Exile

Moin Ahmed

Multiple Narratives of Divorce

  

   ‘Why can’t we be friends now?’ said the other, holding him affectionately. ‘It’s what I want. It’s what you want.’

     This tender exchange between Aziz and Mr. Fielding marked, for me, the climax of the story of affection between the two characters. At the same time, it symbolically questions the possibility of friendship between the Orient and the British Empire. But this friendship is denied by the immutable demands of the world, of history, of the world, indeed of time itself. In the end, both Aziz and Fielding were victims of loyalty, Aziz to hackneyed past of glory, a land that boasted of traditions often pieced together, representing the interplay of religions, castes and civilizations.  Fielding in his place remained loyal to the Imperial legacy, and was unwilling to let go of his philosophy of travelling light and becoming too attached to India. Yet at the same time, I felt that a unique bond does form between the two, wherein they accept the compromises the other cannot make, and so doing understand each other completely. Because of the ordeals he has faced at the hands of the imperial attitude Aziz can never accept the British, and at a deeper level, he represents the injustice against India. Similar to the case of Aziz and Fielding, Britain and India do not separate because they don't want to be together, but because they CANNOT. Aziz is unwilling to close the gap that emerges between them, and this unholy chasm intensifies and solidifies the feeling of injustice between the Indians and the British. The Indians cannot see the British as anything but usurpers of their land, and the British will never accept the emotional destruction they have wreaked on the land which they sought to help in a fashion. Forster sums it up perfectly:

     ‘But the horses didn't want it- they swerved apart; the earth didn't want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single file.; the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest house that came into view as they issued from the gap and saw Mau beneath: they didn't want it, they said in their hundred voices, ‘no, not yet’, and the sky said, ‘no, not there.’