Hajra Khan

🕊️'This House of Clay and water (2017)' is Faiqa Mansab's accomplished and dazzling debut novel. 🕊️It talks about the lives of two women Nida and Sasha. Nida is intelligent and lonely, and has been married into an affluent political family and is desperately searching for some meaning in her existence. 🕊️While Sasha belongs to the ordinary middle-class, and longs for designer labels and upmarket places. Sasha is trying hard to break the shackles of her middle class drudgery. She willingly consorts with rich men who can provide them. 🕊️For me the most important and telling part of the book is the character of Bhanggi one of the central characters. The turmoils and discrimination he goes through living in this divided and unjust world of boundaries invite us to experience what it means to be born so far on the social periphery and therefore such vulnerability. 🕊️So Bhanggi was a transgender an outcast hijra (eunuch) who, sits under a tree in the Daata Sahab mosque, but he was not an ordinary transgender who apply makeup and wear jewellery, instead he was a respectable hijra to whom people came to ask for prayers. He blesses and prays for worshippers at one hand, and is constantly at war with himself and Allah, on the other. 🕊️Lastly, one cannot forget the very tragic side of the novel. Zoya, Sasha's eldest introverted daughter who fell a prey to the negligence of her own mother's poor upbringing, even as she protects her pretty daughter, Alina, from the preying eyes of the society, Sasha turns a blind eye to her other daughter who ends up being a victim of assault by their own house servant. The novel questions the patriarchal notions ,the gender bias and forbidden love laws that govern the society. One of my favourite quotes from the book is Morality, especially with regards to sex, was just primitive. No one had morals these days, it was far too inconvenient. It was like carrying liquids in your handbag at airport security-checks. One simply knew not to have them.