The Sound of Language, by Amulya Malladi
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The Sound of Language, by Amulya Malladi
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Escaping the turmoil and heartbreak of war-torn Kabul, Raihana settles with distant relatives in the strange, cold, damp country of Denmark. Homesick and heartbroken, Raihana bravely attempts to start a new life, trying hard not to ponder the fate of her husband, who was taken prisoner by the Taliban and never heard from again. Soon after arriving, Raihana finds herself in a language school, struggling to learn Danish, which she thinks sounds like the buzzing of bees. To improve her speaking skills, Raihana apprentices herself to Gunnar, a recent widower who is steadily withdrawing from the world around him, even neglecting the bee colonies he worked so hard to cultivate with his late wife. Over the course of the bee season, Raihana and Gunnar forge an unlikely relationship, despite the disapproval of their friends and relatives. But when the violence Raihana thought she had left behind in Afghanistan rears its head, she and Gunnar are forced to confront the ghosts of the past as they navigate the uncertain future… ‘A quietly powerful story about a young Afghani woman adjusting to a new life in Denmark. Malladi's story of two wounded people beset by prejudice has a ring of authenticity. The Sound of Language is finely written, spare but eloquent, sensitive but free of false sentiment.’ - The Boston Globe ‘The Sound of Language is a gripping, captivating novel that opens readers’ eyes to the story of immigration — a life that those who lack the firsthand experience can only imagine.’ - The Oakland Press AMULYA MALLADI was born and raised in India. She lived in the United States for several years before moving to Denmark. She now lives in Copenhagen with her husband and two sons. She is also the author of ‘Serving Crazy with Curry’. You can contact her at www.amulyamalladi.com. Endeavour Press is the UK's leading independent publisher of digital books.
The Sound of Language, by Amulya Malladi - Amazon Sales Rank: #8380 in eBooks
- Published on: 2015-03-17
- Released on: 2015-03-17
- Format: Kindle eBook
The Sound of Language, by Amulya Malladi From Publishers Weekly Cold, wet Denmark is a strange land to Raihana, the widowed Afghan refugee at the center of Malladi's well-intentioned but wooden fifth novel. After her husband is killed by the Taliban, Raihana moves to Denmark, enrolls in language school and, with the help of a supportive teacher, lands an unusual apprenticeship helping Gunnar, a Danish widower and beekeeper, harvest his honey. Though their relationship is initially strained, Raihana and Gunnar soon develop a restorative friendship, but the road to redemption is not easy: Raihana feels pressure within the Afghan community to remarry, and the idea of an Afghan woman working alone with a Danish man soon has both their communities in a tizzy. Meanwhile, racial violence simmers day-to-day. Unfortunately, Malladi's treatment of cultural tension is one-dimensional at best; most of the supporting characters are xenophobic, if not flat-out racist, and their actions play into an overarching philosophy that expounds the benefits of tolerance and multiculturalism. Malladi means well, but her parable-like treatment of complex issues is too pat to resonate. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review 'A quietly powerful story about a young Afghani woman adjusting to a new life in Denmark. Malladi's story of two wounded people beset by prejudice has a ring of authenticity. The Sound of Language is finely written, spare but eloquent, sensitive but free of false sentiment.' - The Boston Globe 'The Sound of Language is a gripping, captivating novel that opens readers' eyes to the story of immigration -- a life that those who lack the firsthand experience can only imagine.' - The Oakland Press
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. OneEntry from Anna’s Diary A Year of Keeping Bees15 March 1980When we first decided to become hobby beekeepers, it was because our friend Ole had been doing it for a very long time and seemed to find a lot of solace in the rituals and responsibility. But I had some doubts.The wings of honeybees stroke about 11,400 times per minute—hence the distinctive buzz. I wondered about the buzzing of the bees. I was sure that constant hum would drive me crazy. But now, after a few seasons, the buzz of the bees is like a soothing rhythm, almost like a song, the song of spring.Skive, Denmark—January 2002Bzzzzzz, that was how she thought it sounded.Bzzzzzz, like the buzzing of a thousand bees.The same sound she used to hear when she visited her uncle Chacha Bashir in Baharak. He had been one of the wealthiest men in town with his silk and bee farm. Silk and honey, he would say, “The riches of the kings are mine.” Then the Taliban killed him and no one knew what happened to his family.That was how the Danish language sounded to Raihana, like the buzzing of Chacha Bashir’s bees.The Danes mumbled, she thought as she watched them in supermarkets, on television, and on the streets. She had never seen so many white people before, and this was the first time she was seeing white people at such close proximity. So she stared at them, she just couldn’t help it.They were different from what she had imagined. They were not all tall and fair and beautiful, some of them were short and ugly. And they mumbled when they spoke. The standing joke, Layla had told her, was that they spoke like they had hot potatoes in their mouths and Raihana agreed.She had escaped a second brutally cold winter at the Jalozai refugee camp in North Western Pakistan when the Danish government offered her asylum. It was difficult for a single woman with no family, no husband, and no education to survive. Her choices had been limited. She could either die in a refugee camp where the cold wind from the