A GOD IN EVERY STONE

Ancient Greek explorers, Peshawar’s famous Qissa Khawani Bazaar, World War I and
India’s independence struggle all come together in Kamila Shamsie’s recent novel, A
God in Every Stone. To say that worlds collide would be an understatement.
Set in the early 20th century (1915-1930), the novel centres on the lives of three
characters. There is Vivian Rose Spencer, a young Englishwoman with a love for history
and archaeology, who leaves behind war-stricken Europe for Peshawar in the hope of
finding an ancient artifact. On her journey, she briefly meets a soldier from the British
Indian army, Qayyum Gul, who is also returning from Europe after losing an eye on a
battlefield. And the third character is Qayyum’s younger brother Najeeb, who ends up
welcoming the British woman instead of his brother when they arrive at the train station
in Peshawar. He becomes her tour guide, and she his tutor. Qayyum, in the meantime,
tries to rid himself of the ghosts of war and to grapple with his loyalties to the Crown
and his own people.
Admittedly, that’s a very reductive summary of a novel in which war and peace, women’s
role in society and male camaraderie, romance and friendship all intersect.
Reading A God in Every Stone, one can’t help but marvel at the amount of research
Shamsie must have done, and that too on topics as diverse as 5th century BC Greece and
India’s independence struggle against the British.
The connection between the two worlds — which few people would know of, even in
Pakistan — is that the ancient Greek explorer, Scylax, trekked all the way to the Indus
River and, at least in the world of the novel, his circlet adorned with figs and leaves may
be buried somewhere in Peshawar. On her own in the city (the other British living in
Peshawar provide only pleasant company, and sometimes not even that), Vivian finds
that the only person who can help her in her hunt — or at least share her interest in it —
is the teenaged Najeeb. She teaches him that Herodotus is the father of history and that
the Pactyikes he describes in his work are none other than the Pathans.
The novel is densely populated with historical information but Shamsie never allows it
to slow down the plot. History is so seamlessly interwoven into the narrative that never
does the novel appear dissertational. In fact, the story moves rather swiftly, frequently
switching between locations and characters. And rather than painstakingly delineating
every development in the plot, Shamsie chooses to jump ahead from 1915 to 1930, by
when Vivian has long returned to England, Najeeb is an employee of the Peshawar
museum and Qayyum is a follower of independence activist Ghaffar Khan (better
remembered today as Bacha Khan).
As with Shamsie’s earlier novels, her eye for detail results in striking imagery. Take for
instance, this scene in which Qayyum, still acclimatising to his new glass eye, goes for a
walk in the streets of Peshawar:
“A tarpaulin flew off a donkey-cart. The load of hand mirrors caught the sun, threw
circles of light up onto surrounding facades whose windows flung the glare back into the
eyes of the men on the street — camel drivers, Victoria-drivers, merchants, customers,
wayfarers. Dazzling chaos. A bolting donkey, an upturned cart of turnips, a man walking
into a tower of brass urns; the blur of other things falling, colliding at the periphery of
Qayyum’s vision.”
And, without forcing it into the narrative, Shamsie cuttingly examines the politics
between the British characters and the locals. When Vivian and Qayyum meet for the
first time, for instance, he asks her why the English enjoy digging for “old, broken
things,” to which Vivian replies that she doesn’t know. Shamsie then writes:
“He used to think it was humility, this readiness of the English to acknowledge
ignorance. But he had come to understand it was the exact opposite — to be English was
to move through the world with no need to impress or convince. Was this so because
they had an empire, or did they have an empire because this was so?”
In her speech at the Karachi Literature Festival earlier this year, Shamsie spoke of the
debate surrounding writing about Pakistan in English versus Urdu. One of the questions
often raised in this ongoing debate (which perhaps should now be put to rest) is that
English writers address an international audience rather than a local one and that
English fiction cannot faithfully represent local experiences. But in the case of a novel
like this one, the world described is so familiar yet strange that the question of using
English fiction to educate non-Pakistanis about the country becomes a moot point.
Towards the end of the novel, the action — and the violence — escalates, perhaps even to
a fault as the scenes become more abrupt and frenetic. But, for the most part, the novel
is deeply layered with history and poetic detail, making it perhaps one of the best novels
written by Shamsie, who has already won international accolades for her work.
This novel, which was shortlisted for the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction 2015 has an
epic reach with a complex plot and large cast of characters. It tells the story of Vivian
Rose Spencer, unusually, for the times, a young female archaeologist, who comes of age
just before the First World War, experiences the war as a nurse in Britain but leaves for
Peshawar, India in 1915 in search of a silver circlet belonging to the 6th century Greek
writer and explorer, Scylax. A second narrative thread runs parallel, the story of Qayyum
Gul, a Peshawari, who fights for the British Indian Army during the war, loses an eye
and returns home to Peshawar. There he joins the movement led by Khan Abdul Ghaffer
Khan to set up schools ‘untainted by the superstition of the mullahs and the
brainwashing of the British’. Without going into the complexities of the plot, the action
for them both culminates in Peshawar in April 1930 where a massacre takes place in the
Street of Storytellers: the British gun down many Indians, protesting peacefully and
unarmed, and then ship the bodies quickly off the scene in lorries to conceal the
numbers killed.

