Arithmetic of loss | Review of Mirza Waheed’s Maryam & Son 

Explore the emotional depth of Mirza Waheed's Maryam & Son, examining loss and identity in a Muslim-immigrant context.

Last year, when the spectre of war between India and Pakistan seemed to crystallise, my mother compelled me to return from Delhi on the final flight to Kashmir before they were suspended. Her logic was precise in its irrationality. I would be safer with her, even though Kashmir stood closer to the line of fire. For her, it seemed to me, safety was not geography but proximity: the fact of having her son within reach. Mirza Waheed’s Maryam & Son begins with the ostensible collapse of that logic, when a mother discovers that proximity is no longer hers to command.

Maryam Ali, a widow, who lives in Walthamstow, London, wakes up one morning to find Dilawar, her only son, missing from his bedroom. At first, Maryam and her sisters, Zarrine and Saffina, assume he has gone away briefly, but their anxiety deepens when he does not return, and they go to the police. 

Intelligence officers from the ‘Joint Section’ become involved, bringing into Maryam’s life Julian Chapman, a counter-extremism liaison officer, whose professional detachment gradually gives way to a complicated intimacy. The unit suspects that Dil may have travelled to Iraq and could be the masked IS (Islamic State) recruit they nickname the ‘Swordsman’, identified through their 72% algorithmic match from a video posted online.

The way Maryam & Son opens, without spectacle or rupture, establishes the novel’s psychological gravity. Dil’s disappearance does not register immediately as catastrophe. Maryam refuses to let her situation erupt outward, especially towards her sisters. The disappearance is not an explosion but an inward collapse as Maryam protects them from her suffering even as they stand ready to share it. Their bond is so tender that the novel could just as easily have been called Maryam & Sisters.

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One of the novel’s most unsettling insights is how the intelligence apparatus entangles Maryam in the logic of suspicion. She, a British-Indian Muslim whose faith and identity become a part of the investigation, is neither accused nor absolved but made to inhabit the space of guilt by association. The officers who enter her life operate within an impersonal regime bereft of ‘feelings and ethics’, while the media compounds this abstraction by circulating her image in a headscarf she does not ordinarily wear, reframing her to fit a familiar narrative of Muslim culpability.