Winds of success, desire, lust and love sway in ‘Shamal Days’

Chandni S Chandel

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In the backdrop of the ongoing Israel-Palestine truce, Sabin Iqbal’s ‘Shamal Days’ becomes relevant as it delves into many issues — politico-religious turmoil which tweaks ordinary lives, as exemplified in misery-laden West Asia, lonely lives of expatriates, dynamic newsrooms, broken families, incomplete marriages, love, deceit, wit and secrets.

The protagonist, Abbas, a Malayali bachelor in his 40s, is the editor of a newspaper in an imaginary country in the Gulf. His loneliness stings him constantly and he goes into a flashback with riveting details of the handsome life in his youth, and lessons learnt from aberrations emanating from premeditated plots being hatched in his personal and professional life, and knowingly but unwillingly walking into the traps.

‘Most men are custodians of secrets and practitioners of lies’ is a frequently repeated line that magnifies his weakness. The ease of accepting whatever comes his way, failing to say ‘No’… ‘No’ to corruption, ‘No’ to illicit sex, ‘No’ to acquiescing to everybody’s demands. Abbas realises that in the absence of a family around, he is not able to discern right from wrong.

Shamal, ‘the winds of bad omen’, signifies miseries of expats in West Asia. The book is pregnant with stories of lust, multi-ethnicity, poor-rich divide, religious imbroglios and West vs East debate. Once they cross their country’s borders, lives of migrants oscillate between hope and despair, emotional insecurity and monetary gains, loss of identity and cultural amalgamation at the new place.

Coming from a senior journalist who has worked in India and the Middle-East, the book can serve as a good manual, in the most entertaining way, to budding journos to get a peek into their future work profile. The energy of the newsroom with sub-editors, reporters, feature writers, page-makers, photographers, sports desk, proof readers (who don’t exist in most newspapers anymore) strutting around cubicles has been captured very well. Their cold vibes, use-and-throw camaraderie, opinionated views and biased behaviour don’t keep them out of the morality orbit.

The author suggests that despite success, we are frail. Only in our solitary moments do we question our rash decisions and ‘there is a second man we all carry within us’. There is ‘concealed grief’ within our hearts. We try and plan our decisions wisely, sometimes discreetly, sometimes impulsively, but ‘the master-planner authors it from above’. The novel also reveals how we embrace escapism and hypocrisy to put a kibosh on our suffering.

How do we relieve our stress? By ‘transferred pain’ — thinking about others’ pain to forget or escape our own pain. Going through the novel, the reader realises all of us do that. It leaves us with questions about the veracity of love, trust, hope in the midst of debauchery.

Iqbal’s writing is lyrical, spruced up with self-created poetic phrases exuding inherent intellect and in sync with the times. He constructs the narrative in a manner which takes you to heightened delight and leaves the reader thinking what next. His lucid description of the feel of the environment at that moment completes him as a writer who has used all tools in his storytelling kit to maintain his grip on his readers.

The idiomatic phrases — ‘oriental charm with occidental manners’, ‘reality was as hard as cold hammer’, ‘night had begun to age’ — are what distinguish this novel from the otherwise similar series on Netflix or other OTT plaforms.