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A God in Every
Stone
Kamila Shamsie is brilliant, her fiction crossing international boundaries with the ease of a frequent traveller and explorer. The blurb of the novel may mislead the reader into thinking that the book is an Indiana Jones crossed with Dan Brown history- adventure, but it's much classier and far more authentic than that. The novel starts with young Vivian Rose Spencer, an Englishwoman, who prevails upon her parents to allow her to travel to Labraunda, Turkey, as part of an archaeological excavation — quite shocking in the early 1900s. She is part of the expedition lead by Tahsin Bey, her father's friend. Among the sprawling ruins of Labraunda, Vivian shares the awakening of love with her mentor — chaste and sweet, but before things can go further, there is conflict between countries and she must return to England, where she become a VAT nurse, giving care to wounded soldiers. A letter from Tahsin Bey urges her to travel to Peshawar and she does so equally in quest of an ancient artifact (Scylax's silver circlet) and to search for her beloved.
Shamsie has kept a firm grip on history, not letting it overpower the human-ness of the book. She reconnoitres lives and archaeological sites with equal élan and crosses from England to India and Turkey with ease, keeping focus on the mercurially changing times and cultures. Lives get impacted and changed as do the histories of countries and Shamsie writes about them all — erudite and compassionate at the same time. She is as easy in telling of the war-torn England as she is in describing the orchards of the walled city of Peshawar — its smells, sounds and colours so vivid. How intelligent this book is. How evocative, multi-layered and descriptive and how many worlds it straddles. The publication of A God in Every Stone is nicely timed to correspond with the anniversary of World War I.
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Along with the more
apparent narrative set in England and Peshawar in 1915 (in the
backdrop of World War I) and then Peshawar in 1930 (the Pashtun
uprising against the declining British empire), runs the ancient tale
told by Herodotus, of Scylax, a man from Caryanda, who set off on a
journey from the city of Caspatyrus, in the land of the Pactyike. This
city (Caspatyrus) is modern-day Peshawar, in Western Pakistan, close
to the Afghan border. The two narratives come together in the quest of
Vivian's quest for the silver circlet. Apart from Vivian, there are
two major characters. Najeeb Gul is the young Pashtun boy who gets
ignited with the fire of learning and questing by Vivian and is
tutored by her, and his intellectual development which, later, makes
him Indian Assistant at the Peshawar Museum and a prominent
archaeologist of his time. The other major character is Qayyum Gul,
whom we first meet as a soldier in the Indian army fighting for the
British, until he loses his eye in Ypres and is discharged from
service. Qayyum's story is of the man who turns from loyal soldier to
rebel, fighting for the Independence of (undivided) India in bloody
uprisings against the British in Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan's unarmed
army of Khudai Khidmatgars . There is a very brief interaction between
Qayyum Gul, who is, coincidentally Najeeb's elder brother and Vivian
when they are going to Peshawar. Fifteen years later, under changed
circumstances the lives of the three disparate people come together
when in 1930, Najeeb invites Vivian, now a lecturer at University
College, London, to Peshawar, to join him in finding Scylax's silver
circlet.