(Review of Sand Storms, Summer Rains, a novel written by Asha Iyer Kumar, Published by: Leadstart Publishing – Indian Book Publisher)
The most common dream of young men from Kerala is about going abroad, and if he happens to be a middle class wage earner, his eyes are more often than not set on the deserts of the Arabian lands. Enamoured of the riches he would reap on landing in the Gulf States, he goes the whole nine yards to make his dream come true, at whatever cost. It is a story or a reality that we have seen happening many times over, as residents of this treasure land.
It is in this much wonted background of desires and dreams of immigrants to the Gulf that Indian expat writer, Asha Iyer Kumar has set her debut novel, Sand Storms, Summer Rains.
The novel maps the lives of two men – Achu and Mustafa – who leave their villages in Kerala with the aim of earning wealth in the Gulf. The reasons for their money chase are different – while Achu is aiming for sheer affluence in his life, Mustafa is compelled by circumstances in the family to go the desert land. They are men with dissimilar characters – Mustafa, wise and realistic and Achu, ambitious and impulsive – travelling the same road. They reach the Arabian shores, only to find life hand out a raw deal that they had least expected. Their future is fraught with events that eventually force them to return, one earlier than the other. Their journey finally ends where it must – back in their villages. Just as their reasons to go to the Gulf are different, their reasons to return are also different.
Achu gains wealth at the cost of all else in his life and returns home to find life hitting a dead end, while Mustafa gives up his quest for wealth early, to seek peace and happiness with his family.
Through parallel narratives, the novel straddles the two worlds of Achu and Mustafa, who although are the protag- onists, make only part of the narrative. Much of what happens in the novel is wrested from the lives of those they have left behind in their homes. As a result, the Gulf only serves as a gentle, distant background, with not much of a reality sketch from these parts, which keeps the novel from becoming a typi- cal gulf-oriented documentary on the lives of workers here.
The author draws vivid sketches of their lives, mostly contained within the boundaries of their families and traces their rites of passage as they glide from the status of ordinary but educated villagers in Kerala to Gulfees. The char- acters are not larger than life, yet they strike a chord with their familiarity. They surprise us with their dissimilarity
and uniqueness of nature, like Achu’s indomitable wife, Devaki, or Saira, the naïve consort of Mustafa. The events in their lives, although at times severe, serve as experiences that are not al- together unknown or unheard of in such families where the men spend long years away from home. There is honesty in the way the characters render themselves to the hap- penings in their lives of which they have no control, and many of the instances and incidents in the novel are so evocative that it is difficult not to be touched.
The story may not be completely new for those of us living in the Middle East, but the manner in which it is told brings fresh in- sight into the lives of those men and their families who have who have given up all that they have in order to reach a much-vaunted position in life. The crises that arise due to conflicts between parents and progeny, between spouses, between siblings are all deftly drawn with the use count- less similes and sometimes, force- ful use of word play.
Sand Storms, Summer Rains, as the title suggests, looks at two different worlds, one swept by the shamaal in the desert land and the other washed by the monsoon in the home coun- try, both coming forth as poignant symbols of immigrant life in the Gulf.
The book will soon be available in stores in Oman, but can currently be bought on www.amazon.com
Book reviewed by
Rachel Mary Abraham
Oman Vistas August, 2009
