At one level, Sunny Singh’s Refuge: Stories of War (and Love) is a dirge to the incalculable human cost of war. At another level, it is an affirmation of humanity shining through the ravages of conflict. While she dwells on the loss that war brings in its wake — the loss of life, dignity, sanity, morality — Singh also suggests that perhaps the only thing it can never take from us is the elevating power of love.
The title story Refuge is the searing tale of a young couple, Abid and Nur, trying to survive the horror of the Syrian civil war. Nur flees with their little daughter, and Abid promises to follow her soon after. By the time he shows up at the refugee camp where Nur is, both have endured unspeakable violence — she has been raped many times, and he has been mercilessly tortured and mutilated. They touch each other’s broken bodies and recite the dates when they were brutalised, their love for each other undiminished despite the shattering abuse to their body and mind.
Each of the 13 stories in the collection is woven around a real war, but the author refrains from weighing down her narratives with specific details about these conflicts. Their horrors, too, are merely hinted at: in the apprehension of the little girl whose father is an officer of the Indian army, and who, she fears, may be snatched by death on his next tour of duty (‘Number Nine Bungalow’); in the calm determination of the girl who saw her mother and sister raped and killed getting dressed for her tryst with a suicide bomb (‘The Tigress Hunts’); in the dehumanisation of Lyndsey, discharged with dishonour for her murderous interrogation techniques in Iraq (‘Tulips’); in the obsessive melancholia of old Carmelita, who sits in a Madrid plaza, caressing scraps of clothes that belonged to the men in her family executed during the Spanish civil war (‘Faded Serge and Yellowed Lace’); or, in the unspoken love of an elderly British spymaster which becomes his undoing (‘In the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens’).
Though they span different continents and ages, in a sense, the stories transcend place and time, and become portrayals of the universal truths of war — the cruelty, the carnage, the vicious cycle of revenge, the way some die fighting and some die loving. And some wait grieving.
Singh, who is the author of three novels and three works of non-fiction, including A Bollywood State of Mind: A Journey into the World’s Biggest Cinema, tells her tales of war and love with rare understanding and poignancy. Her prose is elegant, restrained, gently reminding us of our essential humanity — that which can perhaps redeem us in these times of devastating strife.
Shuma Raha is a journalist and author
Refuge: Stories of War (and Love)
By Sunny Singh
Footnote
pp. 208; Rs 499
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