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Rainsongs of Kotli

Tariq Malik

"...Rainsongs of Kotli offers a narrative of homesickness. The home imagined and missed in Malik's book is not Canada but the home the author left behind, Kotli, a small town in Pakistani Punjab. Memory threads the stories together to form a short-story cycle. Loss and nostalgia inform each story: delirious homesickness, Partition trauma, lost childhoods, forced maturation, frustrated journeys back home, and obsessive quests for lost and forgotten objects are the subject matter of the stories. In the final story, "Malhaara Moving to the Sound of Water," the faqir Malhaara, named after the soulful Monsoon-raaga Malhaar, roams through the streets, lamenting Kotli's "tragic diaspora" and the pain of losing the "loved ones" for those "left behind." The lament also echoes the author's own sense of loss and nostalgia.

      In spite of the unifying mood, the stories are quite different from one another in plot and treatment. Both content and structure may challenge Western literary aesthetics and expectations. The writing style is more affiliated with Punjabi and Urdu literary traditions, and the language is rich and poignant, woven with evocative quotes from Punjabi folksongs and poetry. These long and episodic narratives are complex and personal. Although the stories betray a strong impulse to remember Kotli in minute detail, and while the world of Kotli is more male-focused, there is a refreshing restraint from fashioning the collection as a "third-world" work meant for a cosmopolitan audience. In this context, the rather selective policy of translating Punjabi words should be understood: sometimes the author translates the line he quotes, sometimes not. He does not translate the Punjabi words that he uses himself, leaving the reader to guess the meaning from the context. Curiously, he provides a list of characters with some humorous cultural glossing at the end but not the usual glossary of non-English words. Finally, I must add that for a book so lovingly written and produced, the cover is unfortunate. The picture of a sari-clad South Asian woman has no resonance with the world of Kotli and damages the politics of the book by marketing the ethnic as exotica."

— Paulomi Chakraborty

To explore the lives and longings of the Lohar people of Kotli, Tariq Malik's first collection of stories, Rainsongs of Kotli (Toronto: TSAR Publications, 2004) is mainly set in the Himalayan valleys of Punjab approximately ten years after the tumultuous Partition of India during which tens of thousands died and millions fled their homes due to religious conflicts. This is a memorable, deeply felt and frequently amusing debut, full of lively conversation and sure-handed narratives. "Looking back, I realize it was the first arrival of electricity in Kotli that set in motion the events that had such profound and tragic consequences for our family," Malik writes. Another story deftly begins, "There are certain days when the river sits quietly in profound contemplation of itself with not a ripple to disturb its thoughts." Lovely stuff. In a brief afterword he writes, "This book is a tribute to the spirit of my parents' enterprising generation that triumphed over adversity by sheer resilience and sacrifice; to those wise men and women who were able to fluently quote verbatim passages in Arabic from the Quran and follow these with elaborate translations in moments of moral rectitude, and, when moved to do so, would tearfully quote the classical Urdu and Farsi poets, and yet were unable to read or write a single word of their own mother tongue." Born and raised in Pakistan, Malik lived for 20 years in Kuwait prior to immigrating to Canada in 1995. He lives in Vancouver.

—Alan Twigg

Tariq Malik’s debut novel Rainsongs of Kotli amply demonstrates that a gifted storyteller has joined the ranks of South Asian writers in the Diaspora. He has chosen to tell the story of his native village – very sensitively and imaginatively portraying his characters and their lives over a period of more than half a century.

 "I particularly enjoyed the narrative about two Sikhs who return to Kotli ten years after the partition of India to collect some goods they hid in the house they had to abandon. Their hesitations and fears and those of the couple they meet in their house bring out forcefully the alienation that had occurred between them. Another story that touched me deeply was the death of Shafiq Malik, the cousin of the author, when the ship Dara sunk in 1963. It profoundly traumatized the author who now pours his heart out to us.

I found the description of the background situations and the natural settings extremely well done.

I would recommend it to all those who want to understand how the lives of the people of a Punjabi village have fared in more than half a century.

Ishtiaq Ahmed

Homepage:http://www.statsvet.su.se/staff/teachers_researchers.htm

Associate Professor

Department of Political Science

Stockholm University

Ishtiaq.Ahmed@statsvet.su.se

I used "Rainsongs" for two courses last semester (an undergraduate course on Postcolonial Literature and a graduate class on Postcolonial Theory and Literature). Both classes enjoyed the book very much and I must say I personally found it very lyrical and it worked very well for getting the students to understand the human loss caused by partition.  I would consider using it again if it stays in print for other such
courses and especially if I have a chance to teach a course on Partition literature.  My family too has their own Partition history and so the book resonated for me at a personal level albeit in different geographical and cultural contexts.

Khani Begum,

Associate Professor

English Department,

Bowling Green State University,

Ohio

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