Aamina Ahmad's The Return of Faraz Ali Explores Politics Around Broken Family Relationships

Aamina Ahmad's The Return of Faraz Ali is a spellbindingly assured first novel that poses a timeless question: Whom do we choose to protect and at what price?

Faraz Ali still remembers the day he was abducted from the home he shared with his mother and sister in Shahi Mohalla—Lahore’s notorious red-light district—at the direction of his powerful father. Now his father, once more dictating his fate from afar, has sent Faraz back, installing him as the head of the Mohalla police station and charging him with a mission: to cover up the violent death of a young girl.

It should be a simple assignment to carry out, but for the first time in his career, Faraz finds himself unable to follow orders. As the city assails him with a jumble of memories, he cannot stop asking questions or winding through the walled city’s labyrinthine alleyways chasing the secrets—his family’s and his own—that risk shattering his precariously constructed existence.

Here's an excerpt from Aamina Ahmad's The Return of Faraz Ali

The driver from Tibbi was a shabby-looking sergeant called George, his gap-toothed smile making him seem even shabbier. Faraz could smell the trace of alcohol on his breath when he got into the car and George leaned toward him and said, ‘We have to make a stop at the Mohalla first, sir. I’m not sure if they told you? About the woman?’

‘What woman?’ Faraz said.

George looked sheepish. ‘The dead one?’ he asked hopefully.

‘She was in some kind of accident?’ Faraz said.

The man tilted his head. ‘Accident? You might say that, I suppose.’

An accident, a brawl, Wajid had said. Faraz had assumed someone had gotten a pounding, that they needed scaring off. He’d spent his career doing whatever the higher-ups wanted done; that’s the job, following orders—and what kind of mule of a man can’t follow an order? Inspector Karim used to say, but he felt now the uncomfortable weight of all that he hadn’t been told.

‘What would you call it?’

George shrugged apologetically, ‘I don’t know much, sir. I believe the sub-inspector is waiting to brief you at the scene.’ George was sharp, he realised, because he said no more and put on the radio: news of the planned inauguration of a school by the president’s daughter, a resignation from the Pakistan Cricket Board. Nothing about last night, no mention of riots, or arrests. Officially it had been a slow night.

***
The Mall, Circular Road, still seemed deserted. It wasn’t until they got close to the inner city that the streets became crowded with traffic: bullock carts laden with bulging sacks, donkeys braying as their drivers whipped them, a stream of men on bicycles vanishing into the morning fog. ‘Business as usual,’ George said as the car crept along behind a crowd of carts and tongas. ‘You’re new to this part of the city, sir? The walled city?’ Faraz nodded. ‘It’s always slow heading toward Heera Mandi Chowk, even early,’ George said.

‘It’s all right. It’s not as if this woman’s going anywhere,’ Faraz said.

‘In the Mohalla, sir, anything’s possible,’ George said.

At Tarannum Chowk, by the cinema, a poster of the latest Shabnam-Waheed movie loomed; Waheed’s eyes and Shabnam’s pink lips just visible in the mist, like a broken face in the sky. When they turned into Heera Mandi Bazaar, he scoured the doorways, the open apartment windows above the stores, searching for something—anything—he might recognise, his body stiffening in anticipation. But the bazaar looked familiar only in that it looked like most others in the city.

He tried to temper his disappointment; he’d always known he’d need another way to find his people—his memories, which were vague, fragments at best, wouldn’t lead him to them. They passed a line of shops that sold handmade instruments, dholkis, tablas, sitars, and then a stretch of function rooms where audiences came for dance, song, and, Faraz knew, the other things you could buy here. ‘This is where everything happens,’ George said, ‘the heart of Shahi Mohalla.’ Faraz scoffed. ‘This is the “Royal Neighbourhood.”’

George glanced at him. ‘I know it doesn’t look like much, sir, but it has a long history. Some of the artists who work here, their families go back generations, back to the time of the emperors.’

‘Artists?’ Faraz said. ‘You mean kanjaris.’

‘They prefer to call themselves tawaifs, courtesans, sir.’

‘What do you think they are, George?’

George paused. ‘I think,’ he said, smiling cautiously, ‘they give a lot for whatever it is they get in return, sir.’ He gestured at the window. ‘Over in that direction is Tibbi Gali, where the station is. Tibbi is where, let’s just say, the working women don’t know as much about music and dance as some of the kanjaris here. They sell one thing only.’

The buildings on either side of the road, four stories high, cast shadows over the narrow street. An ancient, ornate wooden door gaped, forlorn. The balcony of one house, lined with elegant arches worked into the stone, was shattered in places, its walls thick with grime. A banner hung from one side of the street to the other. On it was a picture of a heavy man, his expression severe, and the words congratulations to president ayub and pakistan on a decade of development! proud of pakistan!
George gestured to a doorway where a constable stood smoking a cigarette. ‘There, that’s it.’ He parked by a butcher’s stall. The mist drifted past the constable and in through the open windows of the building, and Faraz imagined it streaming through the rooms, circling the dead woman. Then, from somewhere, he remembered: a street corner, a pile of bricks.

Strings of sehras hanging from a stall, golden and glittering, then a sehra around his neck, tickling his chin. His sister, Rozina. She was dressing him up as a groom, marrying him to a goat.

‘Shall we go, sir?’ George asked, ‘The sub-inspector’s already here.’

Extracted with permission from Return of Faraz Ali by Aamina Ahmad, in India by Tranquebar, an imprint of Westland Books, a division of Nasadiya Technologies Private Limited, in 2023

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