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.
Comments
Post a Comment