The Scatter Here is Too Great by Bilal Tanweer: book review

The Scatter Hereis Too Great (2013) is set in Karachi – on a day of a bomb blast at a train station – Cantt Station.

This is a book of multiple narrators. Tanweer commences with a young boy narrator, whose parents take him out of school due to his fighting and anger. His father, who loses his job in an office, where they print children’s books, teaches his son at home. One day they take the bus to the sea.

The bus is full of college boys. The college boys harass Comrade Sukhanza, an old Soviet poet, until he gets off at his intended stop at Cantt Station, minutes before the bomb blast. Another narrator is a person on the bus with a sketchpad. Another is a youth who takes his mother’s car to drive his girlfriend, Sapna, to the sea for a quick tryst. As he passes the bus, he sees his grandfather, Comrade Sukhanza, get off. When the blast occurs blood splatters on the rear windscreen of his car. The poet Sukhanza’s son lives in an apartment near the Cantt Station. Should he go downstairs to try to help after the blast?

Another narrator is a college boy with his friend, Sadeq. They like spending time at the sea. Sadeq is also a narrator. He has a girlfriend Asma. He works for the Chief Security Services firm in the car recovery business. On this day he is looking for a car with the number plate 2219. He is near Cantt Station when the blast occurs, flipping the car ahead of him.

Yet another narrator is the brother of Akbar the ambulance driver on duty at the time of the blast. Akbar is about to be married in three days, and it was his last day of job duty. What he saw on the day changes his life. His brother describes Akbar’s post-traumatic stress after the event. A journalist is the last narrator, assessing the scene after the blast. His father was a writer of children’s stories.

The title of the book refers to a bullet hole in a car windscreen – “the hole at the centre becomes the eye” – and the scatter of the cracked glass radiating outwards from the centre. This analogy may confuse readers as the blast is not linked to an actual bullet, but is used to denote the blast affecting people’s lives in different, fragmented ways.

Each of the characters’s lives converges at a point in time, the blast (the centre of the eye), but each has their own life and story. In each narration it takes time to pinpoint who the narrator is and their connection to others, because time and location are often confused and confusing. Trying to place where everyone is at the time of the blast – i.e. in the bus, on the street, in a passing car, etc. can get quite difficult. I think this aspect is not effectively accomplished in the novel. Once I took the time to attempt to grasp the scatter, time, and narrator concept, I still needed to return to prior narratives in order to cement the linkages and connections together. Once that was done, the novel took a deeper and more emotive understanding, and its intention became clearer. Reading it while in Karachi, as I did, added to my understanding.