Places and Memory - the meaning of Basti

During the bombing in chapter 7, the apathy and listlessness of the main character Zakir and his family is highlighted, but only as a surface appearance. Abba Jan recites verses from the Quran, Ammi prays but Zakir finds himself unable to find anything to occupy his mind with, suggesting that his parents, who are engaged in acts of worship, are engaged in something that is essentially meaningless and a rote activity. Furthermore, when the bomb falls and Zakir’s mother says that it sounds like an explosion, Zakir can only respond with a listless yes. However, this apathy does not translate to anything deeper than a surface response, because when Ammi asks Zakir where the bomb fell, Zakir brings up in his minds the various lanes of the city (Abba Jan on the other hand is noted as being entirely absorbed in his recitation of the Quran, which serves to enhance the theme of generation gap in the novel and underscores his deeper apathy and numbness than Zakir’s). Zakir is forced to consider the possibility that the house in Shamnagar where he had passed his first night might have been destroyed. This possibility horrifies him as he realizes that the house that he had previously dismissed in his memory as unimportant was in fact extremely important to him, due to the room in which they had spent the night. That room was the physical space that had witnessed his tears of separation, and with its destruction all memories of such emotion experienced would have been for naught. Zakir realizes that he wants to remember his sorrows, and from here Intezar Hussein extrapolates an interesting insight into the deeper importance of basti within the novel. According to the author, if a city is destroyed, the sufferings of everyone who lived there are forgotten too, and this breakdown between the transformation of sufferings into memories further serves to highlight the necessity of such a narrative structure within the novel which comprises of memories and a protagonist whose name is Zakir (“the one who remembers”). Hence, places as living repositories of memories can serve to explain the loaded term that is “basti” within the novel.