Fire in the Unnameable Country

Ghalib Islam

HarperCollins India

449 pages, RS 699

The universe shakes as Hedayat, the “glossolalist” narrator (he speaks in tongues) of Fire in the Unnameable Country, is born on a flying carpet in the skies above an obscure land whose leader has the ability to hear every unspoken utterance of the nation. The leader records the contents of his citizens’ minds onto tape reels for archival storage. As the country collapses around the young Hedayat, he begins to write a letter, wherein he intersperses accounts of contemporary terrorist attacks and the outbreak of a mysterious viral epidemic with the memories of his parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents to revisit the troubled country’s history and expose the roots of its crisis.