Unburied Voices: Roots, Ruptures, And Remains: The World of Tales From Qabristan – Book Review

Wise are those who listen to the tales from qabristan 
for only then can you
admire the flowers bloomed in the garden of graves.

Sabin Iqbal’s new novel, Tales from Qabristan, concludes with this haunting reflection—a reminder that graveyards are not mere resting places but vast archives where memory, mystery, and revelation lie criss-crossed. In Sabin’s hands, the qabristan transcends its physicality; it becomes a metaphorical terrain where family legacies are exhumed, suppressed histories breathe anew, and personal reckonings unfold. It is a critical realm, where the past refuses to stay buried and casts long shadows over the present.

At its heart, the novel is a dirge for memory, grief, and the inescapable burdens of familial and societal inheritance. Farook, the protagonist, returns to his childhood village in the aftermath of his father’s death, only to find himself disentangling not just the shifting terrains of home but also the fragile threads of identity and belonging. Sabin builds an offbeat narrative, where time folds and unfolds, stitching together sufferings and the echoes of a village shaped by ambition, exile, and nostalgia. In this interlace, history is not a distant backdrop—it is a pulse beneath the skin, a force that shapes and reshapes the profiles of personal and collective lives.

Farook stands at the heart of Tales from Qabristan, his gaze casting both light and shadow over the novel’s emotional setting. He is suspended between the remnants of the past and the unsettling drift of the present, engaging with the fragments of his family’s history while witnessing the slow disintegration of values once held sacred. Farook’s role swings between that of a detached observer and an unwilling participant, drawn into the quiet tragedies that move through the lives of those he loves. His character is drawn with the subtle marks of unspoken frustration, reluctant struggle, and an ever-deepening consciousness of the injustices put into the frame of his world.

Farook’s early life grows against the backdrop of familiar faces—his father, grieving mother, stoic grandmother, and the unhappy character of his cousin Jami. Each symbolises a part of a world slipping through the fissures of time. Jami, once a gifted cricketer packed with promise, descends into the distressing whirl of alcohol and regret, his brilliance dampened by the weight of unfulfilled makings. In a rare moment of weakness, Jami confesses, No one ever truly understood me —a silent reflection of Farook’s own internal exile. Their shared sense of rejection and overlooked pain threads through the novel, elucidating how personal disillusionment often reflects the larger decay of familial and societal bonds. Through Farook, the novel reveals not just a young man shaped by loss, but a soul passing through the fragile terrain between memory and forgetting, belonging and alienation.

Farook’s personal struggles begin early. As a child, he goes through a painful lesson in family power milieu. A number of events brings to light the anger, frustration, and rigid hierarchy within the family, shaping Farook’s passive existence in the face of hardships. His circumcision ceremony, for instance, becomes another traumatic experience, marking his transition into forced masculinity and deepening his sense of alienation. Unlike the girls, who are spared from such rituals, Farook feels trapped in tradition and masculinity imposed upon him, a metaphor for societal expectations he cannot escape. Farook says: However, circumcision did not make me a Muslim. It only made me a chubby boy. This statement indicates a disconnection between religious identity and the ritual itself, portraying circumcision more as a societal expectation than a spiritual transformation. However, by no stretch of the imagination does Tales from Qabristan generate Islamophobia. Instead, it explores the complexities of identity, religion, and societal norms within a Muslim community, critiquing religious dogmatism without targeting Islam itself. Through characters like the khattib and the protagonist Farook, the novel examines personal struggles with faith, cultural expectations, and familial tensions.

Farook’s relationship with his father, Pa, is a curious mix of admiration, frustration, and emotional distance. Pa places great expectations on him, yet fails to connect with him emotionally. This disconnect is intensified by his father’s failure in the Gulf, which becomes a major source of Farook’s resentment. Unlike the many migrants who return wealthy, his father fails to adapt to the materialistic demands of expatriate life, coming home not with financial success but with books and a terminal illness. The contrast between his father’s idealism and economic struggles creates a quiet but lasting frustration in Farook.

