Waiting for redemption

Aradhika Sharma

There’s a sense of growing revulsion and dread that overpowers the reader as the story moves forward. There lies the horror and beauty of Tell Her Everything, a third book by Mirza Waheed, which essentially deals with the moral choices a person makes in modern times. It’s a story of Dr Kaiser Shah’s confession to his daughter, Sara. 

The story unfolds in an unnamed city in an anonymous country, having the most archaic laws that demand an eye for an eye. The narrative is about the explanation Dr Shah, known as Dr K in the hospital he works for, has conjured up to offer to his daughter when he meets her after many years  regarding the choices he made in his life and profession.

It’s an unsettling book, both in terms of content and technique. There’s no dialogue with another human throughout the 234-page book. The characters are very few, each of them is in the narrator’s recollection. They are, therefore, his version of who they were, their motivations and purpose of life are also in accordance with his own understanding, interactions and analysis. The book is, thus, not just an extended confession, but also an excuse to defend the choices he made. He constantly offers excuses such as poverty, insecurity, aspirations of a good lifestyle for his family. “Someone had to do it,” he keeps repeating. “It just so happens that that someone was your dad.” But he cannot escape the fact that he “did it”. 

Yes, the heinous task was a government mandate, and carrying it out made him rich. He needed the money to provide a good life to his family — to buy a car, a flat and an opulent retirement home in London. But he made the choice a weak person would make. He did not say ‘no’. And that’s the moral question the book places before the reader: Do we have the guts to refuse when it’s easy to give in? Shall we comply with governments and systems even when it corrodes our soul? 

 “I did it for money,” Dr K confesses. But he never, even to himself, confesses the horror of the task that was imposed upon him. His long and often repetitive excuses tell us he couldn’t muster the courage to speak up, and became an innate part of the inhuman task. Would he have refused even if he were free of fear? Probably not, because it was he who proposed to ‘humanise’ the task, thus committing himself to something even more horrific. “It was literally clinical, Sara, better and most certainly more humane than the methods used in the past,” he explains. 

Dr K’s nemesis is Biju, an anaesthetist from Kerala, Dr K’s erstwhile friend and tormentor who constantly questions and challenges his choices. Biju exercises his choice, and asks Dr K to exercise it too. The guilt Dr K feels towards Biju is evident throughout the book. 

There’s a subtext of polity and violence that runs throughout the book. A gnawing sense of disquiet pervades, waiting for an explosion that doesn’t really take place. The dramatic recounting by Dr K is addressed to the reader, making him/her an intimate participant in his life. The irony is that even while waiting for redemption and acceptance by Sara, Dr K still says: “I’ll tell her, ‘No, I do not feel shame’.”