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The Whispering Chinar: 7.75
In Charbagh, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, a short detour from the Grand Trunk Road that leads towards Afghanistan, stands a chinar tree in the garden of Khan Mohammad Usman Khan. Legend has it that it was planted by a saint known to the grandfather of the Khan, who had told him that the family would prosper till this tree survived. The tree has stood for generations, a silent witness to the many stories of Charbagh, its grounds held sacred until the day a bullet fired by the oldest son of the Khan hit one of its branches.
In this debut collection of interlinked stories, the banker author recounts the stories as seen by the chinar tree. In Charbagh, a village where modernity slowly creeps in, there are tales of unrequited love, of family honour and religious persecution, of patriarchy and breaking its shackles, and of what it means to belong to Charbagh in tumultuous times.
Here, Fahad Khan falls in love with Saad Bibi, but it is a dangerous affair that threatens to uproot social norms. An imam competes with another for devotees, and an air-crash survivor-turned-teacher is charged with the crime of blasphemy. In Charbagh, Nazo learns why she has been sent away from her family, and Ali finds out how far friendship and trust can go. A banker struggles to make sense of his misfortunes, while Farid Khan must acquaint himself with a woman's rejection.
Beginning from the 1970s, when the Indus was dammed near Charbagh, these stories chronicle a time and a place of belonging, of nostalgia, and of relationships and friendships. The Whispering Chinar is an extraordinary debut collection that tells stories from an unknown part of our world.
In this debut collection of interlinked stories, the banker author recounts the stories as seen by the chinar tree. In Charbagh, a village where modernity slowly creeps in, there are tales of unrequited love, of family honour and religious persecution, of patriarchy and breaking its shackles, and of what it means to belong to Charbagh in tumultuous times.
Here, Fahad Khan falls in love with Saad Bibi, but it is a dangerous affair that threatens to uproot social norms. An imam competes with another for devotees, and an air-crash survivor-turned-teacher is charged with the crime of blasphemy. In Charbagh, Nazo learns why she has been sent away from her family, and Ali finds out how far friendship and trust can go. A banker struggles to make sense of his misfortunes, while Farid Khan must acquaint himself with a woman's rejection.
Beginning from the 1970s, when the Indus was dammed near Charbagh, these stories chronicle a time and a place of belonging, of nostalgia, and of relationships and friendships. The Whispering Chinar is an extraordinary debut collection that tells stories from an unknown part of our world.
- GenresFictionShort Stories
224 pages, Paperback
Published July 1, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
July 13, 2022
Mention the word ‘chinar’ and all one can think of is romance or a quiet introspective walk with golden hued leaves rustling underneath. It goes without saying that a book with the title ‘The Whispering Chinar’ almost certainly invokes a certain romanticism and mystique. But this collection of interlinked stories by debut author Ali Rohila is anything but romantic. It comes laced with bristling male privilege and machismo, going full speed into the domain of overbearing power and entitlements. There are some very interesting women protagonists but their fate in terms of what they do in life and whom they marry is very much decided by the men around them.
The first story introduces readers to Charbagh, where the might and reputation of the patriarch Khan Mohammad Usman, reverentially referred as Khan Sahab, reigns over everyone and everything. The physical setting of Charbagh is important to the scheme of things – it is located in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan, a short detour from the Grand Trunk Road that leads towards Afghanistan.
Each of the stories has a Charbagh connection, even when the setting moves beyond the physicality of the location, thereby indicating the push and pull of one’s roots and influences. Or in some cases, the way rotten old ideologies cling to the innards of those we assume to be liberal and secular because they appear to have moved ahead.
Ali Rohila writes with just the right serving of narrative spells punctuated by terse, even tingling moments, where the story and the protagonists look set to veer off in a reckless direction. Some do skid off the rails, but you know the author is in charge and that it was all for effect. There is a familiarity that settles on as you read, almost as though you know the people and what they are going through, so that you find yourself on the verge of taking sides and sitting in judgment. And then you realise you have been had by the writing!
full review here: https://scroll.in/article/1029801/whi...
The first story introduces readers to Charbagh, where the might and reputation of the patriarch Khan Mohammad Usman, reverentially referred as Khan Sahab, reigns over everyone and everything. The physical setting of Charbagh is important to the scheme of things – it is located in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan, a short detour from the Grand Trunk Road that leads towards Afghanistan.
Each of the stories has a Charbagh connection, even when the setting moves beyond the physicality of the location, thereby indicating the push and pull of one’s roots and influences. Or in some cases, the way rotten old ideologies cling to the innards of those we assume to be liberal and secular because they appear to have moved ahead.
Ali Rohila writes with just the right serving of narrative spells punctuated by terse, even tingling moments, where the story and the protagonists look set to veer off in a reckless direction. Some do skid off the rails, but you know the author is in charge and that it was all for effect. There is a familiarity that settles on as you read, almost as though you know the people and what they are going through, so that you find yourself on the verge of taking sides and sitting in judgment. And then you realise you have been had by the writing!
full review here: https://scroll.in/article/1029801/whi...
