Seven
Farzana Doctor
Dundurn Toronto, 2020
Review by Kiran Bhat
The number seven is a number of great meaning in many religions, particularly the Abrahamic ones. The day of rest after creation was the seventh; the number of heavens, or afterworlds, are seven too. The human mind unconsciously links the number seven to the divine. And so the novel Seven, by Farzana Doctor, begins innocuously enough. Grounded in the down-to-earth and straight-shooting narration of Sharifa, its Bohra-American protagonist, Doctor’s novel feels at first like the typical homecoming novel. Sharifa has grown curious about the life of one of her distant forefathers, and like many people who are born to one culture but belong to another, she longs to fully know herself; further, her marriage is on the rocks. So, she and her husband, Murtuza, move back to Mumbai for eight months.
At the onset of the novel, Doctor depicts Sharifa’s own inability to fully impassion herself over her husband as the sign of a marriage that is falling apart. The reader is lulled into believing this is another marriage drama. It is a deft trick, and surprisingly works; once Sharifa arrives in India, and starts moving from cousin to auntie, the word khatna––the Arabic term for circumcision, used also in the Indian subcontinent––is introduced. Seven, it turns out, is also the age at which some members of the Bohra, the South Asian Muslim sect to which Sharifa’s family belongs, choose to circumcise their girls. Whether it’s feisty and modern Zeineb, or the fastidiously traditional Maasi, every female in Sharifa’s family has some tale regarding khatna. Through these characters’ stories, and the slow unfurling of narrative that Doctor employs, one gets the sense that Sharifa’s disconnection from self has many more sources than an identity crisis or a staleness with a partner; there is something bodily gripping her, that has long been ignored.
Doctor’s descriptions returning to India as someone raised abroad are extremely relatable for first-generation/third-culture children, and her incisive language takes care to pass on the feeling to anyone who hasn’t lived in that perspective as well. “The humid air is a homecoming, wafting petrichor, gasoline, and the tropical green that resists the pavement’s incursion. The smell never changes,” she writes. Anyone who has flown into Mumbai will either remark, opine, or complain that this very much is, in fact, how Mumbai smells when one lands straight into the city from an airplane. With similar acuity, Sharifa describes being a foreigner in all countries:
It’s not culture shock as people typically understand it, but its reverse: when I return to the States, the place I’ve lived almost my entire life, India will have made me a foreigner again. It will remind me of my outsider status, disrupt the forgetting, wake me up to the fact that the balancing act does require effort.
To be between labels is a constant tug. On one side, there is a desire to perform to the ways of thinking and behaving of one nation, but then as we travel and become part of other places, old ways of acting drop away. It is then when we return we realize how different we are from what we were. And then we learn those mannerisms once more, have them melded onto the ones we picked up from our adopted place, and return home, to be once more a foreigner. It’s not confusion; when a person’s way of being has in fact been shaped by many nations or cultures, it is only inevitable that each little gesture or inflection graphs itself onto the body. By humanizing Sharifa, Doctor makes this process––or reaction to this process––accessible to those who normally would not think deeply of bi-cultural characters.
Another one of Doctor’s skills is to simmer and satiate drama through perusals into the mundane. A little trip to the ice cream store that Sharifa’s daughter, Zee, takes with her circumcision-forward auntie leaves the reader literally about to pace back and forth across the floor in fear of what could happen.
Conversely, when Sharifa and Murtuza experiment with BDSM, the repeated sound of a door opening and closing grows its meaning to reach far beyond the limits of the mundane: Sharifa is blindfolded, strapped to a chair. After some kissing, Murtuza “pulls [Sharifa’s] body down the bed, and yanks away the pillows behind [her] so that [she drops] flat on [her] back like a rag doll.” A page after this scene, there is “the sound of doors opening, closing.” Again, Sharifa feels her husband’s body stretched over hers, and again, the door shuts and opens once more. Because the narrative is in first person, and Sharifa is blindfolded, the reader does not know what is happening any more than Sharifa does. Through Doctor’s mastery of tension and brevity, it’s only inevitable that our minds turn towards the rotten.
What were probably the less impressive aspects of Seven involved Doctor’s decision to intersect Sharifa’s narrative with the narratives of one of her great-grand relatives, Abdoolaly, whose story Sharifa is documenting for a blog. These sections are often around a page or two in length, and attempt to capture life in Mumbai in the mid-1800s or early 1900s. Most of the narratives are Abdoolaly in dialogue with one of his many wives. They are often too short to add tension to the novel, and the writing lacks the richness of description that Doctor captures so easily while in Sharifa’s voice.
This is because Sharifa’s voice is so exceptionally drawn, and the strength, determination, and rawness of it carries this novel effortlessly from start to finish. While the novel often feels slow-paced, it does not necessarily feel like a detraction. There’s a real sense that the reader is living with Sharifa and her family, and every point of her narrative, from her reaction to hipster fashion trends of Mumbaikhers to her passive-aggressive snips add to the sensation that one is reading the narrative of a real person.
Seven speaks to the experience of female genital cutting, how it affects those who undergo it far into their adult years, and the tangled family dynamics that surround it. It fully renders the imaginaries of a certain woman, and gives her the sense and touch of flesh and blood. In creating Seven, Doctor feels no longer like an author speaking to a reader; her ease of crafting narrative coupled with the likeability of Sharifa’s voice makes Seven feel more like a close friend sharing than an author telling a tale. Many authors aspire for this sort of sublimity, but it is Doctor’s effortlessness in creating this intimacy that gives the feeling that she is an author on the verge of transcending the barrier between author and reader. Certain structural slip-ups prevent Seven from fully achieving this effect, but as Doctor continues to write and create novels, I’m assured that her work will continue to move up and onwards, towards the seven heavens and their stars.
Kiran Bhat is a global citizen formed in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, to parents from Southern Karnataka, in India. He has currently traveled to over 130 countries, lived in eighteen different places, and speaks twelve languages. He is primarily known as the author of we of the forsaken world… (Iguana Books, 2020), but he has authored books in four foreign languages, and has had his writing published in The Kenyon Review, The Brooklyn Rail, The Colorado Review, Eclectica, 3AM Magazine, The Radical Art Review, The Chakkar, Mascara Literary Review, and several other places. His list of homes is vast, but his heart and spirit always remains in Mumbai, somehow. He currently lives in Melbourne. You can find him on @Weltgeist Kiran.