Pa himself acknowledges his failure, often lamenting: Perhaps, the fault is mine, but I cannot take this anymore. At the most one or two years, then I shall come back for good. 

The extended family openly criticizes him for returning home too frequently instead of accumulating wealth:

Why does he come home every year? He should learn to make some money. Slog it out in the deserts, that’s the key.

Farook’s mother bears the brunt of these remarks, enduring them in silence:

Whenever she came to know about these remarks from family sources, she sat quietly in the kitchen and wept. Her cheeks shivered and turned red. 

Farook grows up witnessing his father’s humiliation, his mother’s silent suffering, and his family’s social isolation, internalizing the frustration of being the son of a man deemed a failure. His father’s inability to conform to the Gulf dream of wealth accumulation not only marginalizes them but also shapes Farook’s understanding of economic survival and self-worth.

Years later, Farook expresses his ultimate disillusionment over his father’s life choices in a single, devastating line:

Five years later, Pa came back from the Gulf with four cartons of books and clothes, not much money in the bank but cancer in his lungs.

This moment condenses the economic and emotional toll of migration, highlighting not just his father’s material failure but also the physical cost of Gulf labour. Despite years of toil, he returns with intellectual riches (books) rather than financial security, and worse, his time away has cost him his health. For Farook, this is the final confirmation that the Gulf dream is a deception, one that has enriched many but left his family in debt, despair, and social rejection. His father’s fate becomes both a personal loss and a broader critique of migration, leaving Farook to carry the weight of inherited disappointment and a lifelong search for meaning beyond material success.

The relationship between Pa and Ma appears conventional but is marked by unspoken conflicts and quiet defiance. Pa holds authority, dictating major decisions, including forbidding Ma from working despite her qualifications. His dismissiveness is evident when he mocks her desire to collect her degree: What for? To use as a wrapper?

Beneath the facade of a stable marriage, Ma undergoes both domestic restrictions and the social humiliation of Pa’s financial failures in the Gulf. She re-reads his letters, searching for traces of the man she once knew, while others perceive their marriage as ideal:

Like most happy marriages, theirs too was an ideal one for many who watched from a distance. But I have seen it all… the helpless frustrations, solitary sighs, timid protests, and the tears others never see.

Despite her difficult circumstances, Ma resists in subtle ways. She does not argue when Pa refuses to collect her degree, but later sits alone, crying. After his death, she declines financial help from Farook, asserting her dignity. The novel critiques economic disempowerment as a form of control, highlighting how financial dependence silences women. Though Pa is a loving father, he fails to see Ma beyond her roles as wife and mother, reinforcing a patriarchal order that erases women’s identities. While Tales from Qabristan is not explicitly feminist, it exposes the quiet struggles of women in patriarchal families. Ma’s silent struggle and defiance make her one of the novel’s most powerful figures.

The Gulf migration phenomenon forms a crucial backdrop in the novel. It portrays migration as a challenging life-world aspiration, disillusionment, and quiet suffering, where individuals leave home not out of ambition but compulsion, often returning with little more than broken dreams and weary bodies. At the heart of this theme is Pa, a man whose idealism and aversion to aggressive materialism prevent him from finding success in the Gulf. Unlike others who returned with wealth, he struggles to climb the economic ladder, his honesty and ethical approach making him ill-suited for the competitive migrant economy. Over time, his once-hopeful letters begin to reveal frustration with the hierarchical work culture and social isolation of expatriate life.  

Jami, Farook’s cousin, a talented cricketer, represents a reluctant migrant, forced to abandon his passion for sports when his father, Younis, insists he must go to the Gulf. His departure is not one of excitement but resignation, as he joins the long list of young men who leave behind dreams in pursuit of financial stability. In contrast, Podiyan, Pa’s friend, thrives in the Gulf through sheer pragmatism, adapting to its exploitative but profitable system. Engaged in businesses ranging from automobile parts to water supply, Podiyan represents the hard-nosed side of migrant survival, where success comes at the cost of ethical compromises.

