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A review of Faiz Tauhidul Islam’s Pita, Anyaprakash, 2022
BY SANJEEDA ISLAM
Pita (Father) , a novel written by Faiz Tauhidul Islam, is a saga of two fathers and their two estranged grown-up children. It is a gripping tale that takes the readers on a journey of anticipation and uncertainty. The plot line is full of twists and turns which make the reading often a guessing game and an engrossing experience.
Faiz Islam is an award-winning writer whose intriguing novel, Robir Dwitiyo Biye (Robi’s Second Marriage), has won an International Tagore Society award. As an avid reader I had the opportunity to read a number of his novels which contain a strange but powerful mix of the real and the imagined, the material and the spiritual and a range of emotions that he so masterfully conveys. In Pita, he has presented another challenging work that demands our engagement with its inventive form and its exploration of time, space and the moral and communal structures of society. The novel deals with not only the inner conflicts and emotions of the main characters of the book – Shadhon Kumar Acharya, his daughter Sraboni and Moulana Ahmed Fayezi and his son Shafiq -- but also the landscape and history of the settings spread over several regions of the sub-continent. Readers are invited to step into a geography which is both real world and imagined, and is often invested with a dreamlike quality. The historical descriptions of the places that the four major characters visit foreground the unfolding stories and the contradictions and confusions of everyday life.
Pita tells the story of Fayezi and Acharya, one a Muslim, and the other a Hindu, whose grown up children fall in love and marry. The marriage, however, is not acceptable to the conservative elements of society so the couple has no choice but to leave their homes. Fayezi loves his son, his only child, as much as Acharya loves his daughter, also an only child, but they have no idea that their children are in search of a place where they would not be judged by their religion. Faiz Islam very subtly attacks the prejudices and moral blindness of society that alienate free thinking individuals and cause pain and misery to everyone who does not conform to its conservative world view. The novel shows how new orthodoxies pose a threat to our common understanding of the ideals of life, and, without taking a moral position, seeks an active engagement of the readers in restoring the cultural and societal values that used to define human relations in not too distant a past.
Shafiq and Sraboni set off for a place which would rise above the narrowness they have encountered at home, and eventually arrive at a rural area of Uttar Pradesh in India where the journey assumes the form of a mystical quest for self-knowledge. Their coming into a higher level of awareness is described as a progression from illusion to self-recognition and finally to a moment of enlightenment
After Shafiq and Sraboni leave their village, the two fathers try desperately to locate them, and keep in touch with each other in the dark of night fearing retribution from society. For years, they suffer the anguish of not knowing what has happened to their children. Occasionally they are misled by news about their sighting which, upon investigation, proves to be false. Eventually, the two aging fathers decide to personally go in search of them, and after a long journey end up in a small village named Maoa in Uttar Pradesh. The arduous but picturesque journey takes the readers to a world which has the haunting quality of being forever unknown.
As they set out on their journey, the two men talk to each other with warmth and understanding, mostly about their views on life, about their past, their personal losses and their relationship with God. They develop an empathy for each other, which, metaphorically, raises the possibility of mending communal rifts through conversation, something that the subcontinent sorely needs.
With a strange plot twist, the readers are made to realize that the proverb ‘history repeats itself’ indeed rings true. It turns out that Acharya also had married someone from a different caste and also had to leave his homeland--Uttar Pradesh-- when his wife had died after giving birth to Sraboni. He had settled down in Chittagong with Sraboni where the story of the novel begins. Now, after so many years, fate, it seems, intervenes, and makes him travel to his homeland in search of his estranged daughter. But once there, he meets his sister and father, Ganapati Acharya, who he had to leave behind as he chose a life of exile to protect his daughter from the fury of society. The joyful reunion with his father and sister shifts the story into high gear for a time as pent-up emotions and memories are released, overwhelming each of the characters. Soon, another twist of the story takes it to a sorrowful end. The old man had been waiting fruitlessly for decades to see his son, and when the reunion finally happens, he is naturally overjoyed. But that lasts only for a short while as the elder Acharya’s poor heart cannot handle the strain, and he dies. To justify the title of the book, his son performs the last rites of his father, maybe secretly hoping for Sraboni to do the same when he leaves the earth. The two fathers come back home with a heavy heart after their long journey.
The series of events that unfold keep the readers anxiously waiting to find out if and when the two fathers’ search for Shafiq and Sraboni would end. The writer carefully weaves the different strands of the story, keeping much of it under a shroud of mystery while describing the painful wait of the two fathers for the return of their lost children, and their own journey to end it. It would be an injustice to the suspenseful tale to reveal how it ends, but let me just say this: Faiz Islam’s novels are never close ended. The same is true for Pita.
Pita both celebrates and sympathizes with the travails of fatherhood, and shows how, in its best manifestation, it stands up against the pride and prejudices of society that often make family ties to come apart. In case of the three fathers—Ganapati and Shadhon Acharya and Fayezi-- what could have turned into a blessing is destroyed by the self-serving moral codes of society. It is all the more ironic that many members of society are fathers themselves with love and kindness for their children in their hearts.
Sanjeeda Islam is a Public Health Communication Specialist who likes to read books of fiction and non-fiction.