Some good novels could and should be read in one sitting, particularly plot-driven ones. This wasn’t the case with Tales from Qabristan. I would read a chapter (or a few chapters) and needed to take a short break to savour the text. Indeed, the chapters were so precise that each one could be a complete, stand-alone short story. This, in no way meant that I didn’t want to read the entire book. Quite the opposite. In fact, I was strangely sad when, after a week or so, the seamless flow from one chapter to another came to an end with Chapter 13, ‘Father Died: Simple Past’.
Tales of Qabristan was described, on the publisher’s website, as ‘a strikingly vivid portrayal of a boy trying to understand the world through the eyes of the adults around him.’ As Farook, the protagonist, navigates failure, love, life and death, we’re reminded that ‘children are capable of discerning extremely complex realities even if they cannot fully understand them.’
The author, Sabin Iqbal, is a journalist-turned-literary curator of the Mathrubhumi International Festival of Letters and was the Festival Director of Alliance Literature Festival at Alliance University, Bangalore. As the former editorial director of Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Iqbal has worked with Outlook, Tehelka, Business India, The Gulf Today and Sports Today, amongst others. He’s also the author of other critically-acclaimed novels like The Cliffhangers and Shamal Days.
Tales of Qabristan began with Farook preparing to bury his father in the ‘qabristan’ (the graveyard next to the mosque). As the rituals proceeded, the memories of his childhood and youth filled his thoughts, which became the focus of the story and consisted of ‘secret lives, sexual proclivities, superstitions.’ More than anything, they showcased the slow decaying of his family.
The setting was mainly at ‘Kayaloram House’ which was explained as ‘our ancestral home, … in the backwater village of Kayaloram, which was about 20 km away from Kamana town, south of Thiruvananthapuram.’ It was what followed this description which piqued my interest:
‘The village was such a blissful stretch of land that its only link to the rest of the world was the men who went to Malaysia and Singapore seeking jobs. But these men, once settled with Malay wives or concubines, rarely visited their family back home, which in the passage of time became a village of grass widows, waiting for years, sometimes all their life, in vain for their husbands who had found love and warmth in women in their adopted country.’
As a Malaysian, this passage brought to mind two stories from the past. In the first, an old married couple who spoke of ‘Kerala’ as being ‘home’ had a curious age-gap of some twenty-five years. When the gentleman died in the 1980s, for a very long time, his widow demanded and received much respect as the matriarch of the family. Early in the twenty-first century, during a family wedding, this couple’s daughter introduced us to her ‘elder sister’ from Kerala. It was then that we understood that the matriarch was, in actual fact, the ‘other woman’. In other words, the mother of this ‘elder sister’ was possibly a ‘grass widow’ that Iqbal wrote about. In another story, upon returning from a visit to South India to see a man who’d returned ‘home’, the elders lamented that, “They took all his money and he’s got nothing.” The poor man now lived in a hut on the periphery of the land, bought with his earnings, and shunned by his family. It was no wonder, then, that Tales of Qabristan resonated for it was an account of those who were left behind when their menfolk went overseas for work.
Farook’s story about Younis Uncle was another that stood out, particularly the description of the uncle’s love of English, the boy’s discovery of his uncle’s photos from Borneo and a connection with one Sarah Jones (a woman who was ‘more than a friend – she was his girlfriend.’)
Oooo… how familiar this was. Haven’t we all found photos of a usually prim-and-proper elder only to see that they may have had, gulp, a past? And, the conversation young Farook then had with his mother about his ‘discovery’ was positively delicious for how true to life an account it was.
As many of the stories were centred on the happenings in and around the Kayaloram House, the novel consisted of a huge cast. Nonetheless, the core remained the same – Farook, his parents and sister. There were cousins, aunts, uncles, grandmothers, grandaunts and relatives from near and far who visit the Kayaloram House bringing with them stories that were entertaining and comical from time to time. All the stories, however, had that element of heartbreak about them. More than once, there was a temptation to reach out, warn and protect young Farook from harm with, “No, don’t go there.”
The overriding theme of this story was the lack of the presence and influence of a father in the years when a child grows up. By the time a father returned, he was no longer meeting his child; he was meeting a young adult who was often insecure, full of angst and desperate to find their place in the world. While there seemed to be a hint of anger in these missing father-child years, there was also an understanding that if a father didn’t go overseas, there wouldn’t have been some of the creature comforts that money could buy. Nothing says this more than when we read the following: ‘Three months later, he bought me a second-hand motorbike, a Yamaha RX100. A red one, and soon it became my best buddy, my companion.’
As for the quality of the prose, some of Iqbal’s work was pure magic, namely, the following:
‘Not that we wanted to get rid of him, but we didn’t want him to suffer like that. Pain and suffering isolate a man; no matter how much his wife and children try, they can’t get under his skin and suffer for him. Empathy stands outside the skin.’
‘A dead father is a fond memory, but a deserted and indifferent father is a wound never healing.’
‘A prayer could be an unexploded mine buried in the soil for years, but could go off any moment, catching everyone unawares.’
‘Some betrayals are like wormwood.’
‘Five years later, Pa came back from the Gulf with four cartons of books and clothes, not much money in the bank but cancer in his lungs.’ ‘Among the many regrets emanating from his grave in the qabristan, in the form of a gentle breeze or the shrubs that blossomed into flowers with no fragrance, a failed writer’s sighs drew no one’s notice.’
The one ‘mistake’ (if it could even be called that) of this book occurred on page 214. Iqbal wrote about Abdullakka (a Malay boy who ended up living in Kerala) counting from one to ten in Malay, which was all the character remembered for the language in the country of his birth: Satu, dua, tiga, empat, lima, enam, tujuh, lapan, sembilan, sepuluh.
The majority of this was correct. However, since this story was set in the latter half of the twentieth century, Abdullakka would have likely been born in Malaya for Malaysia and Singapore as separate sovereign nations only existed after 1965. What this meant was that words like ‘sepuluh’ would have been written and pronounced as ‘sa-puloh’. It bears repeating that this minor oversight didn’t in any way detract from the rest of the text which has obviously been meticulously researched.
Ultimately, this was a book that wove its spell gradually, like a cup of hot tea that warmed the body on a cold and rainy day. Although the end was known from the very beginning of this story, Iqbal succeeded in maintaining a continuous tension throughout. And, like the effect of drinking hot tea, the feelings and emotions having read this novel remained long after the story came to an end.
(March 2025)
