Shabir Ahmad Mir’s 2020 debut novel, The Plague Upon Us, concludes on a haunting note, where darkness lingers and hopelessness persists in the lives of its characters. His second (and most recent) novel, The Last Knot, transports readers to the brutal, twilight world of Kashmir ruled by Dogras, fraught with despair, where a carpet-weaver dares to dream the impossible – creating a conduit of his liberation, to weave a carpet which can fly.
Mir sets his narrative a century and a half ago to the Dogra rule, where nearly everything was controlled by the monarch. The carpet-weaver reflects at one point in the novel, “New histories, new cities, are just mirages born of the skeletons of the old ones.” The “mad” pursuit of freedom, we see, dates back to history, an idea that the author had tackled in his debut novel too.
The novel starts with a weaver seeking to create a magical carpet. This ambition, which feels almost like a delirious dream, soon reveals itself to be more – a metaphor for artistic obsession. It is, which we find towards the end, a meditation on entrapment and futility.
Feigning madness
He is sent away by his Wusteh, his master, to the enigmatic Abli Bab, a thumbless weaver who lives in a secret cave within Haer Parbat. Abli Bab, realising that the young weaver has abandoned his loom and that the dreaded Dagshalli, the notorious taxation department of the Dogra rulers, will soon be on his trail, understands the perilous path he has chosen. “They even control time,” the weaver tells himself. Knowing the dangers that lie ahead, Abli Bab offers him a singular piece of advice: feign madness, be a Moutt.
Like young Hamlet, he wanders about disguised as a madman. He makes his way along the bank of Jhelum to the home of Rangur, a master-dyer, and into Rangur’s daughter Heemal’s heart. It is here that he begins to understand the true essence of colours. He starts to learn about them, their magic, their sanctity, and how they can aid him realise his dream of a flying carpet.
The historicity of the novel is woven seamlessly into its fabric. They are allusions to the Shawl Bauf movement during the Dogra rule and how the administration arbitrarily levied exorbitant taxes on carpet weavers and artisans. The notorious Dagshalli, through Dogra soldiers, would go to the extent of imprisoning a weaver’s wife, children, and parents to force the fugitive artisan to surrender.
Mir crafts these historical realities with remarkable subtlety. The rulers are never named, not because Mir shies away from it, but because he illustrates their tyranny so masterfully that explicit identification becomes unnecessary. Instead, they exist in the novel as oppressive archetypes, embodied in titles like “King Brutal” or the “King of Thumbs” – this is a ruler for whom a Kashmiri’s worth is measured solely by his ability to weave. If you cannot weave, you simply do not matter.
As the story leaps from chapter to chapter, Mir’s prose gets hypnotic, almost incantatory. The novel reads like a fever dream, and the lines between hallucination and reality blur with each page and each ellipses used. A lot unfolds within the 34 chapters of the book, yet much remains unsaid. The story often moves in gaps between chapters, which leaves the reader to imagine what might have transpired.
The novel evoked comparisons to Orhan Pamuk’s My Name Is Red, where multiple narrators and perspectives unravel a central theme. The Last Knot feels similar in that regard, as the weaver’s journey is shaped by the voices and recollections of those around him. Heemal, Abli Bab, the mysterious old man, and others all take their space to narrate tales, which are metaphors in themselves.
A relentless pursuit
As the novel gathers pace, the weaver finds himself ensnared in danger. Rangur is jailed by the Dogra tax police, which sets off a relentless cycle of deception where someone is prioritised over another. Heemal deceives the weaver, the weaver deceives Abli Bab, Heemal even deceives her own modesty, the carpet deceives the weaver … Come what may, the weaver remains relentless in his pursuit to weave the flying carpet throughout.
The Last Knot is not an easy read. It demands patience and a willingness to surrender to its rhythm. As one progresses, there is a need to pause, to retrace steps, to ponder the stories within stories and the metaphors embedded throughout. The novel is richly layered with original, evocative metaphors, so much so that even the chapter titles are metaphors. The tales of the past are metaphors which mirror the present predicaments of the characters. The text is at once poetic and delectable. The knot itself is a recurring metaphor. The knots of water, the knots of hair, the knot of light …
I hesitate to call The Last Knot a work of “magical realism” for two reasons. First, it reads like a fever dream, where the reader remains slightly perplexed, caught between what is real and what is imagined. The novel does not offer the supernatural as something overt or inexplicable but rather as an organic state. Second, and more important, is its contextual reality. The novel draws heavily on mystical and Sufi traditions, invoking figures like Prophet Solomon, Sheikh Hamza Makhdoom and Shah-e-Hamdan, whose historical and spiritual legacies blur the lines between faith, folklore, and lived reality. The result is a world where magic does not feel like an intrusion but a natural extension of belief and memory.
The novel’s ending (or is it the ending?) is jarring. We expect a moment of catharsis which is simultaneously devastating and, perhaps, liberating. The weaver’s realisation that the final knot is not an end but a beginning changes everything; what we have been reading is not a linear journey toward completion but an eternal cycle, where endings and beginnings merge. Did he succeed in making the carpet fly? What would it take for him to make a flying carpet? And if he did, for what good?
Mir’s prose is like the knots of the carpets his protagonist weaves. It is intricate, obsessive, sometimes maddeningly repetitive, but always deliberate.
Every time I travelled to and from Kashmir University, I would gaze at the distant Haer Parbat, the shrine of Sheikh Hamza Makhdoom standing at the edge, while above, the fort loomed, bedazzled in tricolour lights if it was an evening. But after reading The Last Knot, the sight will never be the same for me.
The hill is no more just a familiar landmark. I will find myself searching for the hidden cave of Abli Bab, imagine where the cannons were fired, picture the innocent souls terrified inside Kallai, the walls of the fortress. I will wonder: Is there, somewhere inside that hill, or a last knot still waiting to be tied? A knot that, when completed, might unravel centuries of suffering and lift the Kashmiris out of the humiliation imposed by the powers that loom above?
The Last Knot, Shabir Ahmad Mir, Pan MacMillan India.
