Musharraf Ali Farooqi is an author, novelist, and translator. He was born in 1968 in Hyderabad, Pakistan, and now divides his time between Toronto and Karachi. His acclaimed new novel, "Between Clay and Dust," was shortlisted for The Man Asian Literary Prize 2012 and longlisted for the 2013 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. In 2015, Restless Books will publish Farooqi's second novel, "The Story of a Widow," which was shortlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2011 and longlisted for the 2010 IMPAC-Dublin Literary Award. His most recent children's fiction is the novel "Tik-Tik," "The Master of Time," Pakistan's first English language novel for children. His other children's fiction includes the picture book "The Cobbler's Holiday Or Why Ants Don't Wear Shoes" and the collection "The Amazing Moustaches of Mocchhander the Iron Man and Other Stories," shortlisted for the India ComicCon award in the Best Publication for Children category. He is the author of the critically acclaimed translations of Urdu classics, "The Adventures of Amir Hamza," and the first book of a projected 24--volume magical fantasy epic, "Hoshruba."
“Musharraf Ali Farooqi is the angel of history. The storm called
progress is blowing him into the future. It is piling wreckage at
his feet, but there is so much to be done between clay and dust: As
this marvelous novel shows, language is to be practiced with the
rigor of style; gesture supported by graciousness; ordinary life to
be rescued by ritual; and nostalgia distilled into knowledge.”
—Amitava Kumar, author of Lunch with a Bigot and A Matter of
Rats
“A crisp and elegiac novel….Farooqi’s atmospheric prose is spare
and lucid.”
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
“The book works like an ache in the heart, evoking cultures and
values that, while not necessarily perfect, represented something
larger than the self; their replacements, by contrast, are small
and mean…. The pages come alive with the grunts of the trainee
pehelwans and capture the last echoes of Gohar Jan’s sitar. A story
that purports to be about decay resounds with the stuff of life.
This is a book to be savoured like a fine single malt.”
—Forbes India
“Set in a decaying inner city after the partition of India, Between
Clay and Dust is an elegiac but unromanticised evocation of a dying
culture. The tragedy of a champion wrestler, challenged by his
younger brother and befriended by an ageing courtesan, has a mythic
resonance, as the characters’ ethical codes collide with the values
of a new world. Farooqi’s tale is more moving for the spareness and
restraint with which it is told.”
—2012 Man Asian Literary Prize finalist citation
“Much of the action of Between Clay And Dust alternates between
sporting arenas and women’s rooms, in spaces which we tend to think
of as repositories of our memories, rather than our histories.
Perhaps this accounts for the power of this small, spare book, a
novel which fulfils the most novelistic of purposes—to refract
history through the prism of memory, and to tell us its secrets and
doubts. Farooqi traces the unravelling of their world with
near-uncanny attentiveness…. Farooqi’s writing is too wise and too
elegant to make this a romance instead of a tragedy. As in Syed’s
poem, we are left with the notion that every history is
underwritten by the minute, private failures of human beings.”
—Wall Street Journal
“A thoughtful and emotionally articulate story about people whose
lives are changing beyond their control…. Farooqi’s treatment of
all his characters is sensitive and subtle.”
—International New York Times
“Musharraf Ali Farooqi has written a wonderful, quiet novel about
how traditions and lives can decline into unmeaning…. This is a
quietly affecting book, with a profound understanding of tragedy:
that what happens to us is as much a function of how we respond to
events as the events themselves.”
—The Sunday Guardian
“Farooqi’s spare, tightly honed prose and the quiet unfurling of
the plot resembles the seamless movements of a dance, in which
sudden implosions of violence and unexpected denouements are
reflected by a change in the dancer’s steps but are contained
within the fluidity of the whole. This sense of physicality and
grace is enhanced by a narrative where much is suggested through
gesture and nuance. At the same time, Farooqi’s eye for detail
vividly brings to life the two main protagonists and their
respective establishments….Between Clay and Dust is a fine novel;
it never loses tension nor wastes a word and, above all, it is
replete with a spectacular imagery that recreates Ustad Ramzi and
Gohar Jan’s dying world.”
—Newsline Magazine
“What’s remarkable about this novel navigating an older world
encroached upon by a newer one, is that it doesn’t mourn the change
as much as try to understand how to stay relevant and urge an
awareness of our part in our personal tragedies and an acceptance
of our fatal flaws.
Between Clay and Dust glides on understated, soulful prose, an
English that feels almost like Urdu in its sensibility, for it
captures the cadence of a culture in decline in post-Partition
India and Pakistan, specifically, the Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb of the
Subcontinent: a shared, plural composite culture and the refinement
of pleasure and the arts, of which courtesans and wrestlers are
perhaps its most enduring, romantic and graceful ciphers. Farooqi’s
restrained prose that creates a certain lushness and heightened
mood, is surely drawn from the eclipsed traditions of the kotha and
akhara that it distills so wonderfully and with such dignity.”
—Asian Review of Books
“As far as intimate epics – that beloved but apt oxymoron of
reviewese – go, Between Clay and Dust is intimate enough to pass
for a whisper in the middle of pillow talk between two lovers. And
yet its richness in capturing a culture at the moment of expiry is
the stuff of epics…. Timelessness, sorrow, and so much emotional
delicacy.”
—Quill and Quire, Starred Review
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