Love has always baffled even the best of us. It brings forth different questions in our mind whose answers we do not know, and at times don't want to know. It induces a strange helplessness within us, a helplessness which we wish would leave our bodies and wouldn't bother our minds so much, but at the same time we cling on to this helplessness with every ounce of will our souls can provide.

This House of Clay and Water is a novel about love, a very unusual love. While exploring it between the most unexpected and strange couple, Faiqa Mansab, the author of the novel makes us take a different approach to love.

It made me ruminate on a lot of thoughts and that gave rise to several questions.Our usual notion of love has always been between a man and a woman. That one must give one's soul, body and mind, to one person (at a time). The idea of your heart belonging to one and your body belonging to another is always classified as adulterous. If we have given the right to our bodies to a single person don't we think that our heart too must belong to him or her? And when we give these two entities to two different beings don't we feel amorous and feel irked by the fact that we are bereaving both? To those we have given our minds and hearts to, to them we seek to give the physical cage of flesh and bones as well. Anything else is unacceptable to us. Why? Who said that this is the right way? Why do we feel it within ourselves, the constant desire to possess another being in all entirety? Why do we find peace in the eyes of the person we love even when there is no physical intimacy and feel repulsed at the thought of any other skin grazing against our own?

Faiqa Mansab embarks on a beautiful and lyrical journey to bring out love in its truest form, going beyond the mental barriers and showing the unconditional love between a woman, Nida, and a hijra, a hermaphrodite, Bhanggi. Nida thought she loved her husband, the husband who she thought didn't care about her, who didn't care about the death of their only diseased child. To her, her husband's claims for her love were nothing but false. She had trained herself to love him. But can one really train to love? She met Bhanggi, a person whose body resembled the characteristics of both a man a woman, yet not belonging to either, and trapped inside this cursed body were the feelings of a man. Nida found solace in the calm eyes of Bhanggi, she grew to love his narrow shoulders and slim waist and thin ankles. The fact that Bhanggi's body was stuck on two sides of a wide border separating man and woman didn't bother Nida. She was in love with him and as a result she didn't have a problem in loving his body eventually. Bhanggi found his reason for existence in Nida, as if God had purposely tortured him in the first twenty-three years of his life, so that He can give him the insurmountable joy of meeting and loving Nida. But a love this pure didn't have a blessed lifetime.

Nida had become friends with a woman who we can safely say was poles apart from her. This woman, Sasha, had seen Nida as a begum of a respectable politician, had seen her as a girl who had read so much that she found the world to be a bleak place and was thereby lost. Sasha had not changed Nida. Sasha had been witness to the change in Nida, and Nida was the one who brought about a change in Sasha. However the new Sasha wasn't an old Nida. She wasn't even a new Nida in fact. She was a Sasha who thought was going on the right path but was clearly on the wrong side of it. Nida's and Sasha's friendship was something unnatural as very rarely do we see women of such opposing nature come together. It's all because deep down they had a common thread and they were both lost. Lost and unable to understand what they should do whilst drowning in the ocean of right and wrong.

Men play another important role here. For men love is very difficult to decipher. They have mistresses on whom they want to shower every possible materialistic gift and make love to. Yet when it comes to leaving their wives and settling down with their mistress it is a big no for them. If their mistress humiliates their wives then they will not listen to it. When they go back to their wives they cannot bear them either. It's as if home and wife are both insipid beings and are just meant to be there. Just like one cannot leave their home, one cannot leave their wife. If they find that their friend's wife has paramours then it is wrong. However if their mistress is a married lady they don't really mind. A comely wife is a necessity. A wife who is dependent on them emotionally and physically is a must. Not having such a wife is demeaning to a man's self esteem. But tending to their physical needs is not, as they have already given birth to the required number of children and their bodies no longer hold any appeal. The man's appetite of course is looked after outside the house. And these very men think they love their wives deeply. After all he hasn't left his wife, still feeds her and clothes her and snores beside her every night. For a man, his heart belongs to responsibility and that belongs to his wife, while his mind and anatomy belong to another woman. For him, this is love. Is it wrong? Or is it right?
   

Spirituality too has a strong essence in the story and it is not the stifling kind of spirituality but more of the awakening kind.

This House of Clay and Water is an excellent read. Written about love in Pakistan, this is a bold story and deals with the notion of love in the gentlest of ways possible. At the end of it all, it will make you feel that love is unnatural. It can be between anyone and love isn't specified only between a man and woman, a woman and a woman, a man and a man.

There are only two kinds of love and that is love between two beings, and love between a being and God.

Title : This House of Clay and Water

Author : Faiqa Mansab

SOC Rating : 5/5

Genre : Fiction/Contemporary Fiction

Publisher : Penguin Random House

Publishing Year : 2017

#Pages : 272

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