Book Review: Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi

                                               

 Although it is touted as a book about three Omani sisters Mayya, Asma and Khawla, this slim volume contains the stories of a multitude of characters, all connected through the three sisters and the men they marry.

Many of these characters get a page or two to themselves. However, the book isn't long enough to flesh out each of these lives. Yet, one still ends up sympathetic to most of the people populating this book.

The books has numerous allusions to bits of black magic and the often the narrative shifts between different time periods. At other times, it is just the hallucinations of the characters, but with so much going on, it all gives rise to some confusion.

The allusion to the moon is made often, as it is an icon of traditional Arabic poetry, specially the classic love poems. In the midst of it all is a strange, passionate love story between the father of the three girls and a typical femme fatale character. In itself it seems lively enough yet somehow its attachment to the rest of the narrative is wanting. Why is there absolutely no explanation of why he cheats on his wife? It seems to have been thrown in almost as an afterthought.

 The character who is most sympathetically fleshed out and who I grew grew quite fond of is Abdallah who falls in love with and marries the eldest of the three sisters, Mayya. However even in their relationship all is not smooth sailing.

Abdallah loses his mother when very young and grows up under the watch of the strict disciplinarian of a father and the violence that he faces at his hands makes your heart break. Throughout the length of the book Abdallah keeps on trying to recreate images of his mother trying to remember whatever little details he can. Her death, narrated rom different perspectives is like the unravelling of a mystery. Here is another convoluted story which remains unpredictable till the end.

 Abdallah faces violence that is father's hands and the trauma of it never really leaves him. On the one hand the desertion by his mother- at least that's the story told to him-haunts him all along. His desperate attempts to establish intimacy with his wife also leave you sympathetic to him, as she remains aloof.  

The reasons why Mayya refuses intimacy are not very clear other than her short lived romance with a young man before her marriage. Does she holds onto his memory, or is it simply depression does not become clear.

 The second sister who is desperate to get out of her parents home so she simply latches onto the best offer that comes away and she gets married. This is as much a reflection of the lives of so many women at least in parts of Asia where marriage is the one step which ensures at least some degree of freedom because till a woman is married she is not even considered an adult.

 The third sister Khawla gets the least time in the book

 This slim volume is populated by so many characters

 the various threads are all woven into each other and that the author is able to hold on to the various threads in making them into a coherent wholes is a definitely a big achievement

 It is also reminiscent of a lot of the customs and mannerisms of Indian women. The effort to keep up with the joneses specially in the matters of gift-giving to the bride at the time of the wedding in terms of a trousseau, the need to show off via the various customs, the internal wranglings between the women in the household and ultimate the word 

Patriarchy is more powerful than any law-these are the aspects that seemed very familiar to me.

 Even as these women live traditional lives they are hemmed in by the rules that bind them. They are able to find strength to not only guide their lives in their own way, how they best see it fit, but also navigating the different courses of life as it unfolds.  The book is also an intimate peep into Omani society, how it functions and how it is transitioning from the days past when it was a society of nomads of the bedouin tribes and now mostly city dwellers, living modern day lives in large metropolises.

If you, like me have had no introduction to Omani literature, this is certainly a great place to begin.