Ever since James Joyce penned A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which Modern Library hailed as 'the third-greatest English language novel of the 20th century', every creative person and his/her uncle/aunt has been influenced to write his/her own personalised version.
Dylan Thomas came up with his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, Ogden Nash with Portrait of the Artist as a Prematurely Old Man, Joseph Heller with Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man, A M Klein with Portrait of the Poet as Landscape, Grayson Perry with Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl, William Eastlake with Portrait of an Artist with 26 Horses, Simon Bookish in song-form with Portrait of the Artist as a Fountain (which presumably gushes), The Next Generation with a parody Portrait of the Artist as a Young Fan, followed by the King Of The Hill parody Portrait of the Artist as a Young Clown almost as if to make the point that what began with a Joycean bang had to end in a whimper.
And now we have In Haleema's Words by Fatima Ahmed. In Joyce's trend-setting version, the young Stephen Dedalus questions and rebels against Catholic and Irish conventions and finally goes abroad to fulfill his ambition of becoming an artiste. Joyce's semi-autobiographical work was first published in book-form in 1916 after being printed in instalments in the magazine The Egoist.
Fatima's protagonist Haleema rebels, as it were, in instalments. After her parents' demise, the Hyderabad art school student relocates to Mumbai where she falls in love with the sea while seeking tranquillity in painting when not writing newspaper columns full of social realism on the underclass of slum-dwellers, ragpickers, blacksmiths and hijras.
However, living a bohemian life is easier said than done for a reserved young woman from Hyderabad, despite the occasional weekend on the beaches of Goa. It is only when she relocates to London of the swinging 60s, courtesy a young textile mill owner whom she declines to marry, that she lets go of her inhibitions, tripping acid in Amsterdam, but only once, and making out. Her quest for romance ends when she realises that her lover is a voyeur and she settles down with her female friends to a tranquil life of painting in suburbania.
The tranquillity is reinforced by the bonding with childhood friends like Parvati, who, like Haleema, has relocated from Hyderabad to London via Mumbai. It's almost as if Mumbai was some sort of staging-post between conservative Hyderabad and London of the swinging 60s, an intermediate point for those who wished to liberate themselves.
The problem with even an honest account of a young female Hyderabadi maturing into a Londoner is that there is always the risk of the reader remaining an outsider. A lifestyle, even a semi-bohemian one, cannot be an end in itself. The portrait of the artist seems incomplete unless the lifestyle is a prelude to something more.
If, for instance, the reader is able to connect effortlessly with the memoirs of Dom Moraes (whose influence Fatima acknowledges), it is because the writer's experiences of a bohemian lifestyle in England of the swinging 60s transmuted themselves into sublime verse like "I sowed my wild oats/Before I was twenty./Drunkards and turncoats/I knew in plenty./Most friends betrayed me./Each new affair/Further delayed me./I didn't care."
The problem with In Haleema's Words is that it is neither here nor there. It is almost as if Haleema is a veil between Fatima and the reader.
Yet the book does come across as semi-autobiographical since the blurb tells us that the Hyderabad-born Fatima is a senior artiste whose work is included in prestigious public and private collections and who was a columnist for well-known Mumbai newspapers and who now lives in Pune.
Fatima's account of Haleema's lonely childhood in Hyderabad is something the reader can empathise with, especially when she describes a mother who is incapacitated by a stroke and a remote bureaucrat father who is more comfortable reading Shaw, Thackeray, Tolstoy and Dickens than the report card mentioning that his daughter has stood first in all subjects in school, including English.
The dog, Renu, comes alive in Fatima's account of the undemanding love Haleema gets from her pet. It is when the book moves on to the London lifestyle of the swinging 60s that one increasingly feels that Haleema is a veil between the writer and the reader. Dom Moraes's memoirs come alive because they are a link to his poetry. In Fatima's case, the veil remains. Since it was her choice to write the book, one wonders why the story could not have been told in Fatima's words, instead of Haleema's.
Dylan Thomas came up with his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, Ogden Nash with Portrait of the Artist as a Prematurely Old Man, Joseph Heller with Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man, A M Klein with Portrait of the Poet as Landscape, Grayson Perry with Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl, William Eastlake with Portrait of an Artist with 26 Horses, Simon Bookish in song-form with Portrait of the Artist as a Fountain (which presumably gushes), The Next Generation with a parody Portrait of the Artist as a Young Fan, followed by the King Of The Hill parody Portrait of the Artist as a Young Clown almost as if to make the point that what began with a Joycean bang had to end in a whimper.
And now we have In Haleema's Words by Fatima Ahmed. In Joyce's trend-setting version, the young Stephen Dedalus questions and rebels against Catholic and Irish conventions and finally goes abroad to fulfill his ambition of becoming an artiste. Joyce's semi-autobiographical work was first published in book-form in 1916 after being printed in instalments in the magazine The Egoist.
Fatima's protagonist Haleema rebels, as it were, in instalments. After her parents' demise, the Hyderabad art school student relocates to Mumbai where she falls in love with the sea while seeking tranquillity in painting when not writing newspaper columns full of social realism on the underclass of slum-dwellers, ragpickers, blacksmiths and hijras.
However, living a bohemian life is easier said than done for a reserved young woman from Hyderabad, despite the occasional weekend on the beaches of Goa. It is only when she relocates to London of the swinging 60s, courtesy a young textile mill owner whom she declines to marry, that she lets go of her inhibitions, tripping acid in Amsterdam, but only once, and making out. Her quest for romance ends when she realises that her lover is a voyeur and she settles down with her female friends to a tranquil life of painting in suburbania.
The tranquillity is reinforced by the bonding with childhood friends like Parvati, who, like Haleema, has relocated from Hyderabad to London via Mumbai. It's almost as if Mumbai was some sort of staging-post between conservative Hyderabad and London of the swinging 60s, an intermediate point for those who wished to liberate themselves.
The problem with even an honest account of a young female Hyderabadi maturing into a Londoner is that there is always the risk of the reader remaining an outsider. A lifestyle, even a semi-bohemian one, cannot be an end in itself. The portrait of the artist seems incomplete unless the lifestyle is a prelude to something more.
If, for instance, the reader is able to connect effortlessly with the memoirs of Dom Moraes (whose influence Fatima acknowledges), it is because the writer's experiences of a bohemian lifestyle in England of the swinging 60s transmuted themselves into sublime verse like "I sowed my wild oats/Before I was twenty./Drunkards and turncoats/I knew in plenty./Most friends betrayed me./Each new affair/Further delayed me./I didn't care."
The problem with In Haleema's Words is that it is neither here nor there. It is almost as if Haleema is a veil between Fatima and the reader.
Yet the book does come across as semi-autobiographical since the blurb tells us that the Hyderabad-born Fatima is a senior artiste whose work is included in prestigious public and private collections and who was a columnist for well-known Mumbai newspapers and who now lives in Pune.
Fatima's account of Haleema's lonely childhood in Hyderabad is something the reader can empathise with, especially when she describes a mother who is incapacitated by a stroke and a remote bureaucrat father who is more comfortable reading Shaw, Thackeray, Tolstoy and Dickens than the report card mentioning that his daughter has stood first in all subjects in school, including English.
The dog, Renu, comes alive in Fatima's account of the undemanding love Haleema gets from her pet. It is when the book moves on to the London lifestyle of the swinging 60s that one increasingly feels that Haleema is a veil between the writer and the reader. Dom Moraes's memoirs come alive because they are a link to his poetry. In Fatima's case, the veil remains. Since it was her choice to write the book, one wonders why the story could not have been told in Fatima's words, instead of Haleema's.