trap Hayat didn’t understand and fell into it. Imagine if the author had worked up a new kind of literary Urdu in a low register and with a heavy dose of Sindhi words, a device Asad Mohammad Khan has used brilliantly in several of his stories, a diction tethered to time and place.

This reminds the reviewer of a modern Hindi classic by Abdul Bismillah. It was not an easy read, but experiencing a different shade of Hindi/ Urdu spoken in Banaras was most intoxicating. Dostoyevsky himself chose lower, less refined registers to fit the kind of characters and their mental states that surrounded the master’s plots.

We also do not have a good sense of the time. The only hook to hang on to is a soccer player, the great Maradona. We don’t know if we are talking about Bhutto’s reign or Zia’s. There’s a complete omission of the mention of the political power of the time, though there is a brief discussion of some kind of dual system of law and order in place, where the mosque and police station are somewhat synonymous. Missing always are any cultural references to the cinema or local sports stars, though it is interesting to see a mild swipe at violent Punjabi cinema making inroads into interior Sindh.

The last part of the novel, beginning with the arrival of Soomal and her mother, Seemi, seems forced and reminiscent of the Maula Jat syndrome. The reader knows the novel will culminate in a final clash between good and evil because, despite warning, the evil in the story in the shape of the patriarchy (read Qadir’s father) cannot mend its ways. It takes an act of utter violence to avenge violence. The novel ends on a depressing but poor note. It would have been nice to see a glimpse of our protagonist’s intellectual and political awakening along with his personal sense of deprivation.

Despite the weaknesses one feels the novel should have avoided, there is power and beauty in Rafaqat Hayat’s meticulous and patient foray and exploration of the protagonist’s daily life, often hour by hour, and his unflinching desire to explore sexual awakening in a very stifling patriarchal system. "A hefty good novel’s one importantlitmus test is that it must not suffocate under its own weight and Rolaak, it seems, just manages to avoid it."

Rolaak

Author: Rafaqat Hayat

Publisher: Alqa, an imprint of Readings Bookstore, 2024

Pages: 670

Price: Rs 1,499

The reviewer is a librarian and lecturer in San Francisco. His last book was  A Footbridge to Hell Called Love. His novella Unsolaced Faces We Meet In Our Dreams is due soon