Books

Raaza Jamshed
What Kept You?

Raaza Jamshed’s first novel opens in a city surrounded by bushfire. The sky is “yellow-filmed”, mornings “the colour of old bruises”. Yet Jamshed’s narrator, Jahan, lies in bed thinking of her history and all its dangers, imagining she is speaking to her grandmother Nani in Pakistan. Numbers unfold on screens: millions of hectares burnt, thousands of homes. Jahan’s husband, Ali, rushes into the blazing days as if to war, leaving bowls of water for birds and tending the horses on a nearby farm. By the end of the novel, fire has hurtled closer and the birds have gone. The horses will burn if Ali and Jahan leave now, and if they don’t, it may be too late.

Fire and danger frame scenes of figurative conflagration. Through the novel run Jahan’s conversations with Nani, who offers “lessons of caution concealed in bite-sized stories”. Story-making is central to Jahan’s Sydney life. She teaches creative writing and attends a grief circle where the facilitator advises participants to “write to it. You write and write and write” and, in the end, “burn it”.

Jahan’s stories are burning stories. She has left Lahore for reasons disclosed gradually and partially. What Kept You? hinges on what haunts and follows and what falls away, mourned or unmourned. When she moves to Australia, her language is ruptured, and in marrying Ali, she acquires another, Arabic. Her thoughts move between English, Urdu and Arabic. Because the novel refuses linguistic renunciation and translation, readers’ understanding will depend on which of these languages they know. “You used to say ishq and mushq cannot be concealed,” Jahan says to her grandmother, and “I had already banished all the shalwar qameez, khussas, and glass bangles, things I didn’t want this city to see.”

In his poem “Do You Speak Persian?” Tehran-born American Kaveh Akbar writes: “I have been so careless with the words I already have.” Having lost most of the Farsi words he spoke as a small child, he can’t remember: “how to say home / in my first language, or lonely, or light.” To braid Farsi phrases into his poems is a way to reclaim lost language. For Jahan, code-switching preserves connection with her family and homeland and enacts her refusal to conform to an Anglocentric culture. Although she meets Ali halfway in English, their second language she describes both as a “neutral field” and a “tongue … forced down my throat”.

The same breakage and violence that characterise Jahan’s life runs through the chopped and braided language she uses. In the interstices between past and future, at the seams of the present where her life and Ali’s meet, each Urdu and Arabic word is a stitch, a means of repair.

Jahan is conscious of crafting a story. She is conscious, too, of stories’ unruliness. She knows she can narrate a series of “threads that fray and drift apart”. She is less sure how they might connect, yet hopeful the telling itself “might bind their shape into a whole, as though this time, the story might save me”. When stories have been scattered, “the pieces of this life scrambled in too many directions”, linear narrative feels impossible. This promises a shapelessness that early sections of the novel embody. As her stories loop and unspool, scenes and moods are hinted at, momentum builds and the weave of the novel becomes clearer.

In two Lahore sections, Jamshed creates magnificent tension as the young Jahan adventures among the dangers of the night her grandmother has vividly narrated. The benignly named “Kissing Frogs” turns from the image of Jahan’s friend Aisha ironing her hair to a night of smoky hidden nightclubs, men with vulpine teeth and “the rumour of a bird”. This bird is a vulture, staked and bloodied, trying again and again to escape and battering itself against a ceiling smeared brown and red, an entertainment for intoxicated partygoers. This prefigures a scene when Jahan and another young woman head out into the Lahore night. As Jamshed slowly unfolds the scene, menace builds, the pulse of Nani’s words in her head: “wolves on the streets beasts out there ghouls demons monsters”.

Spliced between these chapters is Jahan’s present. There are words for the miscarriage she suffers, but most of these evade the pain. Where Ali speaks of chromosomes and destiny, a nurse uses “sterile medical terms jumbled up with old wives’ tales”. Ali denies there was a baby, calling the foetus “a bunch of cells”. He cares for Jahan, cooking quail. She watches his hands opening the tiny bird, lifting out a “heart no smaller than a thumbprint, kidneys like pebbles scooped from a stream”.

For Akbar, “every step I’ve taken / has been from one tongue to another”. Jamshed’s bright and ambitious debut braids tongues, flames and resilient bodies as it retraces dangerous steps, looking for ways to speak of harm and resilience.

Giramondo, 224pp, $32.95

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on August 9, 2025 as "What Kept You?".

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