Heeding the signs in quest for love
• Multifaceted novel set in Durban examines love’s different forms and how broken lives can be made whole
Do we see the signs around us, asks Durban-based writer Shubnum Khan in her new book, The Lost Love of Akbar Manzil, and are we brave enough to follow the path they indicate?
It’s one of many themes in an accomplished novel that blends four genres — coming-of-age, historical fiction, romance and thriller. With a dollop of fantasy and some Gothic horror, and a prose style that evokes the languid introspection of Kazuo Ishiguro and Haruki Murakami, the overall result is an enthralling and rewarding read.
Especially so as it has a relatable SA context and fills something of a gap in the SA’s literary landscape, that of Indian writers, particularly female Muslim voices.
The story is set in Durban, and almost entirely within a dilapidated manzil — a mansion or multi-storeyed house — situated on a once-grand hillside estate. The manzil is now a hostel for five established residents: two squabbling old ladies; a former concert pianist; the domestic worker, who is quite comfortable living in a pantry; and the elderly doctor, who seems to be the landlord and carries the weight of the world on his shoulders.
The lost love of the title refers partly to all of these present-day characters, who, attributable to their own agency or through forces beyond their control, have seen their loves — and their love of life — wither. Each carries the burden of their own pain, shame or disappointment.
Recently widowed Bilal and his teenage daughter, Sana, have also just moved in. Sana is acutely introverted. A conjoined twin whose sister died during the operation to separate them, she still feels the presence of her deceased sister’s restless soul, “the remains in her blood or caught in the stitches of her scar”.
Survivor’s guilt presents as haunting visions and her sister’s imaginary voice, a demon sister-spirit, that taunts her. “If you feel so bad you should kill yourself,” it says, an amalgam of teenage angst, parental loss, loneliness and yearning.
The mansion itself harbours secrets that manifest in strange physical problems: pipes that burst, electricity even more erratic than Eskom, inexplicable night noises. “It’s nothing. It’s nothing. It’s nothing,” Sana repeats to herself, afraid of the house’s mysterious sounds and movements. Her father, mourning the loss of his wife and desperate to re-root and settle his own mind, wanting to give Sana a new locus of belonging, almost pleads with her: “You don’t hate it here, right? This could be home?”
But the various hauntedhouse tropes tell us early on that something’s badly amiss. Besides Sana’s sister-demon, there is another supernatural force. A djinn — loosely, an Islamic equivalent of a spirit that can take human form and be angelic or evil — also resides in the manzil. It’s the source of the home’s eeriness, but it appears benign, mournful rather than harmful, and a keeper of the manzil’s history.
Therein lies the main lost love of the title, bound in a second narrative thread and timeline, the 1920s and 1930s story of the manzil’s origin and the family that lived in it.
Akbar Ali Khan is a wealthy young Indian man with a thirst for adventure and a passion for life. His mother arranges a suitable marriage, but that quenches his wanderlust only inasmuch as the newlyweds venture on an East Africa cruise during which he is smitten with Durban.
To his bride Jahanara’s dismay he decides to settle there, investing in a sugar factory and buying the property, which he starts to develop into a wondrous estate — the manzil, quarters for a menagerie of exotic creatures, sculpted gardens and luxury furnishings from around the world to suit his wife’s colonially inspired tastes.
They have two children, and Akbar’s mother comes to live with them, triggering a running feud between wife and motherin-law that sets the tone for discord. This ramps up when Akbar falls in love with one of his factory workers, Meena Begum, whose parents seize the opportunity to marry her into wealth even though she despises the idea and feels nothing for Akbar.
RECKONING
The romance angle of the storyline — love spurned, eventually requited, evolving into true love — is predictable, but not so anything that follows. Treachery is afoot, and the broody, atmospheric novel turns into a tense page-turner.
A reckoning is under way as an awful plot in 1932 reverberates in the present. Sana finds comfort in small, cocooning spaces, but gradually she ventures wider, and as she explores the estate she discovers mammalian bones in the garden, a key to open an abandoned, locked wing in the mansion, artefacts as clues, and dusty diaries. These are signs, Sana realises, of something waiting to be revealed, and she starts to figure out the past.
A battle between good and evil ensues on two planes: the real world and the metaphysical. Its crescendo unleashes a fresh, current-day tragedy, a complex form of revenge best understood on an otherworldly, spiritual level. The fight is essentially between true love and egoistic love, between burdens and freedom, the internal struggle between fearfulness and embracing the world and its challenges.
In these respects it’s the female characters that shine. Though Akbar established the manzil, his adventurousness setting the story in motion, in key respects he is indecisive and weak. Like the other preoccupied or self-absorbed men in the story, he becomes a peripheral figure. And so, strikingly, the female characters are the protagonists, the villains and the heroines.
Khan didn’t conceptualise The Lost Love of Akbar Manzil as a feminist novel, but agrees that it may be interpreted as one: “The main character is a female going on a journey, trying to figure out who she is.
And there are some strong female characters who say what they think, and don’t fit into society’s script. In that sense, yes, it’s feminist.
“It’s also a celebration of oddities. I wanted to explore characters, who are on the edge, who are misfits, somewhat forgotten by society,” Khan explains, acknowledging inspiration from Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.
There’s a tangential element of class and caste conflict in the bitter relationship between
Jahanara and Meena as the two wives. And the servants know their place in 1920-1930 SA, as does domestic worker Pinky in the narrative’s current timeline.
But Khan doesn’t wish to be tied to an onus of explaining SA’s past. “I don’t want apartheid to be the only important thing to being [an SA] fiction writer,” she says, pointing out that the Durban part of the story unfolds almost entirely within the manzil. “It doesn’t really step out into society. I just wanted to tell a story about a particular type of people in the country, their loves and losses and the crazy things that happened in their home.”
Khan, a former media studies lecturer and advertising copywriter, always dreamed of being a full-time novelist. This is her second novel, more than a decade apart, the two interspersed with a collection of travel pieces, memoir and essays under the banner title How I Accidentally Became a Global Stock Photo. “It took such a long time because it took me a long while to get where I am, to be who I am now,” she says.
Did she capture a part of herself in Sana? She responds categorically that the novel isn’t autofiction, but confirms that her travel experiences shaped Akbar’s backstory and the complexities of the various characters in the book.
The 1920s part of the story, she admits, is rooted in her grandfather’s immigration from India. “He would tell me stories of how it was in India, how he came to SA, how there was running water and electricity, things he’d never seen in his village,” she recalls.
It would be a spoiler to reveal whether love triumphs in the novel; not so to mention that there are beautiful twists as well as a form of poetic justice — and a hopeful future for Sana. It feels like there could be a sequel, or a prequel? I ask Khan. “Hmm, you’ve given me something to think about,” she responds, confessing to being slightly stressed about starting the process of her next book and that “it may feel safe to work at something I know already”.
We agree that, perhaps, I’ve given her a sign, then.
TREACHERY IS AFOOT, AND THE BROODY, ATMOSPHERIC NOVEL TURNS INTO A TENSE PAGE-TURNER
KHAN, A FORMER MEDIA STUDIES LECTURER AND ADVERTISING COPYWRITER, DREAMED OF BEING A FULL-TIME NOVELIST