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Salt And Saffron By- Kamila Shamsie Pratibha Kelapure Pratibha lives in Bay Area California, where she has spent most of her adult life. She discovered her passion for literature at an early age, but became a software engineer later on. She retains a child's naivete, curiosity and sense of wonder about the world around her. Kindness is her philosophy in life.

Salt and Saffron by Kamila Shamsie
Bloomsbury Publishing, USA
October 3, 2000
Price: $23.95
246pp
ISBN 1-58234-093-5

When a young person leaves and enters the world that is so different from the world that one was born and raised, the natural curiosity to search for their roots takes over. Kamila Shamsie's latest (her second) novel is one more in the series of the books1 (fiction and non-fiction) that I had come across lately. Salt and Saffron is a saga of Dard-e-Dil family, an aristocratic nawab family. The story is told by Aliya, the daughter who is educated in America. Aliya has learned her craft of story telling from her family. Story begins when Aliya meets a young man, Khaleel, born and raised in the poorer side of Karachi. A saltine background as opposed to Aliya's saffron background. The encounter leads her to question the class values that she is raised with. Her search takes her through a number of family secrets and legends. The legend of not quite twins, the curse associated with it, the mysterious Mariam Apa, the family tree chart, with a star-pair marking Aliya and Mariam as spiritual twins, and Aliya's interpretation of the parallels between their lives, lends the story its intrigue.

Many of the stories are passed on, from generation to generation orally. Hence, no historical proof of any event can be found. Nonetheless, the stories do have powerful influence on the lives of the descendents. The first legend is that of not quite twins Akbar, Sulaiman, and Taimur, the three brothers born a few minutes apart. Unfortunately, the oldest of the triplets arrived just before the midnight of Feb 28th, the next one at the midnight and one a minute after the midnight, on Feb 29th. Or, so the Ayah, Taj, told the family. Taj happened to be the only witness to the birth and Taj did have reasons to mislead the family. According to the legend, Taj was seduced or raped by the patriarch of the family, the first nawab. So begins the saga of the Dard-e-Dil's. According to the legend, the not quite twins bring bad fortune to the family. The legend becomes self-fulfilling prophecy and the three brothers are thrown apart by the circumstances. But in the author's own words,

". the ties between the Indian and Pakistani side of the family would eventually have been renewed if it hadn't been for Akbar and Sulemain, each declaring that he did not want to hear his brother's name again, each constantly reminding the rest of family of all the harsh words, the insults, the curses that had been hurled across the Nawab's table."

So, this is how the stories were reinforced through the generations and kept people trapped in the legends and curses. Aliya's only escape from the curse and the social division that separates her and Khaleel is to search, understand the family history and come to terms with her own position, her own standing, her own identity. Although the story has some references to the partition, this novel is not about the partition by any means. The division it depicts is social. The mysterious Mariam, daughter of the long lost brother Taimur, who only speaks to the cook Masood and only in the words referring to the food, is a symbol of class confusion in the society. No one knows for sure if Mariam is indeed the daughter of Taimur. No one knows anything about Taimur's life after he rejects the idea of becoming an Oxford educated Englishman and embraces his native roots and disappears to become a Valet.

The real reason for his disappearance, or the one believed by Sulemain, is revealed in the end. The story of the love triangle between, Dadi, Akbar, and Taimur is very gently told, similar to the story of Mariam and Masood. The narrative is sprinkled with the humor, when the relatives such as starched cousins, uncle who worked with yaks enter the picture. There are also numerous tantalizing descriptions of food.

I found some parts of the story to be quite unbelievable. But when I stepped back and took a second look at the power of family orators and the unspoken rules, I realized that people were forced to take extreme measures to fulfill their desires and break all the family bonds in doing so. Not everything could be verbalized and fixed in those days of feudal families.

The last several chapters are Aliya's dialogue with self. She is trying to answer the questions that she is asking about her family, about the class. She recognizes that the class is a fluid concept. She wonders about the "nouveau riches," about the people climbing the social ladder and concludes, "Snobbery is based on fear." In searching for the reason for Mariam's silence, Aliya wonders,

"You think Mariam's silence was a protest against prejudice built into language?"

She asks Sameer, her cousin. In the end, Aliya is left with more questions than answers. But the absence of the factual answers does not stop her from finding the spiritual answers that she is looking for. In spite of all the stories and the artful ways that the author tells them, the novel is a spiritual journey of a young woman in defining herself.

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