Mohammed, Ramia’s husband, is one of the rare individuals who achieves financial security, working in a translation firm in Sharjah. His success elevates his family’s social standing back home, highlighting how Gulf remittances dictate one’s place in the local hierarchy. Meanwhile, Farook himself experiences the Gulf briefly, migrating not for economic reasons but as an escape from personal trauma. However, his realization is swift—the Gulf is not a land of opportunity but one of exhaustion and alienation, where migrants lead rootless, fragmented lives, disconnected from both home and host country. 

The novel exposes the psychological toll of migration, showing how even those who succeed are often left emotionally distant from their families, while those who fail carry the stigma of wasted years. It critiques the romanticized Gulf dream, presenting it as an economic necessity that rarely leads to long-term fulfillment. In doing so, Tales from Qabristan offers a subtle yet powerful exploration of diaspora, portraying both the social pressures to succeed abroad and the quiet tragedies of those who return with little more than memories and regrets.

By bringing different characters and stories to the fore, Tales from Qabristan firmly situates itself within subaltern literature, where the oppressed do not merely suffer but persist, question, and exist in defiance of the forces that seek to erase them. The novel does not romanticize their struggles, nor does it offer simplistic narratives of triumph. Instead, it exposes the hypocrisies of caste-based social mobility in Kerala, showing that marginalized communities must come to terms with shifting identities while resisting erasure. In doing so, Tales from Qabristan becomes more than a story of the past—it serves as a critique of ongoing exclusions, a voice for those whom history often seeks to forget. 

The novel presents the Veda (tribal) community as a subaltern group whose members exist on the periphery of mainstream society, struggling against systemic exclusion, caste prejudices, and rigid social hierarchies. Through characters like Pankan, Kochukarumban, and Neelan, the novel critiques structural inequalities while simultaneously portraying these figures as individuals who, in their own ways, demand dignity and resist erasure. Far from being passive recipients of oppression, they pull their lives through small acts of defiance, adaptation, and endurance in a world that sees them as inferior.

Among them, Pankan emerges as one of the most complex and tragic characters, marked by both caste violence and gender non-conformity. Pankan is subjected to brutal physical assault by a rich landowner, an event that leaves permanent damage to his body and alters his identity. In the wake of this violence, he begins living as a trans woman, wearing a blouse and lungi, thus defying both gender norms and caste expectations. His existence unsettles the village, making him both an object of curiosity and a reminder of the brutality that enforces social order. Farook observes him with a mixture of fascination and discomfort, struggling to reconcile Pankan’s outward transformation with the deeply ingrained structures of caste and masculinity that he has internalized.

Other Veda characters, such as Kochukarumban, seek upward mobility through religious conversion. He embraces Islam, hoping that a new faith will offer social acceptance and dignity. He alters his language, changes his clothing, and identifies himself with the dominant religious community, but his conversion is never fully accepted. His former employer, Farook’s grandmother, once treated him with affection, but upon his conversion, she expels him from their household, viewing his aspiration toward equality as a threat. His story highlights the rigidity of caste-based discrimination, where even a change in religious identity does not grant true social transformation. As the novel tells us, Though there was no obvious change in him, except being circumcised, the thought that he had aspired for equality among the household made Grandmother dislike him.

Similarly, Neelan, another tribal character, also embraces Islam in search of a better life, only to find himself unable to integrate into the new community. His failed attempt at conversion reinforces the novel’s larger critique: caste is so deeply embedded in social consciousness that even religious shifts do little to dismantle it.

The novel also portrays how tribal children are trapped in an illusion of education, reinforcing the cycle of poverty rather than offering genuine social mobility. Schools are supposed to uplift them, but in reality, the education system keeps them locked into their expected roles as labourers. As the narrative notes, No Veda child reached up to the tenth standard. They dropped out of school midway to work in the fields. This structural failure ensures that the promise of equality remains an unfulfilled dream, as tribal children are absorbed into agricultural labour before they can challenge their circumstances.

