Memory, Violence, And Disgust: Khalid Jawed's Tale Of Life And Loss

Khalid Jawed welcomes us into a world of deception with his award winning novel Paradise of Food. The title of the book in Urdu (Nemat Khana) forebodes the unpalatable aspects of food waiting us. The microcosm of kitchen is not an unadulterated fantasy – protected from the harsh realities of the world, where food breeds loves and companionship – it is a literal battleground. This sordid tale is replete with existential questions, magical realism and surprisingly filled with bitter and ironic humor. His caustic vision unearths the bygone time, a dirge to the joint family of the past. Nemat Khana unearths violence both in our increasingly communal society and in the inner world of the bawarchi khana.

The anti-romantic proclivities of the author are channeled through Guddu Miyan, whose disdain for the world is bred through a series of violent encounters. The innocent child loses his innocence even before stepping into adulthood. His crimes obscured from everyone breed an unrelenting guilt changing the course of his life. The narrator repeats certain aphorism throughout the novel. The novel can be seen as making a case for both Guddu Miyan and the distinct philosophy of its narrator. Very early in the book the author proclaims, “The kitchen is a dangerous place”. But the reader does not have to take these declarations at their face value or assume that they are meant to invoke shock. The reader relishes in antagonisms and hypocrisies of daily life uncovered by the writer. 

He writes, “Has anyone given serious thought to the fact that almost all the things in the kitchen have concealed within them the ability to turn into a weapon? Never mind if it is the knife used to cut vegetables, or the girdle, the iron tong, the blowing pipe, the burning block of wood, the lit-up chulha with the crackling, raging fire burning within it, the stone slab meant to grind spices, red chilli powder or the sizzling ash or simple kerosene. No portion of the house had such things in such a large quantity. To the extent that the gun, hanging suspended on a nail on the walls of the outer hall, appeared insignificant and weak.” 

Khalid Jawed subverts the mythology surrounding the kitchen, it becomes a battlefield. But, the author goes beyond the aesthetic appeal of disruption of daily life, he makes his case. By the end of the novel, the reader is also convinced that the kitchen is indeed a dangerous place.  

The action of the book is confined to the second part of the book titled Noise. Violence drives the action of the book. After the second part is over, the writer quietly ushers us into a dream like reverie, where the narrator (Guddu Miyan) ruminates over his past. The aftermath of violence breeds stagnation, a lull in which the laws of time hold no relevance. The writers takes many liberties with the form. Guddu Miyan is a classical unreliable narrator, but that is not enough for the writer. He gives us a narrator in search of his punishment, who oscillates between severe depersonalisation and dissociation. The deranged narrator lends the story a menacing quality; the reader is constantly apprehensive as Guddu Miyan talks to us about his suppressed anger. We know he is capable of violence. This makes it impossible to keep the book down even during his long stretched monologues – imbued with a pervasive sense of loss and regret – our gaze hurriedly runs to the next sentence as the unpredictable narrator keeps us on our toes.

Khalid Jawed is an acute observer of daily life bringing to light the unseen and unpalatable aspects of our daily lives. The reader laments at this knowledge, for what the narrator has shown us cannot be unseen. He talks about the disgusting, the visceral and the repulsive, it is easy to assume that the writer has morbid outlook towards the world. But with penetrative gaze he transcends the mere description of the disgusting, making his fiction symbolic of the extensive inner rot of our daily lives. Khalid Jawed does not adopt a moralistic tone, his narrator is an imperfect observer recording the sordid life around him:

“On many occasions I witnessed important men, of some station, with venerable beards clean their white beards covered in gravy and spices, use pieces of roti as napkins. Rotis were made use of to wipe hands, mouths, lips, chins and the watery discharge from nostrils on account of eating spicy hot food, They served as first-class handkerchiefs that cost nothing to wipe beards wet with gravy.”

Elena Ferrante says in her Paris Review Interview, “Literature that indulges the tastes of the reader is a degraded literature. My goal is to disappoint the usual expectations and inspire new ones.” Khalid Jawed is a serious proponent of this vision which  make him an outstanding representative of the New paradigm in Urdu Literature. The book is tethered on the themes of food, lust and loss, yet the aesthetics of beauty and pleasure do not impinge on the narrative. Sharankumar Limbale in his book “Towards and Aesthetic of Dalit Literature” demands a separate criterion for the evaluation of Dalit Literature. Similarly, to understand Jawed we need to shift our gaze so we can both locate him in Urdu tradition and appreciate his disruption of the tradition.

His book is replete with ugly women whose viciousness negates the roles of nourishment attached to the feminine. The shy, curvaceous and voluptuous beloved of the Urdu poetry is replaced by the lustful skinny women whose sexual appetite both repulses the narrator and attracts him at the same time. The things we hate are often the things we desire and the thrill hidden in the repugnant escalates the desire. It is important to note that in Khalid Jawed’s universe, lust is not just a trope for titillation. Nothing transcends the monotony and cruelty of daily live, the thrill of sex wears off, and daily life rears its ugly head corrupting even the tender moments of love making.  

The writer has an interesting way of describing his eclectic influences through his philosophy of memory. He talks about reading Turgenev, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy during his younger days. In an interview with Baran Farooqi, his translator, at Jaipur Literary Fest, the author says, “Memories keep cooking which later lead to a creative boiling point, like a pinching cataract in the eye that matures”. This highlights an unconscious creative ferment in the writers mind and his unique treatment of memory. The writers preoccupation with memory lends the book a distinctive philosophy. 

He writes in the book, “At this point it should become clear that my memories are not merely memories. They also include the memories of those people who are not there in this world any longer, but through whose eyes I saw something or through whose tongues I heard something.” 

Foregoing the anxiety of influence, the writer hints us towards the collective unconscious and a singular memory. This helps the author to shift seamlessly from the physical plane to the supernatural plane. The books opens in the supernatural plane and ends in the same place. Khalid Jawed infuses the book with a unique poetic rhythm. Thus, the novel hangs suspended in between noise and silence, and strange cyclic patterns hiding in the structure of the novel can only be understood in light of the novelist's philosophy of fiction. The philosophy couched inside the dream like reverie is indeed a complex one but Khalid Jawed is not the one to simplify things. His narrators blasts the modern reader, “Art had never seen worse times and such superficial and shallow readers had never existed before. One had to place everything before them on a platter. They had become habituated to even chocolate being offered to them without a wrapper.”

Additionally, Khalid Jawed brilliantly uses his mad narrator in a Conradian fashion to disseminate his philosophy. It is sometimes difficult to follow his argument. Khalid Jawed is aware of these complexities, in the book Guddu Miyan’s son accuses him, “For God’s sake, we don’t want to listen to all this, everything you say is incoherent nor is there any connection of cause and effect in your exposition.’ The monologues look like rants of a mad person, but when positioned against the narrators life the gibberish becomes prophetic and coherent. Guddu Miyan’s departure from sanity is the only way he can critique the ‘normalcy’ of our society, the absurdity of crime and punishment and unearth the violence hidden in our daily lives. Khalid Jawed’s fiction uncovers the futility of our moral codes and the ambiguous nature of our ‘truths’. Unlike Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, Guddu Miyan after committing his crime is in search of his punishment, he is the sole arbitrator of his actions, his only witness a cockroach. In his insanity he is seeking answers to the questions no one can answer.

Rutba Iqbal is a writer based in Delhi. She writes on books, art, culture, and movies.