Ammi: Letter to a Democratic Mother
Saeed Mirza
Tranquebar Press, Rs 395

Filmmakers who write are a comparatively rare species. Offhand, one can think of Neil Jordan, whose The Crying Game and Mona Lisa on celluloid are matched by novels such as The Dream of a Beast and Sunrise with Sea Monster. Then, of course, there was Satyajit Ray, whose characters Feluda and Professor Shanku remain popular. To this short list, you can add the name of Saeed Akhtar Mirza, whose last feature film, Naseem, appeared over a decade ago. Mirza’s book Ammi: Letter to a Democratic Mother isn’t strictly classifiable as a novel, it being a series of vignettes comprising Sufi fables, childhood memories, re-imaginings and even a short film script. As he himself writes, it can be categorised as “miniatures set in a mural: a kind of reflective, personal journey set in a background of ideas, politics and history”.

The danger of such a text resembling a diaristic ragbag is always there, but Ammi does have the virtue of being loosely held together in the form of long, rambling addresses to Mirza’s deceased mother. Another problem, however, is that Mirza wears his politics on his sleeve, overloading the text with polemic. Thus, liberal, anti-materialistic and anti-communal values are openly espoused, with several asides dealing with the glories of the Ottoman Empire in its heyday as opposed to today’s free-market West. It is not that one has a bone to pick with such attitudes; it’s just that open proselytising weakens the spine of any book if it is not seamlessly integrated into the narrative.

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