he novel under review is Nain Sukh’s latest offering to the growing collection of modern Punjabi fiction. Although it pales in complexity compared to his most polished work to date, MadhoLal Husain, his love letter to Lahore, and is less dense than his last novel Jogi, Sap, Trah, it is also his most endearing fiction so far as it avoids the trap of biographical archaeology. He sticks, for the most part, to the central character, Rani, one of the twin sisters, to the bitter end. He gets out of his system the itch to dig for generational history in the first few pages, with the protagonist’s father settling down in a village around Partition as he gets married, starts a tailoring business and fathers children.

The story is vaguely reminiscent of Anwar Chaudheri’s Saanga, another slim Punjabi novel. The reader is taken on a twisted tour of Pakistan’s history once the twins are born – Rani with a twisted, deformed foot – from dictator Gen Ayub’s takeover to the emergence of hope in the shape of ZA Bhutto, to Bangladesh’s war of independence, to the PPP’s reign, the deposition and hanging of an elected prime minister, Zia’s reign of terror and backwardness, Islamisation and Benazir’s emergence as a hope for a depressed nation.

Like any layered novel, Cheek can be read on several levels. On one hand, it offers an exposure to the ordeals endured by a resilient woman paying a heavy price in life due to physical disability: she loses the man she loves to her sister and is then encouraged to marry a man unable to fulfil his role as a husband. As she finds self-worth by inheriting and capitalising on the trade of sewing clothes, she experiences both business success and plummeting sales. In the process, she learns to be a role model to other women and to seek help when in need.

In the end, Rani stands as a symbol of resistance to patriarchal onslaught on women’s rights – something most readers can empathise with. This has been done by other writers repeatedly, so nothing new, except that Nain Sukh’s language is a pleasure to read. But that alone cannot carry a novel, unless it’s doing something new or experimental.

This slim novel forces the reader to chart the march of a new nation with an old cultural history – not through a big cosmopolitan city lens but instead pivoting it to the underdeveloped part of Pakistan. There, too, Nain Sukh could’ve fallen into the trap of clichés, but his focus and observation are of a higher level and save the novel. The changes taking place on the international stage, one learns, have an unavoidable impact on those living in villages and small towns, as commerce and modern technology tie the upper and lower strata of the economy to each other in myriad ways.

This slim novel forces the reader to chart the march of a new nation with an old cultural history.

The novel also highlights the fact that women’s fight for equality, justice, respect and the right to pleasure is a long, rocky road. Therein lies the raison d’être for the title of the novel Cheek, which can be translated into English as scream, shriek or howl: a personal as well as collective protest against unfairness.

Those who have read international literature widely know that modern Punjabi prose has a long way to go. Nain Sukh has definitely shortened that distance in the intelligent way he has used both the sacred and the profane. He has also not shied away from using certain words that are part of our everyday language, but which, under the draconian influence of artificially imposed Victorian morality or the dictates of the ashrafiya, most writers either replace with empty spaces – something I encountered in a recent Urdu novel Nikka – or choose more ‘respectable’ alternatives.

His boldness in the choice of words and the scenarios around them is commendable. One of the times the reader encounters the scream is, in fact, inside a nightmare – and it results from women’s collective pain, which Rani’s husband, Boota (now a changed man), tries to lessen by offering the balm of love. One of the messages the novel conveys is that feminism does not exclude men – and that women can be equally guilty when it comes to maintaining patriarchy, as we observe along with Nain Sukh the behaviour and political thinking of Rani’s mother.

Nain Sukh has also allowed his women characters – not just the protagonist – to hold political views of their own. He has been careful not to fall into the trap of vacuous liberal posturing. While he does depict women suffering more, he also gives us glimpses of them laughing and pulling pranks – even at the expense of their men. There is a particularly funny scene, tinged with black humour, where Rani teases Boota for suddenly becoming devout in offering namaz. She cheekily reminds him that he’s a martyr – and that martyrs are absolved of religious duties – a reference to an earlier episode from his life.

It is my hope that this book finds a wide readership on both sides of the border.

Cheek

Author: Nain Sukh

Publisher: Kitab Trinjan, Lahore

Pages: 144

Price: Rs 500

The reviewer is a librarian and a lecturer in San Francisco. His last book was A Footbridge to Hell Called Love. His novella Unsolaced Faces We Meet In Our Dreams is due soon