January 10, 2023
2.5 stars. I was hoping to read some stories like the ones written by Daniyal Mueenuddin or Ali Akbar Natiq. In terms of expectations, this collection was disappointing. These interconnected stories seemed cliched and only a couple of characters were well fleshed out. Most of the endings were obvious. One of the stories seems to be half-baked. Patriarchy dominates most of the stories. The stories start from a small village called Charbagh in Pakistan and slowly make their way to city life before ending in the village again. The village life was well described and the Khan family and their descendants appear in all of the stories. There were encounters will love, loss, morality, power and financial struggles, loyalty, family dynamics and belief systems. The predictability of the stories and the formulaic way of writing were a let-down.
September 2, 2023
The Whispering Chinar: Whispers sinister and compelling
There is something R.K. Narayanesque about Ali Rohila’s interconnected tales. Set in or stemming from the village of Charbagh, simple and unpretentious, they are sensitive, character-driven stories. The characters are drawn in bold and definite brushstrokes; their persona not translucent and their intent not veiled. Hence, they almost never behave out of character; hardwired, path-dependent, strait-jacketed by their gender, class, ethnicity and cultural milieu as they are. What you see, therefore, is almost always what you get. The milieu they inhabit is one where dogma, superstition and prejudice remain entrenched and formidable foes. Hence, there the similarity ends for Charbagh is no Malgudy of relatively harmless, idiosyncratic and largely innocuous inhabitants. Unlike Narayan’s Malgudi, Ali Rohila’s Malgudi in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa is a considerably more sinister place where religious bigotry, patriarchy, misogyny and radicalism often manifest in all their unsightly avatars. Machinations rather than happenstance are the order of the day. Rohila writes about characters caught up in the whirlpools whipped up by these corrosive imperatives with palpable passion, indignation, wit, and sarcasm, but always with a deep empathy. A certain wistfulness and a lingering pensiveness permeate his narratives — always a yearning for what could have been if only compassion had prevailed, and love had triumphed. For the outcomes of his stories are almost always dismal for the nobler souls, as human caprice and wickedness largely overwhelm. But then we are introduced also to various valiant women and men who boldly go against the tide, pay a price, but nevertheless hold their heads high and stay resilient to fight another day.
Ali Rohila hails from the land he writes about and instinctively knows and feels its socio-cultural arrangements, its honor code, its political economy of politics and religion, its freedoms and its disparities, its generosities and its close-mindedness, and its breath-taking grandeur. To his credit he neither romanticizes not exoticizes the place and its inhabitants but tells his tales of avarice and jealousy, lust and love, rivalry and ego, power and vulnerability, with disarming straight-forwardness. Having been a close observer of various changes in the turbulent region over the past decades, he explores the terrain of traditional culture as well as rapid modernity and various contestations between the two; as also overlaps and contrasts of the rural and the urban and of the feudal and the corporate. The Whispering Chinar is thus an enticing and highly readable cultural and social chronicle of Pakistan in the 1970, 80s and 90s as it evolved, persevered and molded through a complex era of frequent and brusquely interrupted democracy, hapless westernization and changing normative frameworks.
An astute observer of how power consolidates and exerts itself — whether in a feudal milieu or a commercial one; in matters of matrimony, land ownership, corporate leadership, or religious fiefdoms — his nuanced descriptions are thought-provoking. The military, the cleric, and the feudal patriarch — ubiquitous and relentless overlords in our brand of hegemony and stiflers of a rich, diverse and vibrant culture — are meticulously deconstructed and dismantled by Rohila’s bold and unsparing pen. Romantic relationships too are an enigma that Rohila explores deftly, with considerable emotional insight and an eye for detail. Like any multi-tiered endeavor, The Whispering Chinar is therefore not amenable to narrow categorizations but a rich and layered text that operates at multiple levels.
A successful banker by day, Ali Rohila is someone steeped in the great poetic and romantic traditions of the land. His late father Parto Rohila was and remains a major influence — a thorough gentleman, respected professional, accomplished poet and deep admirer and translator of Ghalib, most notably his letters in Persian. It is with such inherited sensibilities that Ali Rohila gazes at the world he grew up in. Appalled by much of what he witnesses, he is too upright, candid and forthright to settle for being an apologist, an escapist or a disconnected aesthete. For him storytelling, therefore, is quite evidently not simply a mode of self-expression and creative exploration but a mode of confronting injustice, no matter how distressful the confrontation. The current volume is the successful culmination of years of dedication to writing as a meaningful and socially and politically relevant pursuit.
As it is short stories and poetry are very hard to find publishers for. Getting published by a prestigious publisher like Penguin Random House India is, therefore, no mean feat. Now published also by Liberty Books in Pakistan the volume of short stories is thankfully available to his compatriots and an exciting addition to the growing corpus of Pakistani fiction in English. Here is a hearty welcome to the Pakistani and South Asian writers’ community.
