I’ll go right ahead and write this down: Khadija
Mastur’s “The Women’s Courtyard” is one of the most satisfying novels I have
ever read. It is elegant, poignant and utterly unputdownable. There is much to
be said about Mastur’s simple, frills and frippery free style of storytelling
and Daisy Rockwell deserves a shout out for doing justice to this manuscript
which has been translated from Urdu (Aangan).
Aliya finds herself securely sealed within the
suffocating confines of her home, relatively safe from the troubles of a world
in turmoil with the final stages of India’s struggle for freedom playing out
and the partition looming ahead. But she is all but cut off from an outside
world with its endless possibility for one who dreams of self – sufficiency,
and left to keep her hopes alive amidst the broken dreams and carnage of
conflicting ideologies evidenced by her extended family.
The protected environment she has grown up in proves
insufficient to the task of shielding her from the trauma of losing her beloved
elder sister Tehmina and dear friend, Kusum to suicide when they invest too
heavily in the possibility of heady love and romance in the otherwise arid
landscape of their lives only to be left utterly devastated. These episodes
leave her with no faith where romance is concerned, especially since she is
also an appalled witness to the marriages of her mother and aunt, to men who
are more wedded to their politics. Aliya is horrified by both the anger and
pettiness of her mother as well as the emotional ruin her aunt is. Yet, with a
wisdom that belies her years, she is filled with compassion, has a reservoir of
good sense and never ceases to care for her tormented loved ones, choosing to
learn from their mistakes while teaching herself to shield herself from the
pain wrought by irredeemably bad judgement.
Interestingly enough in this cloistered space,
reserved for women, men who are related by blood seem to have right of access
and given a surprisingly free hand to romance, stalk, molest or manipulate
their cousins. There is Safdar, who loved Tehmina to death, Shakeel who has
little qualms about stealing from his cousins, and Jameel who refuses to take
no for an answer. Aliya is adamant when it comes to rejecting Jameel’s love for
her, despite a certain physical attraction, fully aware that he has wronged
another cousin Chammi, writes middling poetry, hasn’t distinguished himself in
the professional sphere and is a little too much like the other men in her life
given to sacrificing their women and children on the altar of their politics.
Love triangles are usually tedious affairs but the
prickly one between Aliya, Chammi and Jameel is beautifully realized. The book
is radically ahead of its time in giving us a heroine who adamantly sticks to
her guns when it comes to resisting patriarchy even when enforcers pressure her
with the prospects of love and marriage, which Aliya realizes are both likely
to entrap her more surely than the chains she has been struggling against all
her life. Mastur doesn’t spare the women who enable sexism either. Aliya’s
mother in particular is a gut wrenching example of a gender traitor. A
magnificent book that depicts the bitter battles women fight, far from the
battlefield.
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