Trespassing

by Uzma Aslam Khan

Overview

A world-class tale of love and deceit, rivalry and destiny from the Lahore-based writer Uzma Aslam Khan.

'Standing in a room with eight thousand tiny creatures, witnessing them perform a dance that few humans even knew occurred; this was life. Everywhere she looked, each caterpillar nosed the air like a wand and out passed silk… When Dia watched one spin, she came closer to understanding the will of God than at any other time.'

Dia is the daughter of a silk farmer, Riffat – an innovative, decisive businesswoman. Like her mother, Dia seems at first sight unrestricted, spirited and resourceful. She seems free. But freedom has its own borders, patrolled by the covetous and the zealous, and there are those who yearn to jump the fence.

Daanish has come back to Karachi for his father’s funeral, all the way from America, a land where there are plenty of rules but few restrictions. When Dia and Daanish meet, they chafe against all the formalities. It is left to a handful of silkworms, slipped inside a friend’s dupatta, tickling skin, to rupture the fragile peace of both their houses – to make the space in which Dia and Daanish can create something together…

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780007402427
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	10/10/2011
Sold by:	HarperCollins Publishers
Format:	eBook
Pages:	464
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Uzma Aslam Khan grew up in Karachi. She is the author of one previous novel, The Story of Noble Rot (2001). She has taught English language and literature in the United States, Morocco, and in Pakistan. Currently she works for an NGO in Lahore, where she lives with her husband.

Reading Group Guide

Discussion Questions
1. This novel is about several clashes, starting with those between Pakistani and U.S. culture. What are the strengths and weaknesses of each culture that this book reveals? If you were Daanish, where would you prefer to live and why?
2. Another clash in the book is universal: the one between generations. In Trespassing, even as the young characters discover great differences in ways of thought between themselves and their elders, they also discover significant similarities in their personal histories and emotions. Do you think that the divide between the young and the old is getting greater or smaller in your culture? How do the characters in the book handle this divide?
3. The novel also becomes an exploration of class differences when Salamaat begins his story. How does his version of the events change your understanding of Daanish, Dia, and their families? What similarities and differences are there among the lives led by Salamaat, Daanish, and Dia?
4. The Pakistani characters in Trespassing have a number of preconceptions about "Amreeka," while we see that Daanish's actual experiences in the U.S. do not bear them out. What differences do you see between the American Dream as seen by Pakistanis like Salamaat and the actual life Daanish leads at school?
5. This book is set in the early 1990s, when the author was a student at an American university, during the time of Operation Desert Storm. Since then, the American public has seen and heard more about Pakistan than it ever has before. How did this book change your impression of either country and its society? Do you think that the East is more or less similar to the West than you did before? Why?
6. Religion and society play large roles in Pakistani life, from Daanish's taxi drivers to his own family. How do these factors affect his decisions, particularly at the end of the novel?
7. Dia is not just a Pakistani with a strong will but is also a woman. This conflicts with enduring stereotypes about women and Pakistani culture. How do you think her culture, not to mention her unusual upbringing, have made Dia the woman she is? Had she been born in America, or had her father not died when he did, do you think that she would have turned out to be a different person? How?
8. While the America that Daanish lives in is at war, Pakistan is enduring a police state. How is the role of the military and its might seen in each country?
9. A pivotal moment in the book occurs when Dia tells Daanish the fable of two young lovers, named Raeesa and Faraz, which explains how the mulberry fruit got its red color. How does the story change the relationship between Daanish and Dia? What role does Dia play in Daanish's life and why is he disturbed by it as much as he is pleased?
10. The story above is only one of the ways that mulberries are significant in the book. What are others?
11. Toward the end of the book, a character in Trespassing complains, "Can't we have a moment to ourselves in this country? Doesn't anyone do anything besides snoop around?" What role do secrets seem to play in Pakistani society? Why do you think Salamaat spies on everyone so readily? Do you think that Daanish's and Dia's passion is fueled because their romance is forbidden?
12. How do the Prologue, entitled "Death," and the Epilogue, entitled "Birth," tie the book together?