(The Review as it appeared in The Friday Times, September 8, 2023
https://t.co/zzKFsHpROA )
There is something R.K. Narayanesque about Ali Rohila’s interconnected tales. Set in or stemming from the village of Charbagh, simple and unpretentious, they are sensitive, character-driven stories. The characters are drawn in bold and definite brushstrokes; their persona not translucent and their intent not veiled. Hence, they almost never behave out of character; hardwired, path-dependent, strait-jacketed by their gender, class, ethnicity and cultural milieu as they are. What you see, therefore, is almost always what you get. The milieu they inhabit is one where dogma, superstition and prejudice remain entrenched and formidable foes. Hence, there the similarity ends for Charbagh is no Malgudy of relatively harmless, idiosyncratic and largely innocuous inhabitants. Unlike Narayan’s Malgudi, Ali Rohila’s Malgudi in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa is a considerably more sinister place where religious bigotry, patriarchy, misogyny and radicalism often manifest in all their unsightly avatars. Machinations rather than happenstance are the order of the day. Rohila writes about characters caught up in the whirlpools whipped up by these corrosive imperatives with palpable passion, indignation, wit, and sarcasm, but always with a deep empathy. A certain wistfulness and a lingering pensiveness permeate his narratives — always a yearning for what could have been if only compassion had prevailed, and love had triumphed. For the outcomes of his stories are almost always dismal for the nobler souls, as human caprice and wickedness largely overwhelm. But then we are introduced also to various valiant women and men who boldly go against the tide, pay a price, but nevertheless hold their heads high and stay resilient to fight another day.
Ali Rohila hails from the land he writes about and instinctively knows and feels its socio-cultural arrangements, its honor code, its political economy of politics and religion, its freedoms and its disparities, its generosities and its close-mindedness, and its breath-taking grandeur. To his credit he neither romanticizes not exoticizes the place and its inhabitants but tells his tales of avarice and jealousy, lust and love, rivalry and ego, power and vulnerability, with disarming straight-forwardness. Having been a close observer of various changes in the turbulent region over the past decades, he explores the terrain of traditional culture as well as rapid modernity and various contestations between the two; as also overlaps and contrasts of the rural and the urban and of the feudal and the corporate. The Whispering Chinar is thus an enticing and highly readable cultural and social chronicle of Pakistan in the 1970, 80s and 90s as it evolved, persevered and molded through a complex era of frequent and brusquely interrupted democracy, hapless westernization and changing normative frameworks.
An astute observer of how power consolidates and exerts itself — whether in a feudal milieu or a commercial one; in matters of matrimony, land ownership, corporate leadership, or religious fiefdoms — his nuanced descriptions are thought-provoking. The military, the cleric, and the feudal patriarch — ubiquitous and relentless overlords in our brand of hegemony and stiflers of a rich, diverse and vibrant culture — are meticulously deconstructed and dismantled by Rohila’s bold and unsparing pen. Romantic relationships too are an enigma that Rohila explores deftly, with considerable emotional insight and an eye for detail. Like any multi-tiered endeavor, The Whispering Chinar is therefore not amenable to narrow categorizations but a rich and layered text that operates at multiple levels.
A successful banker by day, Ali Rohila is someone steeped in the great poetic and romantic traditions of the land. His late father Parto Rohila was and remains a major influence — a thorough gentleman, respected professional, accomplished poet and deep admirer and translator of Ghalib, most notably his letters in Persian. It is with such inherited sensibilities that Ali Rohila gazes at the world he grew up in. Appalled by much of what he witnesses, he is too upright, candid and forthright to settle for being an apologist, an escapist or a disconnected aesthete. For him storytelling, therefore, is quite evidently not simply a mode of self-expression and creative exploration but a mode of confronting injustice, no matter how distressful the confrontation. The current volume is the successful culmination of years of dedication to writing as a meaningful and socially and politically relevant pursuit.
As it is short stories and poetry are very hard to find publishers for. Getting published by a prestigious publisher like Penguin Random House India is, therefore, no mean feat. Now published also by Liberty Books in Pakistan the volume of short stories is thankfully available to his compatriots and an exciting addition to the growing corpus of Pakistani fiction in English. Here is a hearty welcome to the Pakistani and South Asian writers’ community.
(The Review as it appeared in The Friday Times, September 8, 2023
https://t.co/zzKFsHpROA )
December 10, 2024
Rating 3.5 stars
January 1, 2023
Lovely collection of short stories describing the life of villagers, connected through Islam. Fighting the misfortunes of human condition with love.
January 4, 2025
The Whispering Chinar, explores tricky and taboo topics, with mostly inter-connected short stories which albeit interesting, come across as work-in-progress leaving the reader wishing the stories had been developed more.
Full review here: https://thebooksieve.com/book_review/...
Full review here: https://thebooksieve.com/book_review/...
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews