I recently had the pleasure of reading Rehman Anwer’s Breaking Silences. The first time I saw him was at Kinnaird College for Women, where he had come to speak about his first book, Fundamentals of Sufism.
Anwer was born and raised in Lahore. He completed his degree in human rights at Kingston University, London, and has since continued to work as a scholar, writer and activist. His interests include supporting and serving in human rightscampaigns. Currently, he is a public servant, focusing on promoting community cohesion and tackling hate crime.
I first learnt about his novella Breaking Silences after posting a reflection on the launch event of his previous book on my Instagram page. Later, I came across a copy of the new work at The Last Word in Lahore, and immediately felt a strong desire to read it. Eventually, I managed to get hold of a copy. It is a slim volume with an intriguing cover image shot by Umar Riaz, the film director and photographer.
The content is intense;the narrative unfolds with a sense of intimacy and urgency. I hadn’t expected to be so deeply immersed in a story so precise in its nature, until I reached the end with a lingering heaviness in my chest. It felt like a microcosm of unspeakable lived experiences: silences, goodbyes, emotional turbulence and a journey along an endless road that offers no closure. Every page was charged with an unnamed yet deeply familiar agony.
Although I was reading the text in English, in my mind, it seemed to transform itself into the rhythms and idioms of Urdu. The sentences carried a familiar cadence, as if the author’s English were firmly rooted in our linguistic tradition. It was not merely a translation from another language;the prose echoed the intimacy and expressiveness of Urdu storytelling, reminding me that English, in the hands of a Pakistani writeris an English shaped by cultural memory, emotion and inherited rhythm.
Breaking Silences, for me, is about living, breathing and haunting memories, about an ache that has no resolution; a grief that sits unstirred for so long that it turns into a tomb of ashes. The experiences of its characters felt tangible. It was as if they were crawling beneath the skin until the reader was compelled to confront them.
The prose seems to echo the intimacy and expressiveness of Urdu storytelling.
The book explores the transience of life, experience and relationships, with subtle strains of Sufism woven throughout. It is a kind of Sufismthat feels as though it is fading, dissolving even as it imbues the text with a quiet absurdity. It is almost as if the writer is speaking aloud to a strangely evasive void, using poetic diction to reach it.
Na hua keh mar mitain hum – Na hua keh jee uthain hum
[Neither do we die and vanish, nor do we live life to the fullest]
– Faiz Ahmad Faiz
Rehman critiques the urbanisation of Lahore like an eco-critic. He draws attention to how infrastructure development has led to greater concretisation, disrupting the city’s organic rhythm of life. This transformation, he suggests, goes hand in hand with rising materialism and a gradual erosion of humanity and warmth among its residents. At several points, the writer reflects on the changes to Lahore’s landscape, as if building towards an ode to the city, an attempt to hold within words all that Lahore once was, what it has become and what it could never be.
“I miss the old Lahore, its secrets and mysteries, and most of all, the old us…” (15)
Rehman’s work is accessible to a wide range of readers through its precision, simple diction and realistic setting. Divided into five chapters, the novella’s most captivating feature, for me, is the writer’s use of apostrophe, his conversations with dead writers and philosophers, as a way of extending and engaging with their legacy. Refreshingly, the book is not a clichéd romantic tragedy; instead, it carries a gentle touch of humour. Inter-textual references allowthe writer to summon multiple witnesses to the whitewashing of his characters’ anguish. It made me wonder how many of those we love, or claim to love, are lost in the effort to protect our self-esteem and feed our irreconcilable prejudices.
Breaking Silences
Author: Rehman Anwer
Publisher: Broken Leg
Publications, 2025
Pages: 50
Price: Rs2,500
(Hardback)
The reviewer ispursuing apost-graduatedegree in education at theUniversity of Sussex