This book was read at Kalimna, Yeranda cottages, near Dungog in early January 2025.
In a perfect world, and we all know that’s not where any of us are fortunate to live, you would grow up untroubled, fall in love, make a family of whatever diversity and shape reflected who you are, and die leaving no regrets or mistakes to be discovered and dug over by successive generations.
But we live in a plane marred by poor judgement and 20/20 vision that only activates when when we look at where we’ve been, and so while we dream of the ideal and hope for the best, we are often left holding the ragged results of life lived with imperfection dogging our every step.
Someone who is keenly aware of this, but who spends much of her life denying the truth of it, is Sarna Singh, the protagonist of Priya Basil’s Ishq and Mushq (love and smell) who leaves India in the late 1940s, following the bloody horrors of the Partition of India, to find what she hopes will be a new life in Kenya as the bride of Karma, a man who comes from a large Sikh family with considerable issues of their own.
Her hoped-for life doesn’t quite eventuate and it’s here and later in Uganda and then in London, England, that Sarna realises to her growing unhappiness that you can’t outrun your past nor the tragic secrets that mar them, and that the decisions you make to protect yourself from the pain can come back to damage and hurt you later, and play havoc with the lives of those you love.
Her story, which informs every beautifully readable page of Ishq and Mushq, is a universal one in many ways because it speaks to the longing we all have for connectedness and closeness to those we love, and how easily this can be sabotaged by decisions we make that are supposed to make things better but which, in the end, make things far worse.
History was being made continuously everywhere. All he [Karam] had to do was find it. If he could feel a great moment of history, perhaps he would get over the dull sense of anticlimax that had been haunting him ever since he’d returned from India. He would find history. Once, history had caught him unawares; now he would seek out and catch it.
It is clear that Sarna longs for happiness, great bountiful reams of it in an ending roll unfurling through her life.
But stung by the events of her teenage years, she seems patently unable to rest long enough in the good things in her life – and she does have them from a husband besotted with her at first to bright and caring kids, and a fierce intellect that is adept at working out ways to do things that evade others – assuming, of course, that she allows them to come into being in the first place.
Sarna is imprisoned by a corrosive narrative of her own making; in a bid to reframe what happened to her between the ages of fifteen and seventeen, Sarna has told her a series of self-justifying stories which place her not as a victim or an inadvertent villain but as the hero of the hour, the person who rescues and fixes, aids and amends, uplifts and saves.
It’s a beguiling narrative, to her at least, that allows her to handle the effects of a secret that eats away at her through the years, but it soon becomes apparent that while it benefits her, divorcing her from reality and allowing her to stomach some truly unpalatable factss, it is destructive to those around her.
So fuelled by paranoia and mistrust is she, by the need to either see herself as the hero or the victim – they are indeed contrary self-assessments but each, employed in its own way and at its own time, helps her to see life in a way that she can live with – that she is constantly misinterpreting things, confirming her own comforting narrative it is true, but leaving people like Karam, her children Pyria and Rajan, and her wider family on both sides, unable to get close to her or even to reason with her.
(courtesy Wikipedia)
The consequence of her ragingly aggressive internal narrative is that as Ishq and Mushq goes on over a good many decades, Sarna becomes ever more separated from the very things she wants in her life.
She wants her husband to hold her and love her but her accusations of infidelity (one of this which turns out to be true), keeps him far from her while her need to be close to her kids, for them to want her and to seek her out, is thwarted by her inability to simply let them be and to be a support rather than a helicopter parent annoyance.
Everywhere she looks, instead of seeing opportunity and love, hope and possible joy, she sees people out to get here, circumstances conspiring to rob her of what’s due her and a life designed not to give her what she wants but to take it away.
The story of Ishq and Mushq, which has as its central idea, uttered by Sara’s mother, Biji, is that “there are only two things you can’t hide – Ishq and Mushq: Love and Smell”, is how easy it is to lose the very things you crave by employing protective methods that might have once saved you but which in later adulthood years have instead become the tools of your self-engineered demise.
You really feel for Sarna because toxic though she becomes to herself and those around her, who it must be noted are not without their blemishes and their flaws and their own self-rationalising narratives, she is a victim of her own desperate race to redraft life into something that isn’t sad and traumatic but more in keeping with the rich hopes she once had for herself.
She [Sarna] would not consider that her reaction might be disproportionate to the facts. It was a relief to find something external that could be held to account for her miserable inner state.
We all approach life with this sort of hope in our hearts at the start, and when it becomes clear life isn’t going to be quite so perfectionistically accommodating, we face a choice – we either deal with the truth and find a way to live with it healthily or we fall into, or rather remain in, patterns which, far from protecting us as they once did, simply perpetuate the pain.
Love and life are fiendishly complicated and while you could damn Sarna as a nightmare on legs who can’t let go of her pain and thus keeps it going as well giving forms of it to others, it is far more reasonable and understandable to see her as a Everyperson, an extreme example but still, who falls into some very unhealthy patterns and then simply can’t escape them.
Reading Ishq and Mushq might seem like it would be harrowing and in some ways it is as the lives of Karam and Sarna, Pyria and Rajan, and their extended family, fall into more valleys than they climb peaks, but there is something about the empathy and the honesty of the way basil writes that causes you to sink into the story of Sarna and to appreciate how it is that someone can so ardently and unwittingly be the architect of their own persistent unhappiness and corrosive demise.
We are all, to some extent victims of our pasts, and Basil writes about this with real heart and a beautiful sense of understanding, and while Sarna is patently unable to save herself, and it is up to her family towards the end of the book to free the family from a trailing secrets of lies and secrets, you leave Ishq and Mushq feeling as if you understand what it is to one trapped by your past and the steps to make sure it doesn’t poison your present and rob you of your future.