OTHER NAMES FOR LOVE: A Novel
by Taymour Soomro
Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 256 pages. $26.
ON FIRST IMPRESSION, Other Names for Love appears to be yet another novel in which a young gay boy—in this case, a British Pakistani one—grows up misunderstood and has a difficult relationship with his old-school father. And yet, this impression rapidly shifts when, in chapter two, the novel begins to tell things from the father’s point of view. Right away the novel reveals itself to be far more interesting than expected.
When the novel opens, Fahad is being dragged back to the Pakistani village where his father, Rafik, grew up and holds a position of power in the government. This desire to have Fahad spend a summer in the village is an attempt by his father to “toughen him up.” To Fahad, who has spent a great deal of time in London, his father is “a cannonball, an avalanche, something giant crashing through the jungle,” and the village is the most backwater of places. Even Karachi would be preferable, he thinks. Yet there seems to be no way of escaping his father, whose voice and influence seep through even the walls of the train they’re journeying on together.
To Rafik, as we begin to see in chapter two, his son seems disconnected from everything that made Rafik who he is—in essence, everything to do with Pakistan itself. Though Rafik is undeniably a force of nature—at times brutally so, especially to the servants and locals of the village—he emerges as a product of his times, someone who survived by becoming hard, and he doesn’t want to see his son trampled by the world around him. This is not to minimize his ultimate narcissism; and yet, curiously—perhaps because he is such a larger-than-life figure, and so vividly portrayed—he grows on us by-and-by, almost to the point of upstaging our sympathies for Fahad.
On the other hand, over the course of the novel Fahad is shown to be someone who has had a hard time seeing himself clearly. With one foot in Pakistan and another in London, he’s also dealing with a newly emergent sexuality that separates him from the surrounding community—not only in Pakistan, but also in London. During his summer in the village, he meets a local boy, Ali, and the sexual encounter they share will rock Fahad’s world from that point forward. His fears, however, may be more imagined than real. In the end his mother acknowledges his sexuality with the words: “You bring who you want. If you have a friend, someone you live with, bring him. What do we care? You think it is us, looking over your shoulder, that it is us shaking our heads at the things you do.”
The father could easily have come off as a caricature or even a monster. The fact that Rafik emerges as a sympathetic character is a testament to Soomro’s skill as a writer. Proceeding in terse, colorful, fragmentary bursts, Soomro’s prose, especially the dialogue, advances the story economically and compellingly. It also succeeds in creating wonderfully colorful and full-blooded characters. The somewhat clipped, occasionally disorienting style reaches its zenith when Fahad receives the news that his father has died: “A bus stopped, an alarm sounded, and a platform extended from beneath its doors like a tongue. It was absurd and at once everything was absurd: the tourists huddling by the gates to the museum, a pair of pigeons pecking at a plastic bag, an elderly man pushing an empty pram diagonally across the road despite the oncoming traffic. How grey it was, how grey, as if there were no such thing as sun.”
In the end, Other Names is about far more than shifting attitudes about homosexuality or a troubled father-son relationship. It’s about what constitutes one’s identity. What does it mean to be Pakistani or British? To be a son? To be a gay man? In trying to make Fahad a carbon copy of himself, Rafik is concerned that the old ways—in which he used his power to shape the country around him—will die, along with the memory of him. He continually boasts that everything in his village was jungle before he transformed it into profitable farmland. But, as the country moves on from that agricultural model, what exactly does that achievement amount to? What does the history of one man or that of an entire country matter? This book explores both questions.
Dale Boyer’s newest volume of selected poems, Columbus in the New World, is now available.
