Most unfortunately we northerners are isolated from the lively literary output written in the major languages of the subcontinent's southern regions. R.K. Narayan wrote in English and his stories set in Malgudi, a fictional small town in south India, are well known and justly celebrated. But apart from Narayan we have read little else.

The novel under review, written by Salma (Rajathi Samsudeen), was first published in the Tamil language by Kalachchuvadu Publications and is now out in a competent and readable English version.

It is a timely reminder that creative endeavour is pulsating in other languages as well. Set among the minority Muslim community of Tamil Nadu, the story tells of the trials of Rabia, a young girl born into an orthodox family which, like religious minorities the world over, clings tenaciously to ritual observances and to what they regard as tradition.

Zohra, Rabia's mother, is sensitively drawn as a good Muslim mother who believes that it is immoral for Muslim girls to watch films. To her, movies made in Chennai or, worse still, Mumbai only purvey false values that plunge the young towards the slippery slope to perdition.

On one occasion, during the month of Ramazan, when Rabia and her friends sneak into a cinema they are discovered and punished. Zohra beats her daughter to teach her a lesson and the girl's cries are heard by her aunt Rahima who rescues her and takes her to her room.

However, for a long time after the chastisement the doleful weeping of Zohra could be heard by the family. It is up to the reader to decide whether it was the mother or the daughter who had suffered more.

The mother insists that Rabia receive moral instruction from the hazrats at the local madrassah. However, the junior hazrat was a nasty piece of work.

He beat the boys mercilessly when they mispronounced a word from the holy book. The girls he pinched on the thighs. But Rabia, maturing fast, instinctively felt that it was not just to punish them that he groped between their thighs.

The book is peopled by Rabia's family and friends and the saga is enacted against a background of social and economic change. The close-knit ties experience constant tension from both within the community and from without.

Some make concessions and compromises, others rebel. A few families crack and fall apart but others stand strong, cemented as they are by strong religious and cultural ideology.

The much hyped boom that sections of Tamil Nadu's population enjoy is due in part to earnings sent home from abroad. Many men leave wives and family to work in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf.

They return with all kinds of goodies such as refrigerators, television sets, computers and cars. It would be inappropriate, even offensive, to say that they bring home the bacon; but perhaps they bring home worse.

Huge TV screens blare at all hours and small childen watch the terrible trash dished out in neverending serials. The devil has entered the dining room and the young don't have to steal into multiplexes. Rabia's mother would die if she knew what the young saw on the internet.

When a Muslim girl elopes with a non-Muslim, her father is hauled before the elders of the community who demand that the family be punished because they have brought shame upon them all.

In fear and desperation the father takes a stand, not unlike a similar situation described in the New Testament. He points to his stern-faced persecutors and demands that they confess their sins.

How many had not molested their female Hindu employees? He who was not guilty had the right to cast the first stone.

The strikingly beautiful Firdaus is exceptional in many ways. She's in love with a married man, and to complicate matters further, he's a Hindu who fervently wishes he had been born a Muslim.

Siva loves his wife Jaya and Firdaus with equal passion. Firdaus is perfectly happy to become Siva's second wife, but Jaya is not prepared to share her husband with any other woman.

Firdaus is a paradigm of the predicament of one who refuse to conform to the conventions of the society into which they was born. The sub-text of this complexity is probed and explored brilliantly and poetically.

Salma, the pseudonym of Rajathi Samsudeen, is indeed a writer and poet of the first order. Her poem, from which this novel takes its title, is a memorable lament from the innermost depths of a woman in despair. Space prevents me from quoting it in full, but I must reproduce a few lines

These nights
following the children's birth
you seek, dissatisfied ,
within the nakedness you know so well,
my once unblemished beauty.

And what must I do?
These birthmarks cannot be
repaired, any more than my own
decline —
this body isn't paper
to cut and paste together,
or restore.

Salma's story itself is the stuff of high drama. Born in 1968, she left school when she was 13 and educated herself by reading voraciously in public libraries.

She concentrated on her mother tongue and even today is very uneasy in English. However, she has read the best known English novels in translation.

Facing obscenity charges and violent threats from fundamentalist groups, she has become the first Muslim woman novelist in the Tamil language.

Her work as a women's activist is widely recognised in her home state. Currently she is chairperson of the Tamil Nadu Social Welfare Board. One can only salaam the courageous Salma. 
 
The Hour Past Midnight
By Salma
Translated from the Tamil by
Lakshmi Holmstrom
Zubaan, New Delhi
ISBN 978-81-89884-66-6
480pp. Indian Rs350