Mirages of the Mind

A sprawling, gently satirical collection of linked tale within tales, Yousufi’s novel is a hymn to the chaotic lives of India’s Muslims, which follows a post-Partition immigrant to Pakistan, Basharat Ali Farooqi—schoolteacher, poet, and lumber-shop boss, whose misadventures are the subject of good-natured ridicule from the narrator. Basharat’s ferocious father-in-law, Quibla, is imprisoned in Kanpur for beating up a rival shopkeeper and emerges from prison undaunted, “but when he immigrated to Karachi, not only did he find the land strange but his own feet as well.” At 70, Quibla displays a photograph of his abandoned Kanpur home, repeating, “We left this to come here.” When old-fashioned Basharat buys a horse and a car, both disappoint and financially devastate him; the horse is lame, the car hardly runs, and Karachi authorities ticket him for both. A friend who remained in India faces circumstances no less absurd—traveling back to Kanpur after his wife’s death, Basharat discovers that Mullah Aasi lives in Basharat’s childhood room and “has impaled on darning needles all the letters... his friends and family have written.” Rich with allusions to Western and Muslim culture, philosophical asides, and poetic couplets, Yousufi’s text brims with the collected wisdom of generations. He treats the persistent ache of nostalgia for a long-gone world with its only effective salve: laughter. (July)