Book Review: ‘The Book of Everlasting Things’ by Tabish Khair

Published : Feb 09, 2023 10:25 IST We are often told that Partition took place in 1947. It is this long partition that Aanchal Malhotra’s debut novel, The Book of Everlasting Things, is partly about, but it also becomes, as it unfolds, a story about love and loss and, perhaps, finally a kind of redemption. Abandoning the family business in textiles, the Vijs enter the business of perfumes, propelled by the skills and experiences of Samir’s uncle, Vivek, who returns, after being presumed lost, from the First World War. In France, Samir eventually marries Léa, a French woman, and starts a family, and begins to recover, through notebooks that he has saved from the conflagration in Lahore, his uncle Vivek’s story of the First World War. Similarly, Samir’s recovery of his uncle Vivek’s mute stories of love, loss and longing in the years of the war is not just a novelist’s choice, but also that of a historian who is aware of the fact that the stories of soldiers from the British colonies, especially the coloured colonies, have largely been whitewashed out of popular narratives about the two world wars.