Book Review | Love, loss and the impact of childhood in Oman

Jokha Alharthi is a writer of impeccable style, design and vulnerability, and her novel Celestial Bodies, translated into English by Marilyn Booth, won the International Booker Prize in 2019. Returning with another novel Silken Gazelles (2024), she brings her much loved community in Oman to life again and narrates the story of two girls — Ghazaala and Asiya — who are nursing sisters since birth and how Asiya’s memory still holds a sway over Ghazaala’s life after Asiya’s forced departure from their mountainside village. Ghazaala’s attempts to fill the void in her life caused by the departure of Asiya are narrated with care and a quiet resolution. For Alharthi, the future is where reconciliations between hopes and endeavours take place and the past is where possibilities of revision are still harboured. The novel follows this idea and what the reader receives is a compelling non-linear narrative moving between Ghazaala’s accounts of her lovers and the diary entries of her friend Harir whose friendship with Ghazaala is also affected by Asiya’s memory.

In between the passages which recount the various reminiscences and narrations of the characters, there are sections of brilliant lyrical charm even when the subject is the threatened erosion of memory by time. Alharthi makes Harir recollect: “Have as many years as this really and truly passed since I discovered she had vanished? Where is time anyway? How can it pass us by like this — like a river that flows on and on — and then how can it simply stop as if assaulted by a winter freeze?”

Such lyrical moments along with the novel’s non-sequential form transports the reader to a borderland between the novel’s descriptions of Omani society and the reader’s own present reality. Within the complex narrative of the novel, the characters become more than mere mouthpieces for the events that unfold in their lives. Instead, the characters exist as prisms refracting multiple emotions such as remembrance, loss and forgetting, and allow the readers to acquaint themselves with the many-layered nature of human connections.

Ghazaala’s friendship with Harir is another important focal point in the novel’s multi-centred narrative. In the pages of her diary, Harir notes her evolving friendship with Ghazaala over a course of 10 years. What grips the reader most about their friendship is the way in which Asiya’s presence slowly comes to hold a sway over Harir’s life as well. At various stages in the novel, the women characters are born, undone and put back together again by the shifting movement of the narrative. The novel alerts the reader to the traditions of Omani society that continue to restrain the women from experiencing freedom and autonomy. What emerges is an intricate tapestry around the subject of childhood friendship embroidered with the human experience of loss and acceptance and their sublime re-tellings.

Rupsa Banerjee has an MPhil from the University of Cambridge and a Ph.D. from The English and Foreign Languages University, India. She likes to write stories and reviewing them. In her spare time, she plays the keyboard and bakes.

Silken Gazelles

Jokha Alharthi

Simon & Schuster India

pp. 258; Rs 699