MIRAGE By Bandula Chandraratna, Phoenix, £ 6.99 Revealing more by saying less, and that too, plainly, is an enviable art that comes effortlessly to Bandula Chandraratna. He can startle readers by exposing social repression and the equations that dictate them in exceedingly unselfconscious a manner; by playing with a kaleidoscope of emotions in so unassuming a form. Mirage is limpid and telling. And refreshing too, because it is not an account of a diaspora. A Sri Lankan by birth, Chandraratna is rooted to the natives of Saudi Arabia (where he had worked for some time) for an odyssey into the heart of the heat and dust. His style is strikingly simple and, sometimes, austere like the land he describes - long stretches of arid sandy earth, occasionally dotted with clusters of date palm trees and sparse habitation. For villagers like Sayeed, life in the town is harsh. Burgeoning with well-off immigrants, the town has pushed them to the outskirts, in shanties soaked in heat and squalor. The paltry job of a porter at the city hospital is incommensurate with a decent lifestyle and incongruous with the laid-back life that his brother, Mustafa, leads with a large family of two wives in the village. Yet the middle-aged, shrunken man with stunted aspirations seems more of a prop to the tragic drama that unfolds with himself, his wife and her lover pitched against a rigid and merciless Islamic society. Mustafa coaxes Sayeed to marry the young and affluent Latifa. After much deliberation on his financial and living conditions, Sayeed relents. Latifa is a widow with a child and the economic disparity is smudged by this fact, which otherwise could have been a hurdle to the match. For a village girl nurtured in rather lush environs, the squalidness and poverty make Latifa cringe and Sayeed embarrassed. Reality cracks the facade of illusion and the newly-weds withdraw within themselves. What remains is anything but a conjugal life. While tailing her goats one hot morning, Latifa gets trapped in the rocks and is rescued by a winsome youth, Hussain Hasmi. For the first time, Hussain sees her unveiled. The heat and the craggy terrain draw them close. Though taken aback by the suddenness of the encounter, Latifa is consumed by passion in a momentary impulse. A carefree abandon seeps into her being; an overwhelming release from restraint. 'She felt no fear of anyone... She screamed, and she laughed, and her voice came out unhindered... Hussain was standing with his back to her. She could see the red desert below, and far away in the distance, the Mirage.' But her joy, like the mirage, flickers and is crushed under the weight of morality. Convicted for adultery, Latifa is sentenced to death by stoning and Hussain, by beheading. Only Sayeed, intensely aware of human vulnerability, wails and pleads for their release. Latifa, pining behind bars for a last glimpse of her child, and Sayeed, burdened with guilt for dragging her along alien ways, are victims of a dominant ideology. The two disjointed scenes, like a montage, create a numbing effect. The narrative is saturated with snippets of a restrained society inwardly divergent and rebellious - women trailing in burkhas, religious police indiscriminately caning men who disobey prayer calls and the censure on all forms of recreation. Chandraratna doesn't experiment with either form or language. The authorial voice is not only faint, but almost untraceable. The characters are identifiable and unexciting. There is no novelty in the plot - ordinary mortals thrust into extraordinary situations is a hackneyed motif in literature. Yet, Mirage is engaging and intriguing. One can also discern the mellow writer, who has an exquisite eye for detail and is conscious of the subversiveness that he can lay bare. But given the fact that he prefers to depend on the reader's astuteness and is economic with words, doing what he has done appears formidable. He makes Sayeed, Latifa and several other figures, however insignificant, seem tangible by capturing them in moments of follies, crudities and haplessness. And even as the plot drifts from the staid life in a wasteland to a hair-raising catastrophe, the relaxed pace is never disturbed. The denouement catches one unawares. It's like trudging through the desert and suddenly being sucked in by quicksand.