Book Review: Celestial Bodies

In this Man Booker Prize-winning book, the intertwined lives of three Omani sisters and their marriages come to the fore, writes Nandita Bose

When a prize attaches itself to a book, it turns unreadable. The reader picks the book sceptically: ‘Is this the best book (in that category) among all the books this year?’ Everything changes — the expectations, the way we read, even our respect for juries. So when Man Booker International prize-winner Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi showed up on my desk on a rainless July mid-morning, the portents were all unfavourable.

It is extremely rare to read only one book from a country, in this case, Oman. It is rarer still that the book manages to convey a sweeping panorama of the essentials of Omani culture without once diverging from the story it sets out to tell. This book is the best sort of an ambassador, a weaver of bridges. “What is there in al-Awafi that isn’t in Muscat is the graveyard. Most people who live in Muscat aren’t buried in Muscat. They’re buried in their village homes.”

Matriarch Salima is the niece of the richest merchant in the village of al-Awafi and is currently married to the prosperous Azzan. Central are their daughters: Mayya, Asma and Khawla. In telling the stories of these three girls and their marriages, a history constructs of the people around them, of the simple lore of their village, of the sensitive Abdallah who marries Mayya, and of life as it is. “Life appeared to her sharply divided into two parts, like night and day: what we live, and what lives inside of us.” Each story is luminous, with its lights and secrets. Azzan himself is bewitched by the moon, the lustrous Bedouin woman Qamar who picks grains of sand off his face to ingest in her crazed attraction for him.

The other matriarch whose fragmented life takes root in the terrain of the narrative is the slave woman Zarifa who served as a foster mother to Abdallah. Descended from Senghor, a slave stolen for trade from an African village in the 1890s, Zarifa is Shaykh Sulayman’s woman until his sister insists he marry and procreate, a product of which insistence is the son he terrorises until his death. The wife dies of mysterious causes that hurts Abdallah and fuels his eternal search for this one truth. During the season of great anger and arguments and just because he could, Shaykh Sulayman married Zarifa off to another slave, the short, younger Baluchi Habib. Despite having her own son Sanjar, she loves Abdallah with the kindness of a half mother and with the devotion of a slave to her master’s clan.

In an encyclopaedic sweep that scrunches together decades and the lives of those who have survived their sting, many women flit through these pages. The modern descendant of them all is Mayya’s daughter, London. She completes her medical studies and insists on being given a BMW for her troubles. Just as she insists on marrying Ahmad, grandson of one of their slaves in a course that impels her mother to break her phone and slap her into submission. Except that she seeks a divorce soon after, for Ahmad has the habit of beating her, apart from his womanising.

It is the rarest quality in a writer, the ability to compress tomes into mere sentences. This author does. With bare sketches and a style of storytelling where multiple narrators crop up to have their brief say, an entire village and its relatives by marriage come alive to depict the inheritances of an entire nation. Some are all too brief. Some recur in later pages, like Masouda whose daughter Shanna marries Sanjar. Bent out of shape from a lifetime of slavery, Masouda loses her mind and is locked up in a tiny room with food and water delivered twice a day. Maneen sits on a rock begging for some rice or jelly sweet from passers-by, especially schoolchildren. His favourite is bottles of the drink, Vimto. When son Zayid joins the police force and fills his house with crates of the drink, and the fridge overflows with fruits and sweets, he is unable to understand why the old man must still beg. Then there is the pure, intellectual and handsome Marwan whose prayers are so at odds with his impulse to keep stealing that the only way out is to slit his wrist.

A lot of the narration is furthered by the successful and unhappy Abdallah in jets to foreign lands amid newer realities of his life and the changing world around him. The only thing that holds steadfast is his love for Mayya and his conviction she loves him not at all.

It takes a visit to a far off Omani village to discover who we are when we shed our inhibitions and speak of our hopes and fears, relationships and family ties.