“What Kept You?” by Raaza Jamshed is a transformative novel about pursuing salvation in one’s own language and grappling with the feeling of constantly falling behind fate.
From Lahore to Sydney, the book centers on how stories influence cognition and meaning-making in environments that serve as unrelenting reminders of one’s finiteness.
Translation as memory
Raised on her grandmother’s warnings and tales, the protagonist Jahan lives by memories of violence—the Partition of India, the dust storms of Lahore, mythological beasts that roam the streets, men who ogle, death, and the bushfires of Sydney.
Addressed to her late grandmother, the narrative follows Jahan as she recollects inherited stories and uncovers personal tales in an attempt to find out which storyline truly belongs to her. Longing to determine whether the life she is living is merely a cord that tugs her back to her life in Lahore, her experiences simmer into an urge for release that translation and migration cannot satisfy.
“Ali didn’t know that the word for a fetus in his first tongue wasn’t very different from the Urdu word for a secret. Raz, a word so petite it could easily fit in the small of a hand…”
Jamshed uses language—particularly Urdu, English, Arabic, translation, and the spaces in between—to parallel the structure of society, often plucking words from these tongues and underlining what is signified by their syllables.
From Pakistan to Australia
It is a story about trying to outrun the monsters that keep you coddled and dictated, and seek transgression in foreign spaces, only to find yourself lost and guided home by the hand of your history. And this history in “What Kept You?” is a potent one, built by strong imagery of the home and street Jahan grew up in and could barely leave—a constant state of being gazed at, a reminder of her coming-of-age, along with the curiosity for the sole Hindu household in their neighborhood and the idolatry that is denounced in Islam, an eccentric friend from overseas, an ache to be free.
It is also a tale of how the ghost of history will follow you across borders. Living a life marked by loss as much as newfound love and joy, Jahan gains new stories for herself and from her husband, Ali, that continue to be addressed to her grandmother. Jamshed highlights this power of storytelling, its capability to write an inescapable fate, especially for the predisposition of women like Jahan and the climate of their worlds.
Fate is a storyteller
As looming fires paint the Sydney sky red, Jahan is reminded of Lahore’s dust storms. In short conversations and long silences with Ali and their serene life in Australia, Jahan’s edicts that she had learned by heart rehearse themselves in the voice of home.
Jamshed not only asks the titular question—what keeps people tethered to history, but also what untethering might look like. Maybe it is not just about staying or fleeing, but about how the past and its whole world are alive in one’s mouth. Through words spoken and unspoken, parching it and challenging one to grapple with the need to be quenched.
“What Kept You?” can be purchased online at Amazon and ordered for pickup in person at Everything’s Fine.
