Loss and longing in Penang

A multi-cultural tale set during the Second World War, Laurie Hashim's debut novel tenderly examines the many nuances of companionship.

Set on the island of Penang at a time when Britishers were fleeing away from their colony and Malaya’s invasion by the Japanese was underway, Laurie Hashim’s debut novel A Paradise of Illusions is a deeply tender story spanning almost 50 years.

While it reflects influences of classics by Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, it betrays this sense at the same time by being so characteristically unique a voice because one rarely finds a non-Eurocentric, multicultural story set during World War II that celebrates non-normative relationships.

A suitable match

The story begins with Rizal — now an old man — waiting at the Penang airport for his son, Shaun, who has brought with him a young woman — his lover, Sheila. They are back to their roots to get married. It bears asking, however, how did this Chinese boy become the youngest son in a Malay family? No one would ask this around the 60s because at the time of the Japanese Occupation “orphanages were overflowing” and it was natural for families to adopt anybody. But then, such a simplistic explanation wouldn’t have merited a backstory that takes readers back to June 1919.

In Red Parker and Ibrahim Hamid, we witness the patriarchs with a common business and altruistic interest — to invest in a “new venture, a passenger ship that could provide comfortable transportation on the Hajj to devout Muslims.” Business prospects soon turned into familial bonds, as on one occasion, Red, who didn’t have marriage on his mind, finds his suitable match, Zaharah — Ibrahim’s wife Aisha’s sister. This perhaps establishes early on in the book how finding suitable matches was not only a thing in the wealthy set-up but also an inescapable affair. Decades later, two such affairs lead to the marriage of two couples — the principal characters in the story.

Red and Zaharah’s daughter Anna marries a second cousin on her mother’s side, Cambridge graduate lawyer, Rizal. And Boo Tong — belonging to an elite Chinese business family but is called a “sheep of a man” because of his literary interest and conduct in society — marries Sze-yin, an undereducated, ill-mannered woman from a rich family.

Neither were happy in their respective marriage. While Anna feels betrayed as she was told by her father that she “will [be allowed to] marry for love,” Sze-yin, who unlike Anna wasn’t seeking any “tenderness” from her husband, finds herself disrespected in her marriage.

Gays and gaze

While there’s a reason why Boo Tong fails to love or accord the respect to his wife that she rightfully deserves, amidst the elaborate affairs with which these extended families busied themselves, Rizal manages to nurture his relationship with his gardener’s son Arun.

Rizal’s mother feels he’d be perfectly utilised in Ibrahim’s business ventures, but Rizal doesn’t want to stay at his Uncle’s. Though he knows fully that sooner or later he may have to concede to familial demands and get married. Meanwhile, Arun is sent as a houseboy, and that’s where truly they start living like a couple. It’s not so much that this same-sex romance finds utterance — and quite a painful closing — in this book that sets it apart, it’s the sheer beautiful moments it captures and the mindful conversations it allows to happen that make this work unique. One such instance is when Rizal is thinking how “sadistic” it’s of Allah “to have created such a lovely creature only to have put him beyond reach.”

Not only that, but Hashim also verbalises many unseen cases of neglect in a sprawling household. For example, the “uselessness” of grandparents. How outlive their “utility” and find themselves unable to connect with the very children and grandchildren they helped grow. Additionally, through her clever narration, Hashim brings Anna to the street at night time, allowing her to witness how the city transforms “at night into a public resting place.” She finds rickshaw pullers, night watchmen, and families sleeping on pavements and outside shops with their whole life bundled into a rag. A case in point regarding what a female gaze does in storytelling.

The book also has its moments where it has you in splits. Here’s one, for example, when old classmates Tong and Faisal, Anna’s brother, meet at a party, and much to his father’s embarrassment, Faisal utters the unimaginable: “Those floating monstrosities never make money. I’ve always suspected that the men who strive to own the biggest ships, the tallest buildings, or the grandest mansions are just compensating for lack of size elsewhere.”

Or when Anna, concerned after learning how little she knew her husband in Arun’s comparison and growing insecure about it, tried to persuade Rizal to get rid of him by saying that “employing an unmarried houseboy is like keeping a loaded gun around the house.” Rizal plays along and ensures the metaphor reaches its natural conclusion. This way not only does Hashim articulate nuances in the everyday, but she also triumphs in capturing what a gift companionship is in life.