THE LONG WAY HOME
This coming-of-age novel asks some big questions and arrives at a few honest answers
W“When two persons wish to come together, there is always a way.” The final proclamation of Irshad Abdulkadir’s Prodigal, captures a leitmotif of the whole novel, that of a voyage full of hope and courage, which nevertheless (in the silence that follows the bold utterance), fills with sudden despair. For to be the ‘prodigal’ only raises expectations, but to be the prodigal who cannot find his way home, is tragic indeed.
This is a bildungsroman whose protagonist, Akbar Ali Samandar, is a young man seemingly blessed in every way. He is born to privilege, the son of a chief justice, living in Karachi’s Civil Lines.
He is handsome and brilliant, receiving repeated offers to study at Cambridge. And not only man but God too appears to favour Akbar, with ecstatic episodes and an abiding awareness of His divinity. But the surfeit of goods presents difficult choices. Following, at first, the godly vocation, the young man rejects Cambridge and plunges into Islamic studies in Taliban-dominated northwest Pakistan. Should he, then, become an imam at the Beyt-as-Salah mosque? Yet despite the mosque’s veneer of tolerance, there is extremism afoot and zealots desiring to groom him. Meanwhile, Akbar indulges another gift, for business; setting up a profitable scheme to produce and sell honey. And besides, quite naturally, there is a young woman who attracts him, and having fought for her and married her, the vistas of domestic bliss now beckon too.
Such is Akbar’s tangle, and by the time catastrophe arrives to cut through it, the dilemmas seem to have taken root in his heart. What does it mean for the individual to serve God? Are ecstatic experiences a proof and a practice of faith? Does a passionate faith call for violence? Ought one, rather, to serve the poorest and the most neglected? Or to study and be celebrated as an enlightened and tolerant scholar?
Prodigal depicts a search for reconciliation, that all these paths may somehow come together in the life of a man. At the end of the book, though the plot has suffered gawdy drama, the search is not over. But with a narrative that tosses and turns, losing its grip but staying honest, Abdulkadir succeeds in revealing something vital about that uncertain, human process, which we call (in our wishfulness) ‘coming-of-age’.