A Deconstructed Heart [Kindle Edition]

Shaheen Ashraf-Ahmed (Author)

Book Description

Mirza is a middle-aged Indian college professor whose wife has left him. He moves out of his house into a tent in his back garden, where he sets up an outdoor classroom and serves tea to his kind but bewildered neighbors. He is visited by the irritable spirit of his long-dead teacher, Khan Sahib, who is befuddled by the dysfunctions of modern life.

In the north of England, Mirza's niece, Amal, is finishing up her last year of college before she is expected to join her parents in their new home in India. Asked by her father to talk her uncle back into his senses, she moves into Mirza's house, and they soon are connected by their shared loneliness. She meets Rehan, Mirza's student, and is intrigued by the path of certainty he has built over his own loss and loneliness--a certainty that is threatened by his growing feelings for her.

When Rehan disappears, Amal's suffering forces Mirza to face the world once more. Together, Mirza and Amal must come to a new understanding of what it means to be an immigrant family when the old traditions have unraveled.

A Deconstructed Heart is a novella that explores the breakdown and rebuilding in one immigrant family trying to adapt: how lines in families and cultures are forcibly redrawn, how empty space can be reframed by a tent into a new definition of home... but how, no matter how hard we may try to forget, the past refuses to be contained.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Shaheen Ashraf-Ahmed is the author of A Deconstructed Heart and she is currently writing an interconnected short story collection titled The Purana Qila Stories. Three of those short stories, A Change in the Weather, The Dust Beneath Her Feet and The Well-Tended Garden, are available on Amazon for Kindle. Shaheen won a national essay competition about Indian life held by the Indian High Commission in England and has had her poetry and prose published in the Cadbury's Book of Children's Poetry, Tomorrow magazine and Nadopasana One. Shaheen grew up in India and England and now lives in Chicago with her family.

Product Details

• File Size: 304 KB
• Print Length: 160 pages
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B009ZO1FVA
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray: Not Enabled
• Lending: Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #432,218 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 27 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars An existential tale of neighbors and gardens; from hierarchy to coexistence. March 20, 2013

By The Kindle Book Review

Format:Kindle Edition

"...when you have little time left, you understand how to sift every action, every word, weighing it against that little store of time. Not one grain is wasted."

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), an Arabic-speaking Jew from Algeria, father of Deconstruction, would love this book. He taught that to begin Deconstruction, we must strive for "peaceful coexistence" of opposing concepts, which in Western thought, are usually in "violent hierarchical" relation to each other.

First, we have to break the link between the two concepts. Second, we have to keep the old concepts apart so they don't re-establish their former hierarchy. Third, we have to create some new ways to understand the old concepts; develop unique new languages which do not fit in either of the prior oppositional corners. But there can be no "synthesis." We must understand and interpret the differences.

I note that 'A Deconstructed Heart' is on a list of "Desi Chick Lit." I don't want to disparage "Chick Lit," but this book is an existential triumph - much deeper and dimensional than what we usually associate with the genre.

This wonderful book by Ashraf-Ahmed shows us first hand, the opposing concepts of Western and Eastern ways of speaking, living, being, and what happens during that painful period of adjustment when the new language is still forming. Not incidentally, her language to describe the coexistence is wise and careful. She handles her characters gently with love and compassion.

Of Amal, she tells us:
"Occasionally, she would join friends at parties, but she did not drink, and she took a taxi back home alone when the music gave her a headache, returning to a house that had settled into a perpetual twilight, with its orange-brown sofas and their embroidered antimacassars and the cream wallpaper with pink roses, yellowing in the corners. Every weekend, she called her parents' home in India, and asked a nephew or cousin who had dropped by to pass the phone to them."

Amal, the niece, was raised traditionally, but now lives in England. She must understand her own past in her new context and decide if she will become a part of the Western world, or return to India with her parents.

Mirza Uncle and Naida Aunty, in this novella, are the first casualties of East meets West, Traditional meets Modern, Architect counters Artist, Extended Family shifts to Nuclear Family.

Naida is the first to understand the opposition and acts upon it: she leaves to pursue her artistic future in the West. Naida is frustrated with her life and her traditional, absent-minded, introverted husband.

