A review by thebookdog
Hellfire by Leesa Gazi, Shabnam Nadiya

adventurous challenging dark emotional funny informative inspiring reflective fast-paced

 
In my last post -- a review of Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous -- I wrote, "If the fences are eventually lifted, where will we go from there?" Strangely, Leesa Gazi's Hellfire, translated from the Bengali by Shabnam Nadiya, starts from there. Lovely gets out of the house for the first time all by herself. She is 40. As the book begins, the narrator tells us, "Getting out of the house, however, was a task as hard and complicated as crossing the pulserat, that final bridge of the afterlife spanning the fires of hell." Hellfire answers the questions -- why did Lovely take 40 years to do something that's as unassuming as stepping out of the house by herself? Does Lovely cross the bridge? Or does the fire engulf her? If Lovely crosses the bridge, is she the same person when she reaches the other end? Or will she be permanently marked by Freedom?

Leesa Gazi's Hellfire is 198 pages long. The rich, layered story of Farida Khanam and her daughters Lovely and Beauty unfolds like a fast-paced psychological thriller in those measly 198 pages. I keep harking back to the number of pages because despite being ridiculously short, the narrative bursts forth like water that gushes out just after a dam collapses. There is real force in Gazi's storytelling, and Nadiya's translation ensures that the force is not impeded.

For 40 years, Farida Khanam has always kept Lovely and Beauty on her watch. For children raised by Asian mothers, being under the constant supervision of their mothers is an everyday thing. But Farida Khanam stalks her own children. For instance, when Lovely and Beauty sit in their classroom, Farida Khanam watches them from their balcony that's right opposite to their school. When they go out, she accompanies them. Every contact with the outside world is severed. The daughters' privacy is limited to their bedrooms. The house is their bubble. They age, arrive well into middle-age, without experiencing the conventional milestones, trials, heartbreaks, joys, and triumphs of life. A golden cage is a cage all the same.

The reason why Farida Khanam keeps her daughter under lock and key is the story of what patriarchal societies do to women. We meet the important women in Farida Khanam's life, and how they transfer their trauma to her. We see how they make Farida Khanam a woman of steel and a woman who cannot see the pain and damage she inflicts on her daughters. We meet the not-so-important men in her life, and how they are victims of patriarchy themselves, and how women continue to bear men's cross. Gazi narrates each character's story with the unwavering confidence of a creator who knows about every fibre of her characters' being. But the most fascinating aspect of Gazi's narration is how it's impossible to guess the path the story would take despite knowing the characters and their motivation. In my copy, the last line of the story is the last line in the book itself. There are no acknowledgements, and notes about the author and the translator after the story ends. So, I was left reeling in shock when I read the last line. The punch in the gut was so sudden that I was breathless for a brief moment.

Hellfire is wild and disturbing, and it's incredible and important. What makes it outstanding though is how the horror is omnipresent and surreal. Imagine this -- you are ensconced in your bedroom, but the clouds suddenly become dark, and terrifying thoughts cross your mind. You just can't say what's bothering you, but you can feel a sense of impending doom. The horror that Hellfire holds is quite like what Shirley Jackson wrote in We Have Always Lived In The Castle. Nothing is explicit. In Hellfire, there is no mention of physical violence too. But the terror rises out of the characters' realisation that how seemingly normal things are on the surface, and how just a chink is enough to see how deeply ruined they are.