The bare branches of shisham and acacia trees bordering the road prompt eight-year-old Laila to tell her sister: “Look, Sara, the trees are full of sky.” Laila’s imagination knows no bounds. When her grandmother prays for her, she pictures the Arabic words “lift off the page of the book and flow towards her… the upright aliph pranced past her eyes, the fat-bellied laam rolled beneath her nose and the gay, heart-shaped hay skipped into one ear and out the other.” Moni Mohsin’s moving and lyrical debut novel goes on to describe just how Laila’s world gets destroyed, not least because of the role she unwittingly plays in it.

You could say it all began at the screening of Heer Ranjha, the story of star-crossed lovers, which grandmother Sardara Begum treats Laila and her friend Rani to. After crying copious tears, Rani is convinced to do a Heer with disastrous consequences. She doesn’t pay heed to advice that the “kind of love that tears you away from your family… is dangerous”. No, not even a doomed banyan tree can bring back Rani to reality. Rani, already dreaming of big city lights, is lost forever. Laila, desperate to live the life of her favourite Enid Blyton characters, can’t help playing along. In the end, she is inconsolable: “This was my doing, my burden.”

But Mohsin’s novel is not only about love and loss, it’s as much a reflection of the state of Pakistan and its society. She props up this tragic domestic tale alongside the impending division of Pakistan. The story plays out in the backdrop of war on the eve of 1971. For instance, Laila’s parents are forever tuned to BBC Radio, we are told by Laila. “We weren’t meant to split, to shatter. I was there when the country was made,” Laila’s other grandmother, the posh Yasmeen, says wistfully. It begins and ends on the eve of 2002, when war clouds are gathering between the two neighbours again. “There isn't going to be a war,” her father tells Laila. “I was wrong in ’71.”

... contd.