After ten years of trying to have a family, their house is still barren.
"...the neighbors were always attentive to their gardens, and [the Chaudry's] couldn't look "as if we came from the gao," said Naida. "We're always the last to mow our lawns, it's such a cliché, the Indian fam--," she paused, and then began again, "The Indian couple with the run-down garden. It's embarrassing. We might as well just bring in a couple of goats to complete the look."

"Soon, she began smashing the empty bottles, using the broken glass to make mosaic-decorated flowerpots and paving slabs, spending hours arranging and re-arranging the shards to create swirls of colored glass that winked and sparkled in the garden. She took an art class and made oceans of blues and greens, caught in place by grout. Crystal forests of green bloomed icily on side tables and picture frames." That was Naida Aunty's deconstruction.

As an unintended consequence, young Amal becomes caretaker for her father's brother who is very much rooted in the past, to the extent that he experiences visitations from his long-dead neighbor and chess opponent, Khan. Khan gives Mirza comfort while he mourns the loss of Naida. They look together at photographs from the distant past and reminisce about times gone by.

Of Mirza Uncle, the narrator tells us:
"Then he grabbed handfuls of different colored glass pebbles from the sacks, throwing them like seeds for the birds, blood red, royal blue and turquoise against the fading day until the patio gleamed with refracted light, like a cold river under the moon."

The garden, a place of growing and rose bushes, becomes a central factor in Mirza Uncle's return to life, and in an important way, a metaphor for the embryonic new language, growing where nothing grew before.

Amal experiences some happy moments in that garden with Rehan, but he retreats to his loneliness and she is forced to retreat to hers. Ultimately, she learns to make her decision and live with it, to keep Urdu in her heart and the new language in her head.

Unabashedly, I can say I loved this book.

Leila Smith, for The Kindle Book Review.

The Kindle Book Review received a free copy of this story for an independent, fair and honest review. We are not associated with the author nor with Amazon.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A family of disconnections November 27, 2012

By O. Barnack

Format:Kindle Edition

When Mirza's wife one morning announces, to his apparent surprise, that she is leaving him, his immediate reaction is to ask who will feed the cat. His second, after she has departed, is to hide beneath the bed covers. Now, if you do not find this behavior somewhat strange, you will not be surprised by what happens next; namely, he pitches a tent in his backyard, decamps from his home to dwell in it, withdraws from his college teaching duties, and convinces neighbors and family that he has gone crazy. Fortunately, he belongs to a community, and others soon come to his aid. His niece Amal, a college student, moves in and brings order to his household. Soon she is joined by a young man named Rehan, a devoted former student of Mirza. Despite their presence, Mirza continues living in his tent, where he experiences visits from the ghost of a former teacher/mentor who berates Mirza and beats him at chess. Between visits from the concerned, chess games, and backyard seminars, Mirza reflects upon his ill-fated marriage, married life, family, and his sense of alienation. Meanwhile, Amal and Rehan form a relationship that seems to be going somewhere. The action in this novel is limited; contemplation is on equal footing. The point seems to be about replacing an old normal with a new one through a gradual process rather than a quick and simple fix. Mirza's old normal ends as the story starts and a new normal is achieved at the end; likewise, Amal's normal ends when she comes to Mirza's aid and a new normal comes at the end. All this happens at a leisurely pace, with no high drama, major conflicts, or other disruptions. Everything simply works itself out. The "deconstructed heart" of the title concerns the disconnection between a husband and wife, but could also be a stand-in or metaphor for the disconnection within a family separated from loved ones in a former homeland, or between old and new cultures. The author has a fine sense of style, with a wry sense of humor, rich images, and skillful use of simile and metaphor. Writing this good is rare.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Disconcerted Heart Review December 30, 2012

By Ken Kapur

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

This story of two hearts is set in England but is applicable to all those who are living abroad in a foreign country. Being from India, I enjoyed it a lot as living in USA I have come across many couples going through personal conflicts that the main characters go through in this book. I enjoyed reading this book going in Caltrain from San Jose to San Francisco.
The story about an uncle and a niece , who each experience heartbreak and who make the journey towards psychological healing. I strongly recommend this.