This is a historical novel, with much interesting historical and cultural information
which adds to its rich texture. The quest for Scylax’s circlet is partly a ‘frame’ narrative:
we first meet Vivian on her first dig in Labraunda, Turkey. She falls in love with the
Turkish archaeologist and friend of the family Tahsin Bey, who tells her the story of
Scylax from the 6th century BC who explored the source of the Indus for the Persian
emperor, Darius. This sets up one of the main themes of the novel, which is returned to
in different guises, that of the relationship between empire and its subjugated peoples
and of course the relationship between the Carians and Persians mirrors that of the
Indians and the British. Within this issues of identity and loyalty are explored and
Shamsie depicts well the complexity of Indian identity in Peshawar at that time- Najeeb
explains that in 1915 many Peshawaris will speak their language, Hindko, and the
Pathans’ language, Pashto, as well as Urdu and English. However, this picture of a
harmonious co-existence of languages and cultures is that of Najeeb, who remains loyal
to the British, partly because of his interest in archaeology and later career at the
museum. His brother, Qayyum, in his espousal of the peaceful pursuit of independence,
has a different take on the British and develops differetn loyalties.

Details of the  First World War experience of both Viv and Qayyum are explored. Viv’s
experiences as a VAD are treated rather cursorily but she is changed by seeing the
terrible sufferings and disfigurements of soldiers from the front, as were so many, and
benefits from the relaxation of attitudes to British women to be able to travel to
Peshawar alone  in 1915. Qayyum’ s experience of convalescence in the Brighton Pavilion
was interesting- and it was new to me that Indians who fought on the British side were
hospitalised there. The city of Peshawar at that time is brought vividly to life too with its
mulberry trees and willows, the rich vibrancy of its Street of Storytellers-yet telling us
also that the public space belongs to men and the only women seen are those in a burqa.
The lengthy final section is based on historical fact, fictionalising the massacre of  23rd
April 1930 at Qissa Khwani Bazaar in Peshawar.

Now, although the last section is gripping in its account of the massacre I found myself
only partly engaged and I think this is because a sub-plot and its characters, the sisters-
in -law, Diwa and Zarina, were introduced at a fairly late stage in the novel. I found it
difficult to care about the fate of characters whom I’d only just met. I felt the structure of
the novel had a similar negative effect on the plot early on, when Vivien falls in love with
the older archaeologist Tahsin Bey. We’d seen no build up to her feelings nor got to
know either of them as a character and somehow this meant that I didn’t really believe
in or care about this love affair either. And I think this has to do with structure and
content rather than characterisation- the development of Vivien as a character, her
growing maturity and independence are convincingly drawn. Nor is it to do with
Shamsie’s ability to depict relationships – the relationship between Viv and Najeeb and
between the two brothers, Najeeb and Qayyum are touchingly portrayed. I think my lack
of engagement at times with the novel is because the author is trying to do too much.
She has many interesting ideas which she wishes her characters and plot to convey, but
there are too many of them for a novel of this length. It would have been better to have
written a 700 page novel and really develop those themes through character, plot and
subplot, or to keep to this shorter length and to limit the characters and ideas.

Despite this, I found the ending, which comes back to the story of Styclax, intriguing.
Styclax has incurred the wrath of Darius because his account of the Carian rebel,
Heraclides, shows him to be more glorious than the Persians. When asked why he had
done this he replies ” Because I loved Heraclides”. So is the final word that love for
another individual is stronger than loyalty or love for country or  nation- particularly
where the country has the dominant force of empire? Or does he love him because he is
a Carian and the message is that we love best our own? These are huge, important and
timeless themes and I’m looking forward to Kamila Shamsie exploring them further in
her next novel.