All under the Sun

The life of the exile described in ‘Men in the Sun’ seems to be largely godless according to me. The only instance where God seems to be invoked is when thinking of the past, and people who have die, “The mercy of God be upon you, Ustaz Selim, the mercy of God be upon you.” Yet what seems to me to fill the role of the divine in this context, is the Sun. In the absence of the divine, the Sun becomes the only thing one can depend upon, swear upon: “I’m as sure of that as I am of this damned sun.” The divine role however is warped then to a great extent.

To explain further, notice that the Sun is what unites the characters, and in fact all human beings together, even if they may have divided the earth into territories and ousted others from their share, the Sun inevitably falls on all, the old and the young, the perpetrators and the victims. The title of the story reflects the same sort of unity, that these separate characters are brought together by ‘fate’, which in this case is also the Sun. It is the Sun which can either cause loneliness or desolation, and it is also the Sun which brings a new day, with perhaps renewed hope. The following instances show this:

“The sun was pouring flame down on his head, and as he climbed the yellow slopes, he felt he was alone in the whole world.”

“…in some wonderful way it had broken down all the barriers of despondency… When the sun rose he opened his eyes. The weather was beautiful and calm…”

The divine however, only seems to manifest its side of terror and wrath in this context. Thus the words used to describe the Sun are “merciless” and “fearful”. Significantly also, there is the passage that talks of being dying of sunstroke when going to Kuwait, but the narrator contemplates on the kind of end such a death was, and to whether it was just as simple as all that. There hence is confusion in the understanding of this new divinity, whether this was “God’s Hell” or “Could the sun kill them all and the stench imprisoned in their breasts?” The first part of the question is at the very least ominously answered by the end of the narrative.