Abdullah says, 'The day after 9/11, Muslim-Americans woke up to a new America — the one where they were no longer regarded as locals but outsiders and lumped together with the fundamentalists.'
Abdullah's new book Saffron Dreams is an attempt to view this struggle through the eyes of a Muslim woman living in New York. The protagonist, Arissa Illahi, is an artist and a writer who spent her less than ideal childhood in Karachi with her father and siblings. When a trip to the US leads to a chance encounter with a young man in a library, Arissa's imagination is captured but it is not until fate intervenes that she finally meets and marries the same man in Karachi.
Arissa and her husband, Faizan move to New York where life has its ups and downs. Although Faizan is well educated, he opts to work as a waiter in a restaurant at the World Trade Centre in order to have enough time to work on his pet project, a novel. While this initially raises Arissa's ire, she eventually settles down to a life of happiness and contentment with him and soon discovers that she is pregnant. However in the initial stages of her pregnancy Faizan becomes one of the hundreds of victims of 9/11 and Arissa's world changes forever.
Abdullah paints a bleak yet compelling portrait of a young woman struggling to come to terms with her husband's death in the most brutal manner after just three brief years of marriage. As Arissa goes through the full spectrum of emotions, disbelief, shock, trauma, and eventually, pure, unadulterated grief, her plight seems very real — helped along in no small part by Abdullah's careful attention to practical detail.
She tells us about the ghaibana namaz-i-janaza (absentee funerals), about the process of obtaining death certificates for victims whose bodies were never found, about the families of 9/11 victims being given some part of the soil and the ground — through it all her research is meticulous.
Beyond grief, Arissa must also cope with a changed America where Muslims are treated like the enemy and her faith is 'tried, sentenced and hung' every day. 'We were regarded as a race gone bad, mad. The people of our adopted land had lost faith in us and we couldn't trust our own. The line between allies and enemies was growing thinner by the day. Watching our backs had become a habit, a necessity of the strange times we lived in. We struggled to know ourselves only to lose ourselves in the interpretation of others, in the hyphenation of our worlds.'
As Arissa encounters hatred and mistrust from perfect strangers, she makes a radical decision, one that will not only change the way people view her but also change the way she sees herself. The rest of the novel deals with her journey to come to terms with her new surroundings and the challenges in her own life, but is littered with enough twists and turns to keep the reader's interest.
Saffron Dreams is Abdullah's first novel and her second book (her first book was a collection of short stories called Beyond the Cayenne Wall) but it contains the sort of practical and emotional detail that makes it seem autobiographical. Responding to the question over email, Abdullah denies this notion but does point out that there are similarities between Arissa's character and herself, 'we are both writers and artists and had arranged marriages.'
Some of the characters are also modeled on Abdullah's family members, including Faizan who is based on a cousin who died after three years of marriage and left behind a pregnant wife; as well as Faizan's compassionate parents, who are based on the cousin's parents.
Admittedly, Saffron Dreams gets off to a slow start; in fact the first few pages had me wanting to set it down (I personally prefer a more fast-paced novel) but once you get past page 10, the narrative picks up considerably and settles into a very comfortable pace, effortlessly weaving in and out of Arissa's past and present.
Although this constantly non-linear progression of events was initially irritating, it eventually lends itself to making the book quite a page-turner.
Saffron Dreams has received rave reviews in the American press and in literacy circles with one reviewer saying that it made her realise 'how little most of us [Americans] know about the world of Muslims and how incredibly wrong many of our perceptions are.' In spite of having grown up in a Muslim country and living alongside Muslims, I have to say that even I can relate to that statement.
However, what really struck me about Abdullah's writing is that after a while you forget about the character's religion and relate to her as a human being. As I read some of the bleakest parts of the novel, I was unable to remain dry-eyed and chances are it will have the same impact on many other readers, which in itself speaks volumes of its success.
Dear visitor, the comments section is undergoing an overhaul and will return soon.