Another Gulmohar Tree (2009) is a tale
within a tale – or rather, the intertwining of fable with fiction. Hussein
commences in poetic fashion with three Pakistan fables in the first chapter, Usman’s
Song. Usman is a young Pakistani boy guarding his family’s fields, sheltering
from the heat under a gulmohar tree “flowerless but green.” He shares his
meagre food with a little green frog that perched on his knee. The heat makes
him sleepy and he dreams of the tree’s golden flowers falling on him. Two
simultaneous fables are interwoven within Usman’s Song. One is of a deer
wandering into Rokeya’s garden – she shelters from the rain under a gulmohar
tree. She sees a frog and hears the distant echo of a young boy singing. Her
mother warns her not to make a pet of a wild animal. The last fable is of a
farmer’s three children who woke a sleeping crocodile. They had to keep a
promise to the crocodile to stay safe. Home was far away where the boundary was
marked by a gulmohar tree.
The gulmohar tree is the name of the
tree in India, Nepal and Pakistan – for Australians it is known as the flame
tree (Delonix regia), and for others
it is the royal Poinciana or the flamboyant tree. With large red (and yellow
variety) flowers, when in bloom, the tree is strikingly beautiful.
The second, narrative chapter, Another
Gulmohar Tree, describes Usman Ali Khan, a 19-year-old newly-married writer on
a year’s secondment from Karachi to the foreign desk of The Daily Telegraph in London in 1950. Lydia Javashvili is a
30-year-old illustrator, the daughter of a half-Georgian émigré and a Catholic
Scottish mother, awaiting finalization of her divorce. Usman and Lydia meet at
a socialist seminar. There was no romance, only a promise to “keep in touch.”
Two years later, on an impulsive whim,
Lydia travels by boat to Karachi to visit Usman. Usman’s wife had died, and he
proposed to Lydia. At the “brief, unsentimental wedding ceremony” Lydia “in
perfectly comprehensible Urdu, said, I, Rokeya, accept.” Usman couldn’t conceal
his surprise at her Urdu, her new name, and “without asking” her conversion to
Islam. Thus their life in Pakistan begins. Three children later, and with her
at work, and Usman’s change from newspapers to writing stories, Rokeya too
ventures from illustrating children’s stories to writing her own novel. This
changes everything for Usman. “At night, he was again plagued by those odd
dreams that had made him shake himself awake in his youth: he was climbing a
ladder to the sky which ended in an empty space … and was left dangling in
mid-air.”
He took to sleeping on a pallet on the
veranda. “Companionship and inspiration, not dependency and duty, were what he wanted.”
He leafed through Rokeya’s sketch book which she left on the veranda, “open and
fluttering in the morning breeze,” and sees “her bright impressions” of their
garden’s gulmohar tree in full flower. He walks barefoot towards it. It was not
in flower. What is she noticing that he is not?
Gently written, it is a short novel of
love that changes over time, beginning not from an abundance of passion and
excitement, but gradually warming and evolving with its own memories of
togetherness. Hussein explores togetherness as a couple with individual dreams
and goals, and their convergence or divergence – layered with the love of two
people from two different cultures, one who sacrificed all to live with the
person she couldn’t forget, and the other coming to terms with the person he
met with the person she’d become.
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