I recently read “The Lost Love of Akbar Manzil” by Shubnum Khan as part of a readalong hosted by Tandem Collective Global (also, with thanks to Pan Macmillan SA and Exclusive Books). This was a wonderful opportunity to, in the company of South Africa’s best Bookstagrammers, discover the beauty and magic of this book.
This book is published under the title “The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years” in the UK and USA.
I annotated this book as we made progress in this readalong, and thought it would be a good idea to share a few favourites:
In an old wardrobe a djinn sits weeping. It whimpers and murmurs small words of complaint. It sucks its teeth and berates the heavens for its fate. It curses the day it ever entered this damned house. (What an opening line!)
No one in Durban remembers a Christmas as hot as this. The heat is a living breathing thing that climbs through the windows and creeps into kitchens. It follows people to work and at queues in the bank and on trains home. It crouches in bedrooms, growing restless until at night in fury it throttles those sleeping, leaving them gasping for breath. It sweeps through the streets and bursts open pipes, smashes open green guavas, and splits apart driveways. It burns off fingerprints and scorches hair and make people forget what they are doing and where they are going so that they wander around beating their heads.
She is going Home. It is not really home, but her father says it is because he believes it. He says Home can be many places, even places you haven’t seen before. He says Home can also be a memory if you return to it enough.
The silence was a complete thing. She could touch it with her fingers, taste it with her mouth, and sit in it like bathwater
She sees that the signs of love exist in small and quiet ways, from how people look at each other (or don’t), from the way they speak to each other (or don’t), how they touch each other’s shoulders carelessly or search for someone in a crowded room.
The garden is better at keeping secrets that the house. Whereas the house has grown stiff and slow and occasionally drops a piece of history from the rafters, the garden is nimble, it grows and climbs and peers. It is alert enough to ensure it keeps its secrets
‘But don’t you know? The best songs are the sad ones. It’s like love – the best love stories are the painful ones.’
Pinky says that love in real life is an unpractical thing. It slows people down and makes their brains wonky; it makes completely sensible people do all sorts of ridiculous and unreasonable things like get married or share food. She says there is no such thing as love because love is supposed to last forever and nothing lasts forever. She says love is just for the movies.
‘From the day a girl is born she’s told she needs a love story to survive. It is everywhere: in poetry, in music, in films and books. She is told life is worthless without love. She is told she is worthless without love.’ She lowers her voice. ‘But what no one tells her, what no one talks about, is that it can kill her. That the very thing they say can save her can destroy her. Love is a trap, darling. It lures you in then digs its bony fingers into your chest, breaks open your ribs, and yanks out your bloody, beating heart, and still leaves you alive.’
‘Love is like that.’ She pauses to look at the shut curtains as if she can see the view beyond them. ‘You’re driving along the highway, twiddling with the dials, until you finally find some good music on the radio – you’re humming along, making plans for what you’re going to cook that evening, thinking whether you need to defrost the chicken, then suddenly a car comes out of nowhere to blindside you. And then you’re skidding and sliding and screaming and everything goes black. When you wake up you find yourself in some sort of steaming wreck and you have to pull yourself out and there is blood running down your face and you’re dazed and you don’t know who you are or what you’re doing.’
Think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course. Love has no other desire but to fulfil itself.
@roelia_reads Convincing you to read this book! “The Lost Love of Akbar Manzil” by Shubnum Khan #lostlovereadalong #shubnumkhanreadalong with thanks to @Pan Macmillan SA @Exclusive Books #TandemCollective AD-PR product #roeliareads #booktok #booktoksouthafrica ♬ Seruling Kalonaho – vmozjr
Buy this book: The Lost Love of Akbar Manzil – Exclusive Books Online