Editorial Reviews

Khan limns the conflicts between modern Western and traditional Pakistani mores in an intelligent, ambitious novel (her first to be published in the U.S.) about two star-crossed young lovers in contemporary Karachi. Daanish, a journalism student in "Amreeka," as his aunt calls it, returns home to Karachi for the funeral of his beloved father, a prominent, forward-thinking doctor. He catches the eye of a comely Karachi student, Nini, with whom his traditional mother would like him to make an advantageous marriage. But when Daanish meets Nini's best friend, the thoughtful and challenging Dia Monsour, who helps run her family's silk farm, romance blossoms quickly. Their families' disapproval casts a pall over their meetings, though, and Daanish begins to feel uncertain about seeing Dia as the date for his return to America draws closer. Khan's portrayal of life in Karachi, seen from multiple perspectives, is rich and complex, and her supporting characters, such as Salaamat, a young fisherboy who becomes a driver for a group of freedom fighters whose attacks have a deadly impact on Dia's family, add great depth. Khan's frequent flashbacks can be jarring, and the affair between Dia and Daanish is stretched perilously thin as the primary story line, but Khan's prose, ornate yet precise in its discussions of both love and politics, mark her as a truly gifted observer of moments grand and minute. (Oct.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Set in the turbulent Karachi of the early 1990s, Khan's second novel is both a work of fiction and a political statement targeting U.S. foreign policy in Iraq while exploring ethnic conflict, social inequality, environmental destruction, and the status of women in the author's native Pakistan. After the death of his father, Daanish returns home from studies in the United States with a deep antipathy for U.S. politics and its complicit media. Meanwhile, Dia has been leading a life typical of Pakistani women even as her mother raises her to resist social restrictions. The two launch an affair that tears apart their families, and a devastating revelation concludes the novel, although readers are left with the hope that good could yet emerge from these damaged lives. Unfortunately, though the book serves an important social purpose, ultimately it suffers as art; politics and literature mix uneasily here, with Khan often presenting political arguments via dialog, to stilted effect. Still, Khan's sentiments are timely and will interest those looking for another voice in the ongoing debate on U.S. hegemony overseas. Rebecca Stuhr, Grinnell Coll. Libs., IA Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

A contemporary romantic tragedy displays a startlingly fresh voice as Khan illuminates the complex social, religious, and economic mores of Pakistan while offering an outsider's hard-eyed perspective on American attitudes during the first Gulf War. Dia's Western-educated mother, Riffat, who has run the family's silk business since her husband's random murder, raises Dia to share her independent thinking and assures her daughter that she'll be allowed to marry for love. Daanish is an Amherst journalism student on a visit home after his father Shafqat's death. Daanish is frustrated by the prejudice he encountered and the sloppy journalism he witnessed in America, but he can't find a place for himself in Karachi, either. He adored Shafqat, an enlightened doctor who traveled the world, but Daanish's smothering and needy Pakistani mother, the traditional Anu, is pushing him into an arranged marriage with Dia's best friend Nini. When Daanish and Dia meet, though, the attraction of like minds is as strong as their sexual tension. Soon, they are arranging trysts. While Dia is head-over-heals in first love, Daanish has a more casual American attitude, though neither knows that they are following in their parents' footsteps, that Riffat and Shafqat had a love affair years earlier in England. Dia and Daanish's ill-fated affair forms the story's main arc, but Khan surrounds the couple with a richly drawn Pakistan filled with characters struggling to survive with some semblance of dignity: Nini, who tries to make up for her early British education by being the extra-dutiful Pakistani daughter, and bitter Anu, who destroys all Shafqat's gifts to Daanish. Foremost is the driver Salaamat, whose fishingcommunity was destroyed by foreign trawlers and who considers the central romance trivial compared to the issues of survival he's faced. A rare, wonderful gift of a novel that defies mere plot synopsis: a complex fictional world that illuminates the real one and seamlessly merges the personal with the larger sociopolitical conundrums we all face today.

Kirkus Reviews

‘A story of cultural and ethnic conflict in spare and elegant prose that resonates beyond its immediate setting’ Observer

‘A haunting and beautiful book’ Glasgow Sunday Mail

‘Original and emotional… as intricately patterned and vivid as lengths of top-quality silk.’ Sunday Telegraph

‘Cocoons are not the only things that explode in this novel. The silken prose emphasises the conflict between the tender subject and a world (in this case Pakistan) where violence of every sort has become institutionalised. It is a self-confident novel and marks the emergence of a new generation of Pakistani novelists unencumbered by the icons or the ideology of a wretched state.’ Tariq Ali

From the Publisher