Author: Uzma Aslam Khan
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 2003
Language: English
Pages: 448
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0143029851
Description
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
Contents
Prologue Death
PART ONE
DIA
Detour May 1992
DAANISH
Toward Karachi
High Volume October 1989
Choice January 1990
Toward Anu May 1992
Recess April 1990
Arrival May 1992
The Order of Things
ANU
Guipure dreams
Argonaut
Girls May 1992
Shameful Behavior
DIA
More Apologies
Numbers
Life at the Farm
Choice
SALAAMAT
Sea Space March 1984
Look, But With Love April-June 1984
The Ajnabi July-December 1984
In the Picture May 1985
DAANISH
The Gag Order September 1990
Revisions June 1992
There, Of Course!
Every Thirty Seconds January 1991
Khurram’s Counsel June 1992
The Rainbow Parade
The Find
DIA
Metamorphosis
Not Clear at All
Inam Gul for Ever
Examination
Assembling
PART TWO
SALAAMAT
Here July 1992
The Bus June 1986- February 1987
Blue March 1987
The Fire
Ashes
Brother and Sister April 1987
The Witness
ANU
The Doctor Looking In July 1992
The Clue
The Doctor Looking Out
DIA
Turmoil and Bliss
Rain
The Blending of the Ways
Darkness
DAANISH
News August 1992
Ancestry May-October 1991
Rooms August 1992
Thirst
The Authorities
Open-ended
SALAAMAT
Schoolboys May 1987
Discipline June 1987
Fate
The Highway
Remains August 1992
Fatah’s Law
A Visitor
RIFFAT
A Usual Day
Awakening April-May 1968
Her Job, His Fight June 1968
Parting July 1968-July 1972
What Sumbul Says August 1992
DIA
Fourth Life
Epilogue Birth