The Return of Faraz Ali – Aamina Ahmad (2022)

This was a kindle book purchase that I made on a whim, after hearing about the book on the BBC’s Between the Covers programme. I started reading it a day or two later. The Return of Faraz Ali is Aamina Ahmad’s debut novel – and an excellent one at that. There are more layers to this novel than I had initially expected, the premise I saw online making it sound a little like something else. It was such a pleasant surprise that there was so much more to this novel.

Faraz Ali is a police inspector, in late 1960’s Pakistan. In 1968, Faraz has been dispatched to a police station in Lahore’s red light district tasked with whitewashing the murder of a young girl. The child has been killed by a man of great power, though no one seems to know who. Faraz must make it all go away. The man responsible for Faraz’s new assignment is Wajid, Faraz’s biological father.

“He waited for his mother and his sister, who had followed them downstairs, to wave good-bye, but they didn’t. His mother went back inside the kotha and called for Rozina to follow her. She didn’t watch as he disappeared around the corner. He knew then they would not bring him back, just as he knew his amma’s sorrow had not made her powerful. It had not, he realized, made her remarkable in any way at all.”

Unknown to anyone in his life, Faraz was born into the Mahalla, the red light district of Lahore. He began his life growing up alongside his older sister, living with their mother, one of the district’s courtesans within a tradition where a mother would raise her daughters to follow in her footsteps – and her sons would grow up to act as pimps. Wajid had initially left his son to grow up in the Mahalla with the woman who he had had a secret relationship with – only later he stole him back. Ripping the young boy from his mother and sister and everything he knew, and giving him into the care of relatives.

Faraz, has his own family now, married to the woman he chose, a woman who married him because he was the sensible choice, they have a baby daughter. His new status as a family man and father, making him question his past, and wonder about this mother and sister – he has virtually no memory of his early life – a few images remain, haunting him. Now he is back, and he can’t stop himself looking for the family he lost.

“…since the arrival of his daughter, Faraz had thought constantly of going back. Nazia was of him now; who else was? He longed for the family he scarcely remembered, his mother and sister, to know Nazia, who ought to be known, and to understand the legacy—however poor—he’d given her.”

The Mohalla comes to life in Ahmad’s descriptions of it and the lives of the people who live here, she doesn’t sugar coat it – this is very much the short straw of life. This is a period of political upheaval – there is plenty of talk of riots and elections, corruption and power. Yet the lives of the women in Lahore’s red light district continue as they have for generations. Women are exploited and tossed aside here – their lives have little value – except perhaps to one another.

“When they turned into Heera Mandi Bazaar, he scoured the doorways, the open apartment windows above the stores, searching for something—anything—he might recognize, his body stiffening in anticipation. But the bazaar looked familiar only in that it looked like most others in the city. He tried to temper his disappointment; he’d always known he’d need another way to find his people—his memories, which were vague, fragments at best, wouldn’t lead him to them. They passed a line of shops that sold handmade instruments, dholkis, tablas, sitars, and then a stretch of function rooms where audiences came for dance, song, and, Faraz knew, the other things you could buy here.”

Faraz is not happy with his assignment, he doesn’t want the man who killed that young girl to get away with it, he looks into the eyes of the girl’s mother and see her pain. He understands the loss suffered by the girl’s mother and brother; he recognises her as a person. However, he quickly comes to see he is fairly powerless. His actions make some of his new colleagues suspicious, he knows he doesn’t have much time, so quickly begins making rather more enquiries than anyone is expecting him to. A visit to his father Wajid, at his comfortable home, where Wajid’s wife and Faraz’s half siblings live in some luxury underlines further, how little he can actually do. Wajid is not ready for Faraz to disobey orders.

Meanwhile Faraz’s mother Firdous is still in the Mohalla, she is bringing up her grandchild as her own daughter. Faraz’s sister Rozina has made it out of the Mohalla – her beauty and talent allowing her to raise her status to that of a minor celebrity. Her daughter Mina is growing up with Firdous, she only knows Rozina as her sister. Only, age is starting to catch up with Rozina, the married man who pays for her lifestyle, is already looking elsewhere – and Rozina knows it’s only a matter of time until she is back where she started in the Mohalla.

Having seriously angered Wajid, and asked too many of the wrong questions, Faraz is sent to Dacca –in what at this time was still called East Pakistan. The political backdrop to this novel is fascinating, the dictatorship of Ayub, and the rise of Bhutto as well as the start of Bangladesh’s independence all come into play. Ahmad doesn’t over explain things – which I am always glad of – she trusts in her reader’s intelligence (and Google) and so there are no awkward explanations of cultural terms, swear words or political figures shoe-horned in. Throughout the novel are little flashbacks to Eton educated Wajid’s time as a POW during the Second World War in the desert of North Africa – where he talks of his baby son for the first time. Years later, that son will also find himself a POW during the struggle for Bangladesh’s independence.

The Return of Faraz Ali is such a good debut novel – deeply poignant, in its exploration of what family means. It spans several years and takes us from Lahore to Dacca to London and back. A beautiful novel of love, identity and loss – and how we can’t help but carry those things with us.