In terms of labour, the Veda men serve as farmhands and cattle herders, while Veda women take up domestic labour in upper-caste households. Their physical presence is needed, yet socially unacknowledged, reinforcing the contradiction of caste society, where dependence on tribal labour does not translate into respect for their personhood. Their social status remains fixed, their mobility illusory, and their existence permitted only within the confines of servitude.

Yet, despite this systemic marginalization, the Veda characters are not entirely powerless. They resist in subtle but significant ways—through conversion, endurance, quiet defiance, and even humour. Kochukarumban, despite being rejected, does not beg for validation; he simply continues attending mosque prayers, subtly challenging the discomfort of upper-caste Muslims. Pankan, rather than fading into oblivion after his trauma, embraces an identity that defies the very system that tried to erase him, standing as a symbol of resilience and silent rebellion.

As Farook matures, he begins to understand that Pankan is not an anomaly but an embodiment of a larger truth—a living reminder of identity’s fragility, the cruelty of power, and the resilience of those who refuse to disappear. Pankan does not demand recognition, nor does he seek revenge. He simply exists, his presence alone a disruption to the social order, refusing to conform to the expectations imposed upon him.

Years later, at Pa’s funeral, Farook sees Pankan standing under a mango tree, an apparition that lingers at the edges of the living world:

Far away, under a lonely mango tree, stands Pankan. I strain my eyes to look again . . . Is it really Pankan or an apparition?

This ghostly image cements Pankan as more than just a person—he is a symbol of survival, of history’s unseen witnesses, of those who refuse to be erased.

Through Pankan and Ma, Tales from Qabristan critiques multiple dimensions of oppression—patriarchal, casteist, and gendered. While Ma endures her suffering in silence, Pankan exists as a living defiance, a body that disrupts the boundaries of caste, gender, and tradition. The novel, in its subtle yet profound way, forces readers to confront what it means to live outside society’s definitions, to exist between worlds, neither fully belonging nor entirely erased.

Sabin Iqbal’s two earlier novels The Cliffhangers and Shamal Days, as well as Tales from Qabristan share a common thematic and narrative sensibility, deeply rooted in migration, socio-political alienation, marginalization, and the shifting locales of identity. Each of these novels explores displacement—whether geographical, emotional, or social—while connecting personal histories with broader social and cultural commentaries.

In The Cliffhangers, the story unfolds in a coastal village in Kerala, where a group of young men grapple with social exclusion, political violence, and the disillusionment of their generation. The narrative examines their alienation within their homeland, depicting a Kerala that is as politically volatile as it is culturally fragmented. The protagonists are caught between the pressure to conform and the desire to break free, mirroring the tensions between tradition and modernity. This sense of belonging and estrangement, of being outsiders in their own land, is a recurring theme across Sabin Iqbal’s works.

Shamal Days shifts the setting to the Gulf, chronicling the lives of Indian expatriates addressing the precarious terrain of migration, labour, and economic survival. The novel paints the Gulf as both a dream and a trap, where migrants struggle to create an identity for themselves in a space that views them as disposable labour. This critique of the Gulf dream and its unforgiving realities appear again in Tales from Qabristan, where Pa’s failed migration story encapsulates the illusions and disappointments of Gulf migration​. 

Sabin’s novel is a striking work of diasporic literature—raw, reflective, and unapologetic, blending social fiction, autofiction, and stark realism. His atypical storytelling refuses the comfort of continuity, echoing the dislocations and fractures of exile and displacement. Memory and myth collide, not as distant echoes, but as urgent presences shaping lives caught between worlds. This is literature forged in the aftermath of departures, where identity is a question without easy answers, and every grave is a contested space, holding stories that refuse to be silenced, demanding to be unearthed and spoken into existence.

• A condensed form of this review appeared in The Wire