It’s Istanbul, 2016. Thirty-something Peri is on her way to a dinner party in a seaside mansion with her teenage daughter Deniz. There’s a bad traffic jam. A tramp snatches her handbag and tries to escape. Peri runs after him in an effort to claim her handbag, and in the violent struggle that follows, an old polaroid photograph of Peri with two other women and a man, shot in Oxford, falls out of her handbag. Peri “flinched as though the photo were alive and might have been hurt in the fall”. The snapshot is obviously of great importance to her. Thus the story begins. We are soon taken back and forth, to her childhood in Istanbul, followed by her life in Oxford, to the dinner party she heads soon after her violent encounter with the mugger, to unravel the mystery of the importance that particular photograph holds for her. And, of course, her relationship with the people in the picture.
We soon learn that the other two young women in the picture are Shirin, a faithless Iranian, and Mona, a devout, hijab-wearing Egyptian, while the man is Professor Azur, who taught ‘God’ to handpicked students. They were from Peri’s days in Oxford, as a 19-year-old, with dreams in her eyes and the passion for fulfilling her father's dream of an Oxford education. The three girls are the most unlikely of friends, who Shefak prefers to call the Sinner, the Believer, and the Confused. And rightly so. For, Shirin is hedonistic and says things like “We Muslims are going through an identity crisis. Especially the women... Eat your heart out, Jean-Paul Sartre! Get a load of this! We have an existential crisis like you’ve never seen!”, becoming the Sinner, while Mona likes to call herself a feminist who believes “A freshwoman in Oxford needs feminism just as much as a peasant mother in rural Egypt!”, becoming the Believer. Peri is the Confused, as she struggles between belief and doubt, feelings that can be traced back to her childhood in a home where the father is faithless, and the mother, a strict Muslim.
Peri’s confused state leads her to Professor Azur, and his classes, where endless debates on God, and the meaning of divinity, happen. So enamoured is she of Azur and his line of thought that she makes him her centre of existence in Oxford.
Cut to the present, we learn that Peri has left Oxford without completing her studies. And that she’s no longer in touch with her best friends. What could have forced her to leave Oxford? Is it Azur? Is it her religious dilemma? Or, her failure to deal with the differing ideological positions of people close to her? Well, that forms the crux of the novel. For the details, you have to stay the course.
Shafak excels at keeping our curiosity alive till the last word of the book. On reaching the end, we are left with an image of Peri that’s very different from that of her Oxford days. She’s now part of a society that’s rich and glamorous, so into outdoing one another as far as fashion and wealth are concerned. In Peri’s own words: “I’m a mother, a wife. A housewife, a charity trustee! I throw parties for my husband’s boss — exactly the kind of woman I always dreaded becoming.” However, Shafak offers us glimpses of the ‘real’ Peri through her streaks of rebelliousness, especially in her desire to break the beautiful fish tank at her dinner party host’s home.
The book offers a sneak peek into the challenges facing Muslims today, with competing ideas on Islam clashing with one another. So much so that, at times, the book seems like the playing out of Shafak’s own thoughts. In fact, there are echoes of her earlier novels like The Forty Rules of Love that saw pages devoted to debates on theology. And of course, there’s that Shafak touch of magical realism too, as Peri keeps seeing visions of a baby in a mist.
While questions crop up on Peri’s obsession with Azur, it is very understandable considering her impressionable age, and her experiences back home, caught between ideologically warring parents. As also the agony of questions after constant questions, raging in her head, about ‘God’ and the role of religion in our lives.
Though the book deals with a host of complex themes, it is engrossing to no end. Shafak manages to convey her thoughts deftly, and Peri works extremely well as the focus of the book, and as the vehicle of Shafak’s thoughts.