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Another Gulmohar Tree by Aamer Hussein: book review





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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