Of Mud and Honey by Roxana Trabulsi. Published in 2023 by Ten 16 Press, an imprint of Orange Hat Publishing, 259, South St, Suite B Waukesha, Wisconsin, W1 53186 USA. Pp: 315. Price: $ 17.99 (paperback), $ 25.99 (hardback).
In 1871, a young Parsi arrived in Aden, hoping to make his fortune. Bhicajee Cowasjee was drawn to the Arabian maritime city because its British colonial masters had given it the business friendly status of a free port. While he was a relative latecomer to Aden — others had preceded him after Britain’s 1850 declaration — his name would become among a select few etched in the city’s commercial history.
At its peak, the number of Indian expatriates in Aden was an estimated 30,000, including 1,300 Parsis. These expats served the imperial power’s needs in a multitude of ways, from filling municipal jobs to providing the economic and intellectual scaffolding for building foreign rule. After the British displaced the local sultan in 1839, Aden went from being a sleepy coaling stop for ships to a watchtower protecting India, the crown jewel of Britain’s colonies, from rival powers.
Aden’s very location is considered strategically vital — in Yemen, at the southern end of the Arabian Peninsula. There it overlooks traffic between the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea. In the colonial era, Aden’s significance to shipping, and to preserving Britain’s grip on India, increased after the Suez Canal opened in 1869. The Canal drastically cut the time it took to sail from Europe to India and boosted traffic.
In an internet post, an American oilman who spent five years in Aden until departing in 1967 recounts what he saw there: "Most of the shops were deep and narrow and incredibly hot. Their ceiling punkahs (fans) didn’t cool anything… Some of the buildings were offices of the colonial administration. Others held a variety of commercial enterprises, mostly with Indian names — Sunderji Kalidas and Sons, Bhicajee Cowasjee, J. Premjee and Co and Cowasjee Dinshaw. Bhicajee Cowasjee had knocked several shops together and sold — from separate emporia — musical instruments, general hardware, haberdashery and foodstuffs. They also had a restaurant, the Galleon Grill, described in their adverts as ‘an intimate, dear little place plucked right from Home and transplanted in Aden for you.’”
More than a century after the British takeover of Aden and its environs in southern Yemen, however, the local citizens insisted on running their own affairs. Their simmering resentment of foreigners prospering in their midst and ruling over them boiled over. They began a bloody insurrection. (Location has been more bane than boon to Yemen. Meddling by outsiders and internal strife still roil the country.)
A land that generations of expatriates, most of them from India, had found idyllic suddenly became inhospitable. The British quickly capitulated. They departed Aden in 1967, leaving the Indian merchants and professionals who had come to the city in their wake to fend for themselves.
This is the backdrop to the harrowing tale at the center of Roxana Trabulsi’s (pictured) novel Of Mud and Honey. (The title pays homage to the distinctive honey found in Yemen and the country’s mud-brick architecture.)
At first impression, the reader would be right to label the novel a thriller, a political thriller to be exact. To fans of the genre, the gist of the story and its remote and exotic setting hew to a familiar formula: In a distant land bad people have taken an innocent family hostage and against all odds good people are working to get the captives freed.
What lends verisimilitude to the story is that it is a barely disguised account of the actual predicament of real people — two of whom were the author’s mother and father. In fact, the author notes, her inspiration was a journal that her now late mother surreptitiously kept during months of forced confinement, deprivation, anxiety and defiance. You might say Trabulsi’s mother is the co-author.
Let me get to the kudos right away: This is a skillfully crafted narrative, especially admirable in this respect because it is a debut novel. The former Roxana Motiwalla has come up with what they call in the trade a page-turner, which is as high a compliment as a reader can bestow on a thriller. (I do have some quibbles, but those later.)
It is the late 1960s, and Dara Barucha and his wife Silloo are Indian expats in Aden. The city’s colonial masters, facing irrepressible native discontent, are preparing to leave. Dara is the latest generation of the family to own and manage Bhicajee Cowasjee. The mercantile business was founded by the patriarch nearly a century before and had become a city landmark. Over the years, the imported wares the shop stocked drew clientele of means, many of them European expats, members of local diplomatic posts and tourists. In recent years the family had set up new businesses, including a restaurant and a movie theater.
The Baruchas are well known and well regarded in town. Customers know them as honest merchants. Friends know them as good company. Many local Yemeni families, not as well-heeled as his foreign clients, find Dara a generous and helpful member of the community. The "good deeds” part of the venerated Zoroastrian precept "good thoughts, good words, good deeds” is not just an empty slogan for the Baruchas. Dara is fond of life in Aden and the friendships he has made. "Beach clubs, boating, water-skiing, dancing and campouts along the shoreline were all part of the everyday routine.”
