Loss of Home as a Permanent State

"The mysteriousness that used to permeate everything seemed to have departed."

When Zakir returns to Rupnagar for the first time since leaving, he searches in vain for the same feel the village had for him when he used to live there but it is no where, not in the Black Temple, not in Karbala, not in the Fort, and not in the Raven Wood. This is, in my opinion, the ultimate tragedy of the exile--longing to return is the constant state of the exile and yet when, if, he does, the years of exile have already stolen even the sense of belonging to the actual home. The theme is repeated in works where the exile does manage to return home, like in the film Kandahar in which Nafas, exiled to Canada because of the dire situation in Afghanistan, does return to save her sister but finds herself not in her 'own' country but in a land that is strange to her and in which she is an outsider. 

It is as if the home moves on much like the exile grows up, neither waiting for the other during the period of absence, which results in a new form that makes the exile alien to the home and the home alien to the exile. When Zakir (and Habib) return to Rupnagar during the vacations (and it is important to note the return is temporary) they themselves are too changed to belong to their own former home ("His trousers were of a new cut. [...] now he had long English-style hair"). The parallel between the permanence of loss of homeland and the permanence of loss of childhood is a compelling one. Not only is childhood very deeply linked to a home and the 'safeness' of that home, it is also one of those things that cannot be got back once one has moved beyond it and I think so is also the case with belonging to homeland, one cannot have it back once one has moved beyond it--regardless of any attempts the exile might make at physical relocation. 

It's hard for me not to mention here the famous Palestinian symbol of 'Handala', a Palestinian child drawn by artist Naji al-Ali, who is forever 10 years old (and will not grow up until the return to homeland) because that is when al-Ali was forced into exile. This odd distention of time brings us to another very interesting theme, the permanent loss of belonging not just to a physical space but also to one's own time. Basti opens with Zakir repeatedly having various flashbacks (to childhood, interestingly enough) which are so pervasive that he has a hard time belonging to the present--and since one cannot actually go back to the past he ends up present neither there nor here. The same happens in Kanafani's Men in the Sun when Abu Qais becomes confused about his present surroundings due to his constant dives into memories of the village he belonged to before exile. Zakir almost seems to be imitating Handala in the first few chapters of Basti when he refuses to participate in his own life ("...the outer world had already lost its meaning. [...] he ran an indifferent eye over the headlines...") in the way he ignores the riots that are the center of conversation for everyone else, the way he cannot be bothered to read the news for his mother, there is a very stark disparity between Zakir and his surroundings so much so that not only does he not belong to the physical space that he inhabits but he seems separate from the very time he exists in (and since he can also belong to no other time, he ends up in a limbo of unbelonging).