The three-year-long Covid-19 pandemic was a horror saga and yet we remember so little of our individual days in isolation. The every day – repeated in the exact pattern over and over again – perhaps disabled the part of our brain that sieves the extraordinary from the ordinary, the unforgettable from the forgettable, memories from reality.
We remember the sickness and death – always together, always lurking. We remember the loneliness – new and debilitating. We remember the despair – malevolent, all-consuming. It was the worst of times. Still, there were stories of hope, of shared humanity, of friendship in unexpected places.
Avtar Singh’s new novel Into the Forest takes us to Germany during the grim times of the early lockdowns. Covid-19 – referred to as “the sickness” – does not stop rumours and crimes from taking place. “Scandal finds fuel in a time of isolation”, says a journalist (also called Avtar), after a young German woman goes missing. She was last seen in public sitting “too close” to Nabi, an Afghan refugee, who is a janitor at the local hospital. Besides disappearances, hate crimes and racist attacks are also at an all-time high. However, no one expected a local, much less a White woman, to go missing in these already troubled times.
The unnamed town is located at the foot of a forest. The wilderness provides a happy escape from the sickness all around. The residents can finally take off their masks here, walk their dogs, let their children free, and dream about the day when all of this will come to an end. It’s a point of genesis – the forest offers a break from routine as the residents eagerly wait for their new lives to start.
Suspended lives
Ahilya, a middle-aged Indian woman who has recently moved to town; Nabi, an Afghan who has found a job at the local hospital after arriving in the country on refugee boats and angry seas; Liesl, an elderly woman who was born in Czechoslovakia and has a special love for plants and flowers; Nejla, a Bosnian immigrant and mother of two young boys; and Mia, the German woman who goes missing are at the centre of Snigh’s novel. Possibly a very small town, all of them have seen and know something about each other even before they were formally introduced.
The Indian woman feels slighted by her teenage son and ever-busy husband, she feels unwanted. The only friend she has in this distant land is her dog. Though reasonably well-off, her loneliness stems from being ignored by her loved ones. The mute animal, who needs her to stay alive, reminds her of what life used to be like before this unpleasant, epic change. When Ahilya sees Liesl on one of her walks with her dog in the forest, she is comforted by the old woman’s maternal kindness and easygoing ways. Nejla – often referred to as an “angel” by the other two women – goes into the forest to let her children play. Her endless patience and good spirit charm them. Nabi, good-looking and soft-spoken and Afghan, spends his hospital breaks staring at the trees and listening to birdsong. He can often be seen eating fruits, until a few weeks later when the good-natured Mia, visiting the town from Berlin to look after her parents’s dog Nacho, starts joining him for tea on the bench.
This is what their day-to-day lives look like – with little expectation of excitement and short interruptions from the outside world. A phone call from Nabi’s brother from their Afghan village unsettles him – his young nephew has taken ill. His brother insists it cannot be the sickness and when Nabi suggests that they get tested, his brother gently dismisses his worries with age-old wisdom: “What you know in your mind doesn’t affect what you carry in your heart.” While Nabi is content with being allowed into this new country, his brother reminds him that the rich can never consider the poor their equal. The brothers have opposing views on immigration and Western imperialism. Still, they are grateful for the euros Nabi sends.
Harpreet, another Indian in this town, considers Ahilya something of an older sister. She addresses her as “bhainji” and her job at the local incinerator is barely something to boast about, but employment – of any kind – is always welcome.
The lives of these unsuspecting residents receive a rude shock when an intruder lands in one of their homes and a story has to be quickly concocted to prevent the victim from paying an unfair price. Only, the one who will take the fall might lose everything in the process.
Our lives as such
Singh moves around his characters like chess pieces. They cross each other’s paths but do not obstruct them. They exist at the same time in their minds and the present reality. Singh’s experiment with form – Ahilya’s segment is journal entries; Nabi’s, mostly dialogue – prevents the characters from merging into each other. It is a necessary and difficult exercise if you want the reader to remember – and grow fond of – each of them. The author leaves out ornate descriptions of their physical surroundings and emotional landscapes. We are invited to look at them in the here and now, to appreciate the friendships born in unfortunate times, and to acknowledge that human existence is more a matter of chance than anything else.
Immigration – which is as much at the heart of the novel as the pandemic – is probably the finest example of the silent role that luck plays in each of our lives. The uneasy categories of refugee and immigrant are interchangeable – depending entirely on how much on good terms your home country is to your acquired one. While they are scorned and easy to pin the blame on, the host country often forgets the indispensable roles immigrants play in keeping their economies alive. When you keep the door ajar instead of firmly shut, it becomes easy to be smug about your apparent generosity in letting the displaced make a home in you.
The short years of the pandemic and the ongoing “refugee crisis” warrant a question – What do we do with the small space and limited time given to us on this planet? Looking after oneself is the sensible answer, but coming together in a crisis, offering to shoulder someone’s burdens while you are already weighed down by your own is the more compassionate, humane one.
The cover – illustrated by Chinmayee Sawant and designed by Saurabh George – is like a puzzle offering clues, and deserves appreciation too. It is even more delightful to behold once you finish reading the novel. Into the Forest resists easy categorisation and it is unnecessary to slot it into a genre. I would even hesitate to call it a pandemic novel. Singh creates a new corner for himself, and what emerges out of it is an elegant, meditative novel that reminds us there are fewer illnesses as destructive as that of human negligence and violence.
Into the Forest, Avtar Singh, Context/Westland.
