Khalid Jawed’s ‘The Book of Death’ is a meditation on mortality

Albert Camus once described suicide as the “one truly serious philosophical problem” because understanding whether life is worth living or not amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. How does one look at death itself then: as a certainty to be brooded over or as something to be ignored, leading to some false notion of permanence?

Khalid Jawed’s ‘The Book of Death’, first published in Urdu as ‘Maut ki Kitaab’ in 2011 and now rendered into supple, lyrical English by A Naseeb Khan, stages this very inquiry. At just over a hundred pages, it is less a conventional novel than an experience — fragmented, poetic and unsettling in its vision. It obliges the reader to make several mandatory pauses to take in the enormity of its narrative.

Jawed frames the story as a text within a text. In a distant future, a scientist, surveying the ruins of a drowned town to assess its suitability for a steel plant, chances upon the diary of a mentally unstable man preserved amid the debris of a mental asylum. The town, once called Girgita Til Mas, was submerged to make way for a hydroelectric dam. However, due to ecological imbalances, the rivers dried up and the power plant became defunct — a parable of modern progress as devastation. Out of these ruins emerges a voice, intimate and broken, that tells the story of a man born into violence: injured in his mother’s womb when she is sexually assaulted by his father, and condemned thereafter to a life of hostility, estrangement, and inner torment.

The father-son dynamic gives the novel its tortuous moments. The protagonist resembles his father physically yet is branded illegitimate, condemned to embody both likeness and rejection. Women figure as fragile but decisive presences: a suffering mother, a distant wife, a spectral lover with “pale yellow hands and vacant eyes”. Yet his most loyal companion is Suicide, personified as an angelic, shape-shifting shadow — an inseparable friend who whispers, cajoles and waits.

As Suicide makes one final plea to the man to come out of the confines of the body, he proudly says, “I have placed Suicide in my torn shoe, like the final weapon that will obey my command at the right time.” The line recalls philosopher Daya Krishna’s assertion that man is “the only Being who can choose not to be”. In this sense, suicide is not a compulsion but an ultimate form of freedom — the ability to end one’s existence by one’s own choosing. The protagonist’s refusal to yield, despite his constant negotiations with Suicide, is a paradoxical assertion of that very freedom.

It is within the asylum that Jawed’s prose reaches its most harrowing pitch. As body and mind writhe in unison, the reader is drawn into a claustrophobic, labyrinthine world where anguish becomes almost tangible. The effect is deeply unsettling, and perhaps deliberately so. It is little wonder then that Jawed concedes at the very outset: “Writing is an excruciatingly painful act. Through writing, you inflict stinging pain on others, and moreover, a profound wound grows deep within you as well.”

Yet the novel refuses closure. It ends with a final chapter left intentionally blank — at once a provocation and a void. The drowned town, the broken family, the asylum, and the empty pages converge into a haunting meditation on mortality. The blank chapter is both an ending and a riddle, reminding us that mortality is less a problem to be solved than a mystery to be endured.

— The reviewer is a contributor based in Bengaluru