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Seasonal Adjustments -by Adib Khan - An overlooked book --reviewed by Ravi Shenoy

Seasonal Adjustments was the 1994 winner of Australia's NSW Literary Award. Adib Khan, a teacher of English and History at Ballarat, Victoria, migrated to Australia from Bangla Desh in 1973. This first novel is a bittersweet tale about the dislocation and cultural fragmentation of the immigrant from the sub-continent.

Like his creator, Iqbal Chaudhari, the hero of Seasonal Adjustments, left Bangla Desh for Australia soon after the war with Pakistan. Now, eighteen years later, he has returned to his native land, accompanied by his daughter. He is separated from his Australian wife, who needs time to reflect on their relationship.

The novel is set in Dhaka and Shopnoganj, Iqbal's ancestral village; but the past whether in Australia, or Dhaka, or Shopnoganj keeps bubbling up. The racism in Australia is humiliating, and the Catholicism of his in-laws leaves him cold, but he is equally ambivalent about Islam. The decisions involved in raising a child of mixed race and the conflict between the two cultures complicate his life. He finds the affluent life of his zamindar family and their friends, corrupt and hypocritical. Behind the façade of propriety, Iqbal learns that his physician brother in Dhaka is planning to divorce his wife to marry his mistress. His younger sister confesses that she is a lesbian who considers it best that people don't know this about her.

His once idealistic journalist friends Iftiqar and Zafar are now embittered and kept under army surveillance. They work under a dangling noose to remind themselves of the murder of their fellow journalist and friend, who had been hanged by the army because he was a Hindu and a communist. Iftiqar himself suffers from post-traumatic stress resulting from his days with the Mukti Bahini. When the ancestral lands are sold to pay off debts and the village of Shopnoganj is to be the site of a refinery, Iqbal realizes that the world of his boyhood is forever altered.

The contrast between the suburban boredom of Ballarat and the chaos and vitality of Dhaka are wonderfully captured in a scene describing bus travel outside Dhaka, in which a passenger insists that his goat is luggage!

"It cannot come inside my bus!"         "It is my luggage!" The farmer insisted. "I do not have a trunk or a suitcase!" He glowered and made another lunge with the umbrella.         The goat was a sacrosanct barrier. Neither antagonist crossed the divide the animal represented.         "Luggage?" The conductor screeched beseechingly to the growing crowd. "Eish! This is too much!" He shook in emphatic disbelief before leaping evasively to the left. "How can I admit a dirty animal into the bus as a piece of luggage? I have to think of my passengers!"         A matter of pressing urgency forced the wretched animal to break the deadlock and humiliate the owner. As if to justify the conductor's stalagmitic stand, the goat surrendered to a bout of enuresis. A trickle of pale yellow liquid splattered the footpath. The onlookers reacted with consternation. The circle widened quickly. People clapped. They whistled and exhorted the goat to greater effort...         "You see what I mean?" The conductor appealed to a wall of grinning faces. Na! Just think how smelly it would be inside the bus. Eish!" For emphasis he tilted his head upwards and pinched his nostrils with his thumb and index fingers. With the other hand he fanned the air near his face.

        The writing is flawless, switching from a humorously ironic tone to one of lyricism and tenderness. At the end of the novel when Iqbal decides to return to Australia, despite his marginalized existence there, he concludes that for the immigrant there are no easy answers.

         "I shall pine over what might have been. This is the way it must be. I have known too much to live contentedly."

This engrossing novel should be popular with all immigrants.

Click Here for more info on the book and the author.

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