Book Review: BLASPHEMY

Title: Blasphemy

Author: Tehmina Durrani

Publisher: Penguin Books

Pages: 229

My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

 

Pir Sain, the spiritual leader of Muslims in their local community, has died and his household is in grief. But for Heer, his widow, at 38 a grandmother and mother of three daughters and three sons, two of them dead, it is a new beginning. She says, My contract had terminated. A grip had loosened.

Heer was a 15-year-old schoolgirl, crushing on her best friend Chandi’s older brother Ranjha, when the 44-year-old Pir Sain offers to marry her. Heer’s mother, a widow, is thrilled. The alliance will make life smoother for Heer’s younger siblings, 14-year-old brother, Bhai, 13-year-old sister, Chitki, and 9-year-old sister, Nanni.

But marriage is a horror from the very start. A mountain of flesh descends on me is how she describes her wedding night. After her first experience of sex (read: rape), her husband calls her unclean and tells her to bathe and wash her hair. The next morning, he rapes her again, then beats her in full view of the extended family, the servants and the neighbours. He also spews obscene abuses and vile threats.

Her life is confined to the four walls of the haveli, and she tries hard to make her life round like everyone else’s is.

Will Heer ever get out of this hell, this nightmare, alive?

 

Within a few pages, we learn that this supposed man of God is anything but. Violence, sexual, physical and verbal, becomes routine for Heer. As her mother-in-law, Amma Sain, says, “Unintelligent violence makes the culprit resilient, stubborn and fearless.”

The charpai punishment is particularly brutal. But Heer's situation gets worse. Pir Sain is an utterly debauched man, who indulges in incest, paedophilia, and rape. He kills anyone who stands in his way, including his own son. He even pimps his wife out to strangers and films her in the act. And all along, Heer is punished brutally for the smallest of perceived crimes in a household where everyone watches her and is quick to tell tales.

 

It is interesting that the consolation offered to Heer, ‘May Allah give you patience to live a long life without a husband,” is perhaps meant as a curse, but is her first stab at freedom.

 

Death, the most dramatic event in our part of the world, had made them all theatrical.

The wailing became so loud it seemed as though we had lost Allah. Both the above quotes show how the authorial voice feels about authoritarian religion and culture.

I loved the metaphors and the similes. Heer tells herself to take her fears in like a hot green chilli, sharp, sharper, then gone.

She was hanging on like a loose tooth.

Heer describes her life as a beggar’s winter.

There are a few characters, but they leave a mark. There is Guppi, Heer’s oldest daughter, for whose safety Heer makes a terrible choice. There is Yathimri, the orphan girl who seeks to usurp Heer’s position. There is Cheel, who should have hated Pir Sain, but is his most devoted servant.

Pir Sain is evil personified, and yet he is deified by the ignorant and poor community, who imbue with sacredness the bones that Pir Sain has chewed the meat off, the earth he has stepped on, even his spit.

The hypocrisy of the system is seen in these lines. Unanswered prayers were forgotten, answered ones were called miracles. The crowds never thinned.

Reading Blasphemy was not an easy experience. I felt tortured as I read about the horrors that the women were subjected to, especially Heer, and, in time, 12-year-old Guppi and many other girls. We feel the pain of Heer as a mother when she tries to protect her daughter in the only way it seems possible under the circumstances. She feels horrified at what she has put Yathimri through.

As time passes by, the faces of the girls changes, and the sin becomes routine, and Heer, anxious to save her own daughters, becomes complicit in crime and sin. One by one, Pir Sain destroys everything good.  

It would be easy for us who have never had to face such a situation to blame Heer when the guilt should rest solely on Pir Sain. She says, Human beings have a natural reserve of evil and…it only takes circumstances for it to surface. Some people’s circumstances make smaller demands on their dormant evil. Like a case of Stockholm Syndrome, Heer begins to feel threatened by the very girl whose life is hell because of her decision.

Much as I liked the bulk of this novel, I was unconvinced by the speed with which the denouement was brought about. It seemed too pat, too easy. Also, I would have liked to know what happened to Ranjha, how he reacted after Heer’s marriage, his life over the 24-year-period.