Review: 'The Return of Faraz Ali,' by Aamina Ahmad

Partway through "The Return of Faraz Ali," Faraz, a married police inspector investigating the murder of a 15-year-old dancing girl named Sonia in the red light district of Lahore, Pakistan, finds himself in a sexual encounter with the deceased girl's mother. The latter is a character you don't especially like: She's foul-mouthed and distraught — as much over the death of her child as the loss of future income.

It's an unsettling scene of lovemaking, but one that creates a shock of empathy. Author Aamina Ahmad uses it to make us see the raw humanity of her characters: venal but also lonely, guilt-ridden and suffering.

Set mostly in 1968 in Shahi Mohalla, as Lahore's red light district is called, the novel is a family saga centered on the area's age-old tradition of hereditary prostitution. The sex workers here are artists: trained singers and dancers who have to be wooed with gifts. But for all practical purposes, they are society's trash. Devoid of didacticism or sentimentality, the novel asks what it means to be born into the trade.

At its center are two characters wrestling with their destinies. Faraz was 5 when his mother, Firdous, gave him up so that he could have a decent life outside of Shahi Mohalla. Years later, thanks to his high-born and influential father, Wajid Sultan, he is a police inspector. But he is scarred and full of self-loathing. As an illegitimate son, he cannot claim Wajid's title, and his outwardly respectable life is a sham.

Meanwhile, Rozina, Firdous' daughter from another relationship, has escaped Shahi Mohalla by becoming mistress to a businessman. But now that she is older, she realizes that a return to prostitution is imminent. Like Faraz, she is a prisoner of her birth. Stigmatized by her society, she has few options. Yet it's incumbent upon her to earn money if she's to keep her young daughter, Mina, from the flesh trade.

As the title indicates, the novel is primarily about Faraz. But Rozina is its most exuberant creation. Her indomitable spirit — despite the degradations of the profession, her failings as a mother, her bold assertion of desire and struggle for respect — give the novel its most vibrant humanity.

The novel is also a shrewd dissection of marriage in Pakistani society in its time period. Ahmad tackles the way marriage — arranged by parents for status — can be a loveless match. But it is also the means of survival for women from respectable families.

Ahmad's real gift is in the specificity of detail. Each chapter is a feat of style, steeped in the sights, sounds and poetry of Pakistan and South Asia.

Yet the beauty of the prose also blots out the plot. The narrative energy flags. The chapters sometimes feel bloated. Still, the distinctiveness of the novel shines in its exquisite prose and the author's capacious vision. The novel's final impression transcends suffering in a note of survival, even triumph.

Sharmila Mukherjee is a lecturer in English at the University of Washington, Seattle.

The Return of Faraz Ali
By: Aamina Ahmad.
Publisher: Riverhead, 352 pages, $27.