The bug and his love that dare speak their name

Fauzia Rafique's Punjabi novel 'Keeru' subverts the conventions of doomed love in queer narratives of yore

- Somak Ghoshal

Fauzia Rafique's slim novel Keeru, elegantly translated from the Punjabi by Haider Shahbaz, contains multitudes in less than 200 pages. As a work of fiction, it trains its gaze on the lives of the titular character, Muhammad Hussain Khan Keeru, and a few of his closest associates. But Keeru is also the story of millions of others in the subcontinent—dead or alive, known or unknown to the world.

It is a story of persecution and migration, the conflicting impulses of religion, politics and humanity. Above all, it is a tragedy in which identities are made and unmade, brutally and violently, over and over again.

Keeru bears the scars of a history that is all too familiar to anyone living in India or Pakistan, though it never allows history to become a scaffolding. Rafique's brilliance shines through the characters she creates, as well as the deft control with which she reveals and holds back information about their lives.

The novel opens in the town of Surrey, near Vancouver, in Canada, but detours into Pakistan, where Keeru spent his early years. Told from five different perspectives, the action moves nimbly, braiding the past with the present so seamlessly that all time appears to be subsumed into the novel's tragi-comic consciousness.

Keeru is a