In March 2003, a brief news item, a few paragraphs long, came out in The Telegraph. "Muslims in Gujarat face blatant discrimination", the headline said: this community had difficulty buying houses, and found it hard to get mobile phone connections, housing loans, credit cards and insurance policies.
"Or anything," the story added helpfully, "that requires the verification of name, address and source of income." These news stories, their smudged print speaking of the ways in which the lives of numerous Indians had been disrupted and diminished by an institutionalised discrimination, were forgotten as the memory of the 2002 riots in Gujarat faded.
By 2011, when Ila Arab Mehta's Fence (Zubaan, translated by Rita Kothari) was published in Gujarati, the facts of segregation and prejudice against Muslims in the state were no longer considered newsworthy in an India surging in a different direction. But fiction has a licence that goes far beyond the reach of the news, and with decades of experience as a novelist, short story writer and teacher, Mehta spins a deft tale for the times. It is a pity that the introduction speaks of Fence in isolation, not placing it in the context of Mehta's other challenging and memorable writings.
The Gujarati cover for Fence (Vad) features a faceless woman in a burkha, her silhouette hovering above a large apartment building bisected diagonally by a single strand of barbed wire. The English language edition replaces this with a burkha-clad woman, her eyes connecting with the reader's, radiating a sturdy confidence as she rides a motorbike.
We meet Fateema Lokhandwala when she is on her way to work, preferring to ride along the riverbank so that she can see the new housing estates coming up where she hopes to buy a small flat of her own some day. Her story unfolds rapidly. She grows up in a "fragile mud-baked house that could fall any moment" in a village in Saurashtra. By the age of eight, she begins to understand that some classmates are different: she is "different", so are Dalits.
Education and English give her a way out; soon she has started to dream larger dreams. "Surely, on this wide and beautiful earth that Allah had made, there must be a small piece of land for me?"
Without sentimentality, but with enormous affection, Mehta sets down the many fences in Fateema's life - when she clears her university exam, part of her wonders at the questions the examiners ask her, about Jinnah and Hindu-Muslim unity.
"How much she had prepared for the interview, from ancient to modern India!" But were the examiners really interested in the questions they asked, or were they scrutinising her "Muslim mentality"? When she can finally afford a house, she is told that the builder's plans are never quite ready yet, that there is no provision in the society rules to allot flats to a single woman. Religion is never mentioned, and yet it stands like a fence between her and her dreams.
A key subplot concerns Fateema's brother, Kareem, and his immersion in the world of an imported terrorism, of conspiracies "to spread communal tension" and to "incite the youth", in those twinned phrases. He attempts to draw Fateema in, too, and for a brief while, she finds herself under suspicion for being a traitor, a namakharam. (Kothari, the Gujarati literature expert who has translated Fence, wisely leaves "namakharam" as it is instead of attempting clunky verbatim equivalents.)
This is the weakest section of Fence: the trope of the terrorist and the "good", patriotic Muslim, found in the same family, grates all the more because it is such a cliche in an otherwise subtle and layered novel. Fateema is three-dimensional; Kareem just a plot device. But once the novel returns to Fateema's dream, it gathers strength again.
The saddest part of Fence is not that the prejudices Mehta sketches so expertly are true; it is that the compassion, trust and practical assistance Fateema receives from strangers, friends and even the police ring slightly hollow. In these times, happy endings are the preserve of fiction, not reality.
