Like a Diamond in the Sky

Shazia Omar

Penguin and Zubaan

Pages: 252

Rs 250

Deen is a 21-year-old in Dhaka, with compassionate eyes and heroin in his veins. He has sold his books, pawned his guitar and still needs money for his next fix. AJ, small-time diamond peddler and another “smackie”, bails him out with cash from small-time crime. They look like brothers—Deen, the musician who has frittered his gift, and AJ, a good-looking crook looking to hit pay dirt. They call themselves “khor2core”, addicts (khor in Bangla) to the core.

Shazia Omar’s novel Like a Diamond in the Sky plays out in the world of alienated youngsters in the middle and upper middle class society of Bangladesh, a country often reduced to the media shorthand of poverty, floods and conservative Islam. Deen and his friends listen to Dylan, get high on pethidine in an empty plot of university land named Dallas (“after the soap opera they watched on BTV”) and score smack in squalid bastis on the fringe of the city.

Life outside the cocoon of addiction doesn’t seem much to Deen. His country and its people, he finds, is “god-forsaken and GOB-forsaken” (Government of Bangladesh). “No value for life. Especially not in Bangladesh, the sewer of India, the ass wipe of America, the sycophantic beggar child of Islamic fundamentalists.”

Turned out of his home by his heart-broken mother, he sits on the bank of the once-mighty Torag river, “now a polluted poison pit” and muses on the platitudes of middle-class life: “Work hard, be good, pie in the sky when you die. Sugar free pie. An eternity of blandness.” He has visions of himself “fighting the power structures, smashing G8” but gives in gamely to his “turquing”, craving body. Like Renton, the protagonist of Trainspotting, he could chose not to choose life. And yet, there is beautiful Maria, “his crazy diamond”, the woman for whom he will redeem himself. But can he?

... contd.