He turns away doubts and concerns about what might lie in store for his family and businesses in a land ruled by Yemeni revolutionaries. He declines an opportunity to move to a more congenial spot away from the troubled country.
Dara’s vote of confidence in revolutionary Aden quickly turns out to be misplaced, and that’s where the Barucha story takes a grim turn.
One evening Dara’s reverie is interrupted by a knock on his door. Officials of the revolutionary government have come to his home with a chilling message: "We come from the prime minister’s office with instructions to put your family business under custodianship.”
"What do you mean? What is custodianship?” Dara asks."We will be doing some investigating. You do not need to go to your office tomorrow. Please just stay here.”
Falsely accused, Dara is thrown into a notorious prison along with some others involved in the business. Silloo, their children, and other family members are put under house arrest pending trial. Both sets of captives suffer months of uncertainty and deprivation. Silloo desperately, but discreetly, tries to summon help from friends and, through them, from Indian and British diplomatic officials. She faces daily threats and humiliations from the guard assigned to her home, a truly villainous character.
This is when the desperate family finds some unexpected allies. Not to give away too much, but it turns out the Yemeni beneficiaries of the Baruchas’ years of "good deeds” have not forgotten them.
In the Indian context, creative artists such as novelists, dramatists and movie script writers generally have a hard time crafting well-rounded Parsi characters, individuals with the ability to experience and express a multitude of emotions common to all humanity. Maybe that is because of the well-known stereotype of Parsis as wealthy, middle-class and jolly, especially jolly. Even Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in a speech lauding the many faceted contributions of Parsis to Indian society, singled out one characteristic. Parsis, he said, "have taught us Gujaratis to laugh.”
Parsi characters are seen as hard to imbue with the pathos necessary to lend dramatic depth to the plot. Danger, deprivation, helplessness are not circumstances that come to mind when one thinks of a Parsi. So, often, Indian writers or filmmakers see Parsis through the one-dimensional lens of drollery.
Trabulsi’s Parsi characters are multidimensional. They are defiant. They are in despair. They are guileful, trusting, needy, proud. They are comfortable among the powerful but without losing the common touch. To relax they sip Scotch and listen to Miriam Makeba. In times of stress they recite Ashem Vohu. "Happiness is to him who is righteous for the sake of the best righteousness,” this ancient Zoroastrian prayer exhorts. In other words, the Baruchas are normal people with normally complicated cares, emotions and coping mechanisms. They are relatable.
The author’s own affection for her characters is palpable. With or without pseudonyms they are her parents and extended family after all. The book is a long tribute to them, especially her valiant mother. In the process Trabulsi also opens a window to how ordinary Parsi Zoroastrians live their faith. The faith they practice is one of simple, unquestioning devotion. They wear the sudreh and kusti. They pray every gah. They recite Ashem Vohu. When a traditional dakhma funeral for a loved one is refused, they quickly swallow the disappointment.
Some quibbles: The names of some of the Parsi characters are idiosyncratically spelled which takes away from the realism that otherwise imbues the entire saga. "Barucha” instead of Bharucha, for instance. And it is unlikely an agiary official would be named "Mardden.” Perhaps the author misheard "Madon.”
Even some of the transliterations of Gujarati expressions sprinkled through the story are slightly off. For instance, "Dara, Dara, ooto. Wake up.” "Ooto” probably is what a western ear hears when a Gujarati speaker says "ootho.” To readers familiar with the idiom, these miscues are like speed-bumps in an otherwise easy flowing narrative.
The author has left one conundrum for the reader to resolve: Is her book fiction (she labels it a novel) or non-fiction (which she more than implies in end notes)?
Trabulsi has told interviewers she chose to frame her writing as fiction so she could take creative license to fill in gaps in her knowledge of the facts and because it liberated her from shyness she experienced when she tried to write directly about her parents.
But the kinds of events she describes during that turbulent period in Aden feel real because they were real. Many were victimized during the revolutionary troubles. Numerous Parsis and other Indians fled Aden in haste. Some left without possessions they had accumulated after years of work.
So I read the book as if it was mostly fact, with Trabulsi’s imagination and research filling in obvious gaps. Every time I encountered Silloo and Dara Barucha in the story, I knew they were really Prochi and Rohinton Motiwalla. And, in real life, the Motiwallas did operate a business in Aden called Bhicajee Cowasjee. PORUS COOPER
Cooper is a frequent contributor to Parsiana based in the US.