Lost, Carried, and Remembered
I Left You Behind, Nazneen Sheikh. Mawenzi House Publishers, 2024.
Nazneen Sheikh’s I Left You Behind is a short story collection about what we find and what we leave behind in our migrations. Through seventeen stories written in captivating prose, Sheikh paints the lives of characters who find themselves returning to defining events in their lives and identities.
The first story of the collection, “The Girl on the Rock,” takes us to 1949 Rose Villa, Pindi Point, Murree (Pakistan). Our protagonist is a five-year-old girl who learns the word “resistance” from her father, a civil servant in Pakistan who is committed to regaining the land they lost, Kashmir. She uses the word resistance to protest the removal of a large boulder on which she often sits. As we learn from the narrator, “The rock is more than her command post; it elevates her and is where unusual thoughts enter her mind. These thoughts separate her from the more mundane aspects of the life of a child who is ruled by adults.”
The child’s world consists not only of this rock, but the house and relationships she is embedded in, all of which Sheikh builds through vivid portrayal of small details:
A small line appears between her mother’s two eyebrows. The little girl is familiar with this line, which sometimes also appears around her mother’s lips when she purses them. Like the thorns on the roses, lines on faces spell hazard. In soft even tones, her mother can announce a draconian consequence of misbehaviour.
When her world is disturbed by the removal of the rock, I, too, felt an abrupt untethering from the familiar and a longing for it to return. Through the child’s reactions of confusion, anger, and grief, Sheikh establishes one of the key themes in the collection: displacement.
Despite her mother’s looming authority and in her father’s betrayal, a strong will and autonomous spirit blossoms in the girl and continues to develop throughout the stories in the first half of the collection. Sheikh’s development of her character is notable. By plunging her into various trials, including a strict Quran teacher, an enigmatic yet challenging professor, and a king who keeps his young wife in purdah, a critical thinker begins to emerge, one who refuses to dampen her voice or submit without exercising reason — qualities historically considered to give women merit. While she has much to learn, our protagonist knows that she cannot learn without a degree of inquiry and trial.
What also strikes me is how Sheikh gives her protagonists power through storytelling. In “The Storyteller,” the young girl is inspired to write after she is visited by an aunt who tells her religious stories:
The story did two remarkable things. It transformed the storyteller and the listener. Suddenly, the stuffy aunt became magical. This magic was the ability to captivate an audience that did not want the story to end.
The girl rebels against the ending of a story she hears and is compelled to write a new one, one of hope and empowerment: “She loved the horse and instead of a horrible fate, she as a writer could change that fate, so readers could get joy out of the story.”
In “The Carpet,” told from the point-of-view of a personified carpet, our protagonist tracks down the carpet’s history: it once hid a young girl escaping a forced marriage. In “The Photograph (1889),” the protagonist unearths the story of a secret second wife in her family, a courtesan (who herself did not know she was one until later). The emotional and thematic resonance of the closing story, “The Photograph (1889),” mirroring the first two is effectual. While the prior generations could not change the ending of their stories, the ones after can uncover these stories and change their present trajectories. Intergenerational ties are not only reserved for human relationships in Sheikh’s stories, but also for object-human relationships, an exploration which opened me to another side of displacement: the symbolic, emotional, and practical roles that objects play in the shifts one may experience in their sense of belonging, memories, and selfhood.
This collection challenges expectations. The contrast of multiple worlds and realities across stories adds to this effect. While the protagonist in the first half idealizes aspects of the West — the learning of English, her travel overseas to broader horizons, the critique of local cultural customs without much understanding of their history or context — the second half unravels journeys of diasporic characters who prompted me to think about whether a diasporic ‘happily ever after’ could ever exist. In both “The Inheritance” and “The Last Martini,” two male characters who never planned to look back at the land they/their ancestors migrated from, find a renewed connection to it. In “The Australian Woman,” a once gregarious, vibrant woman struggles in the frigid arms of the Canadian winter and her husband, who reduces the cultural dislocation to mental health issues requiring medication.
One of the ways Sheikh thrusts us into the character’s realities is through her poetic prose. Her sentences are often studded with metaphors that create striking imagery. Consider, for example, the protagonist in “Lingering Love,” about a married woman who engages in an affair across continents and over decades:
There was nothing she could say to him. They stood so close together that she wanted to stroke his face, but the enormity of what could not be uttered was like the waters of a vast ocean. No horizon could be seen at this ocean’s edges. Every feeling they evoked in each other hid underneath on their deceptively still faces. It was a valiant love that continued to flourish without contact.
In these few lines, a sharp juxtaposition is sculpted between the façade of calmness and inner turmoil. The emotional landscape is complex. To be able to strike a sense of nobility in transgression (the narrator says “hers was not an open marriage”) is no easy feat. The word choice is specific and the language economical, yet we readers float along in the story’s lack of resolution. Sheikh makes it possible to experience longing in the way her characters do. She also captures the mysterious ways grief may be weaved into the fabric of our lives, stretching us out to various crossroads, alternative possibilities.
Another strength of this collection is the situational irony, which I absolutely devoured with satisfaction. In “Voromar,” a restaurant owner aids illegal refugees that wash up on the shores of Barcelona by giving them jobs at his restaurant and ends up bankrupt (his reservation of judgment of people outweighing his business sense). In “Solitaire,” a woman learns to be in her own company during the COVID-19 pandemic after great efforts, but then thrusts herself into a lake after receiving a diagnosis. With such twists and turns, Sheikh emulates real life on the page, all its contradictions, hypocrisies, and surprises included.
I Left You Behind is full of surprise and depth. The prose is at times direct and restrained and, at other times, dreamlike and romantic, patterning the tides of life. On these waters, where do we come from and where do we go? Do we return? What did we believe we left behind (but perhaps did not, after all)?
— Sumaiya Matin is the author of The Shaytan Bride (Dundurn Press, 2021), living in amiskwacîwâskahikan (also known as Edmonton, Alberta).
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