Trespassing
by Uzma Aslam Khan

(ISBN:0-14-302985-1 ~ Pub Year: 2003 ~ Pages:448 ~ Binding: Paperback ~ Publisher: Penguin)

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Trespassing is intricately and delicately made. Its characters – and their destinies-are utterly clear before us and the reader is driven hurriedly through the book seeking shelter-for the characters they have come to love as much as for themselves.

Dia is the daughter of a silk farmer, Riffat-an innovative, decisive entrepreneur. Like her mother, Dia seems at first sight spirited and resourceful. She seems free. But freedom has its own borders, patrolled by the covetous and the zealous, and there are those who yearn to jump the fence.

Then Daanish comes back to Karachi for his father’s funeral, all the way from Amreeka, a land where there are plenty of rules but few restrictions. When Dia and Dannish meet, they chafe against all the formalities. It is left to a handful of silkworms, fattened on mulberry leaves and slopped inside a friend’s dupatta, to rupture the fragile peace and plans of both their houses, to make the space-noisy like the sea in a shell-in which Dia and Daanish can crate something new, all over again. Meanwhile, around them, new ways drive out old, as new hatreds are manufactured and old ones revived, and new rules are posted and then broken.

Standing in a room with eight thousand tiny creatures, witnessing them perform a dance that few humans even knew occurred; this was life. Everywhere she looked, each caterpillar nosed the air like a wand and out passed silk. They sashayed to the left and swiveled to the right. They bobbed and undulated, dotting the air in figure-eights. They worked ceaselessly for three days and nights, with material entirely of their own, and with nothing to orchestrate them besides their own internal clock. Each, a perfectly self-contained unit of life. When Dia watched one spin, she came closer to understanding the will of God than at any other time.

REVIEW

Cocoons are not the only things that explode in this novel. The silken prose emphasizes the conflict between the tender subject and a world (in this case Pakistan) where violence of every sort has become institutionalized. It is a self-confident novel and marks the emergence of a new generation of Pakistani novelists unencumbered by the icons or the ideology of a wretched state. –Tariq Ali


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