“Here I am, breached into this world, all twenty inches of me, all seven pounds, with all my features and appendages in their place. (…) I’...
“Here I am, breached into this world, all twenty inches of me, all seven pounds, with all my features and appendages in their place. (…) I’m fully and independently human now, even if I haven’t yet taken my first breath,” announces Nawaaz Ahmed’s just-born narrator, Ishraaq, a name chosen by his mother for its meanings of sunlight and radiance.
Still to take his first breath, Ishraaq hovers between knowing and forgetting, in liminal spaces outside of ordinary existence, taking the reader on a journey between the past and the present, excavating the histories of his mother, Seema, his could-be-mother and aunt, Tahera, and his grandmother, Nafeesa.
In a near-gothic start, Radiant Fugitives opens in an interstitial place between life and death, with “a mother who is already dead” and a child unwilling to transition to a world where she no longer exists. Like Rushdie’s Saleem Sinai, tumbling forth into the world and absorbing as well as regurgitating the memories of a time he was definitely not a part of, Ishraaq becomes our near-omniscient narrator, claiming relationships, reaching into a past that is not his, revealing stories, wondering about the future.
This is not going to be a heartwarming story of affirmation and assimilation, Ahmed seems to...
