Taymour Soomro: "Other Names for Love" (Fiction)

An aphorism of dubious provenance holds that “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.” But it leaves unclassified the mind that discusses a people, or the place that shapes a people, or the times that transform a place. Such a mind is that of Taymour Soomro, whose debut novel, Other Names for Love, comes out in paperback from Picador this summer. It is the story of Rafik, whose family has held the landmark farm in the fictional Pakistani region of Abad for generations, and whose political ambitions intermix problematically with his noblesse oblige; and of his son, Fahad, whose emerging understanding of himself as a young gay man makes his presumed succession of Rafik as a public figure unlikely, if not outright dangerous. In just 250 pages, Other Names for Love is at once an intimate coming-of-age story, a family saga, and a social novel, capturing the tense, sometimes tragic, interplay of personal desires, familial duties, and social transformation. 

The novel comes in two halves. In the first, sixteen-year-old Fahad arrives at his family’s ancestral rice farm in Abad, where his father intends “to grow him up,” which seems to mean sparking Fahad’s sense of duty with regard to the estate, as well as separating Fahad from his mother and their annual trips to London for theatre, shopping, and dining. The farm, wild in its beauty, feels like a cultural desert to Fahad, who resents his father’s efforts to point out its virtues and his attempts to cast Fahad in his image. 

The Soomro farm near Abad, Pakistan

In the midst of this desert, the only oasis is Ali, the son of a neighboring landowner, whom Rafik introduces to Fahad, perhaps as a friend, perhaps as a model of young, masculine ambition. Ali teaches Fahad how to navigate the farm, and so how to appreciate it (even if that appreciation isn’t realized until decades later). He teaches Fahad how to shoot and how to protect himself. And in a tender moment that either causes or coincides with the end of Fahad’s stay on the farm, they show each other what it means to worship at the shrine of love. Soomro is an expert in rendering experience, whether it be the hard jolts of the boys’ jeep thundering across the lands of Abad or their numinous encounter at the memorial to a local saint. The perspective in these chapters, of someone who feels unseen and unknown by those closest to him, is exquisitely rendered. Those who have been such children, adolescent or adult, will feel Fahad’s ache.

But Fahad’s is not the only perspective. Soomro has interwoven Rafik’s point of view as well, in which we can see, yes, his paternalistic concern (perhaps another name for love) that Fahad should be successful in the world. But we also see Rafik’s clear understanding of what exactly the farm is and does: It is not just a monument to family wealth and influence, nor simply a testament to Rafik’s business acumen. It is the very soil of Abadian society. It is not just his family’s livelihood, but that of hundreds on whom Rafik depends to work the paddies, and who depend on Rafik to maintain and expand the infrastructure — roads, canals, mills — that make the land livable. It is feudalism, to be sure. But what Soomro conveys so poignantly is the sense of community that capitalism, with its emphasis on personal profit, destroys. Indeed, in the moment the farm becomes a personal point of leverage between Rafik and his co-heir, its fate is sealed and its decline begins.

In the second half of the novel, Fahad has grown and settled in London with his partner, Alex, whose insubstantial presence seems the antithesis of Rafik, who takes up just as much room as a dotard as he did when he was the landowning, politicking king of Abad. Fahad is summoned by his mother back to Pakistan to save the family from ruin: They are now aristocratic only in name. The creditors are calling, the house in Karachi is caving in, and the only thing that can save them is the sale of the farm. But when Fahad returns to Abad with Rafik, who is convinced that Fahad has come to restore the land and the family to their former glory, he barely recognizes it. The house, once removed from the town by a long tree-lined avenue, is now surrounded by sprawl. The canal that once watered the paddies is now an open sewer. The tenant farmers have left for commercial jobs in town. Fahad spends most of his final sojourn there trying to track down the story of what happened — to the place, to his father, to himself. He sees Ali in every face. When he finds his way back to Ali’s home, the compound where Ali taught him how to shoot, it is nothing but a grazing ground for shepherds. When he finally tracks Ali down, their reunion is brief and dominated by the things they cannot talk about. “One moment in your life can cast such a long shadow,” Fahad says, getting as close to it as he can before Ali is called away. 

Two farmers in front of the paddy harvest

Everywhere Fahad looks, there is evidence of his father’s having been wrong. Wrong about Fahad, wrong about the fate of the farm, wrong about the people Rafik presumed to lead. As with most of us, Rafik’s wrongness is a blend of stubbornness and inevitability. The world proves each of us wrong sooner or later. Those who are great in one age are often greatly wrong in the next. Rafik’s grasp on reality is intermittent: In his insistence that Fahad will make everything right, he cannot see that the world has changed, or that his writerly Londoner son is not, and was never going to be, the one who would redeem the place. 

But there is one aspect in which Rafik has seen more clearly than anyone gave him credit for. In the years that Fahad has been away from Abad, Rafik had an office made for him—“all wood…the walls and the ceiling and the floor…at great cost…and the lamp fittings were brass, and [the] desk came from one of his father’s government offices.” It is lined with files—“every date, every letter, every meeting” — records kept by Rafik “to say, this happened and this happened and this happened…an archive of the history of the country.” It is a history that he imagines Fahad will someday return to tell, because “once it is written, once it is history, no one can question it.” As Fahad leafs through the ancient and decaying files, he realizes that it is not just the story of the country, but the story of his father, and, in some part, the story of himself. “A man is more than his face,” Rafik tells Fahad in what is perhaps an oblique criticism of Fahad’s Western individualism. “He is more than the places he has been. And the places he has been, they are in [his heart], nowhere else. We carry it where we go. Everything. What does it mean to leave? We can only leave ourselves.” 

In the end, the truth of their story, like ours, lies somewhere in the space between Rafik’s files and Fahad’s pen, in the space between what happens to us and what we make of it. 

—Jonathan Freeman-Coppadge
Managing Editor