Suzi Feay
The two women whose friendship is at the heart of this novel don’t even meet until page 147. But then they have a long way to travel. The novel spans roughly the 1940s to 1980s, with Mahsa and Katherine both born in the war years in tragic circumstances, on opposite sides of the globe.
Mahsa’s American father, a water engineer working in Afghanistan, fell ecstatically in love with a local girl and married her. But when Mahsa is 13, her mother’s brothers murder her parents, outraged that the couple are living openly in Karachi, rather than fleeing to the US. Mahsa is whisked away to live with her grim uncle and aunt. Katherine, over in Canada, has a slightly better deal: at three months old, she is taken from the care of her unwed mother, who is put in a reformatory. “A woman could get arrested for not using the Ladies and Escorts door at a tavern, much less sleeping with a Chinese migrant worker.” Katherine’s Chinese father slips back to his homeland, never to be seen again.
Mahsa’s early memories of her father revolve around the music they both loved. At three she is picking out blues tunes on the piano. Mahsa, he admiringly says, is a “half-Afghan, half-American Karachi girl who likes jazz and pahada, playing ‘Kansas City’ like she owns it. Isn’t that a world to live in?” Although, as we see, the world isn’t ready for that. Katherine is exposed to jazz at the hotel where her worn-out mother works nights; Katherine is powerfully attracted to the rackety musicians, so charismatic in performance that they seem to grow taller on stage.
Different paths eventually bring the women to the same destiny as jazz pianists scraping a living in clubs while [married and?] bringing up children [where?]. Echlin’s theme seems to be the near-impossibility of women fulfilling their talent, at least during this [60s?] era; however gifted, it seems Mahsa and Katherine will always struggle and be deflected by wifely duties. Echlin impresses with the seemingly flawless presentation of the Mahsa’s Muslim family and Karachi setting. However, Mahsa’s story is, if not exactly cliched, still a familiar parade of stiff-necked, authoritarian men and compliant, enabling women.
The novel unfolds in alternating chapters written from each woman’s viewpoint. The duo apparently have a near-mystical onstage rapport as they perform side by side on two pianos. But for a story of friendship, it is remarkable how unfocused and faint the relationship seems; they don’t even meet that often. For Mahsa at least, confident Katherine represents a fearless attitude to life and fierce commitment to one’s art that she can only dream of. It seems more an idealised friendship than a close one.
The pace is a slow burn, taking characters from youth to, in some cases, sickness and death; a somewhat bleak trajectory. Given the timespan of the book, there is very little sense of the intellectual currents sweeping through American culture; no stiff breeze of feminism, no flower-power revolution, not even much rock’n’roll. The sweaty clubs are vividly evoked, the music almost rising off the page. Rather than a study of stardom, the novel turns a spotlight on the jobbing players, the ranks of professional musicians who gamely keep on swinging but who never get the big breaks. It’s all the more effective – and poignant – for that.
