THE POSTMASTER By Saad Ashraf, Penguin, Rs 295

The Postmaster is Saad Ashraf’s first novel. And it is in his debut fictional venture that Ashraf’s obsession with the history of the British India makes itself felt. The novel cuts a swath of seventy-two years of Indian history — starting from the late 19th century and extending some five years beyond Partition. It takes off where Ghulam Nabi, a devoted employee in the Indian Posts and Telegraph Department, is transferred from his native state of Punjab to Delhi. And it touches down where Ghulam Rasool, Nabi’s only son, dies of angina in post-Partition Pakistan in 1952. The events in the lives of the father and son during this period present a picture of a pro-British Muslim community in a tense transitional phase of Indian history.

Ashraf’s representation of this life is informed with wry humour, which occasionally becomes tart and stinging. The description of Ghulam Nabi’s state of mind when he learns about Queen Victoria’s death is an example of this: “He had never been weighed down with so much grief — not even when his mother had died in the Punjab.” The satiric touches are sustained throughout, but interestingly, are never allowed to reduce the narrative into a caricature. There is a serene charm in Ashraf’s narration in, for example, the depiction of the fortitude of Noorani Begum (Ghulam Nabi’s wife) after her husband’s death or that of the unwavering love of Ahmad (Ghulam Rasool’s lifelong friend) for a courtesan, Yasmeen.

The focus of the novel, however, stays steadily on Ghulam Rasool, delineating his years of growing up, his admission to Missionary College, his appointment in the Indian Posts and Telegraph Department, his marriage with Sara Rattan, his sexual promiscuity and his obsession with Kiran, the wife of one of Rasool’s Brahmin subordinates, Purushottam.

The social mores within the Muslim community are brought alive against the backdrop of the radical upheavals of national and international politics (such as the Partition, the riots and the World Wars). Not that every development is properly etched out. For instance, Rasool’s infatuation with Kiran, and Kiran’s reciprocation appear to be too hastily manoeuvred.

A few such patches notwithstanding, Ashraf craftily weaves a tapestry of a period of Indian history which has been worn from overuse by fiction-writers. The novel provides a tragicomic portrayal of Indian sycophancy during the raj. Under the placid surface of Ashraf’s narrative lurks ripples of irony (ghulam, meaning servant, in the names of both father and son), which allow history to “leak into” (to borrow a phrase from Salman Rushdie) the narrative.