mountains pierced its frozen fingers through the tents to all but peel the skin off the bones, or she could go to this country where her distant cousin and his wife had agreed to give her a home.A part of her didn’t want to leave the camp. She had to wait, she thought, wait for Aamir, or maybe go back and look for him? But even she wasn’t foolish enough to go back to Kabul. Everyone knew that Osama bin Laden was responsible for the plane attacks in America and everyone knew that the Taliban were the same species as al- Qaeda. America would attack; that’s what powerful countries did. The Taliban would fight back, they said, and though the Afghans in Denmark, like many others, didn’t like the idea of American troops on Afghan soil, it was better than the Taliban. Some thought the Taliban had been unjustly rousted out of power, that they were the good guys.So Raihana joined the small number of refugees living in Denmark, all of whom watched the news with desperation, wondering when they could go back. Afghanistan, they knew, would be a war ruin for several decades to come, but there was still hope. They wished that, somehow, Afghanistan would no longer be synonymous with tortured men and women living in penury. Maybe things would change and Afghanistan would become a safe haven, a progressive country, a normal country.“Have to go home someday, can’t live here all our life can we?” Kabir would say almost every day. “Don’t unpack everything, Raihana, we’ll go back soon.”“Go back to what?” Layla would ask her husband, her hands on her hips as her son, Shahrukh, pulled at her salwar.“Mor, slik,” he said, pleading with his mother to give him candy, which she had strict rules about not giving to him.“Look at him, hai, Shahrukh, it is not Mor, it is Ammi, say Ammi,” Kabir said as he always did, but Shahrukh never took him seriously. “Mor is some Danish woman, not Layla, she is Ammi. Now say Ammi.”“Leave him alone, he’s just two,” Layla said. “And he’s calling me mother, not some evil name. All his friends call their mothers Mor, so he calls me Mor.”Raihana watched the young couple battle about going back, about staying. She had been scared when the people from the Danish immigration told her that Kabir wanted her to live with him. She remembered Kabir from her childhood, a long time ago. He was her mother’s sister’s husband’s brother’s son. The families had not been close, only meeting at weddings and celebrations. Kabir’s family had lived in Kabul while hers settled in a village outside Kabul. But he was the only one who had offered her a chance to leave the refugee camp and she had taken it. She hadn’t had much of a choice. The rumor was that Aamir had died in a Taliban prison, but a part of her never believed it. However, she knew she had to leave Pakistan because whether she liked it or not, there was a good chance the rumor about Aamir was true.But she wished—wished until she went mad with it—that he was alive. She wished they had been able to leave together. She wished she wasn’t alone and cold because even though Kabul had been hell, she’d had someone to share it with, someone to keep her warm. But in the refugee camp in Pakistan, there was emptiness, insecurity, threats from other men, and fear.It had been a stroke of luck that when she rattled out the names of relatives and where she thought they lived, she had named Kabir. The others had not panned out, maybe they couldn’t be found or maybe they hadn’t wanted her, she didn’t know. What she did know was that Kabir and Layla had welcomed her with open arms and that was a debt she would never be able to repay.As she sat at the dining table chopping carrots for the Kabuli pilau she was making for dinner, Raihana was grateful for the turn her life had taken after she’d moved to Denmark. When she’d first come to Skive nine months before, she had been worried that Kabir would be a religious type. She didn’t intend to wear a hijab or an abaya, not after having left Afghanistan and the rules of the Taliban so far behind.Kabir hadn’t asked her to wear a hijab and neither had Layla, who never went out without donning one herself, in addition to an abaya. Kabir, who drank merrily on Friday nights to celebrate the weekend, didn’t ask his wife to get rid of her hijab and she didn’t ask him to stop drinking.“Islam says smoking and drinking is wrong,” Layla told Raihana on one of the Friday nights when Kabir was out of the house. “What do you think?”Raihana didn’t know what to say about things like this. She believed that people should do what they wanted but knew that was not what Layla wanted to hear.“I think it is wrong,” Layla said before Raihana could answer. It wasn’t like Raihana was talkative, and she didn’t always respond to people. Layla had met women like her, men too, people who had scars so big hidden under their skin that they were really one big wound. She didn’t know the details about Raihana’s life in Afghanistan, but no one knew the details. Raihana wasn’t talking and her past was not well known.When Raihana had first arrived, Khala Soofia, who lived next door, had tried to get Raihana to talk about her past, about her life in Kabul, the dead husband, but Raihana didn’t say anything. Khala Soofia had come to Denmark in the early 1990s. Her husband had been a doctor in Jalalabad. Her son had died of cancer, and her daughter had moved to America with her husband, also a doctor, and their children. Soofia talked about moving there all the time.Soofia’s husband, Dr. Sidiq Rehman, had spent several years when he first came to Denmark petitioning the Danish integration minister and the Danish Medical Association, and writing letters to EU Parliament members, that he should be allowed to work in Denmark without having to go to medical school again. He understood that he had to learn Danish, which he had done by diligently going to language school.Now he’d stopped the petitions and the letters. He didn’t come out of his house much. He was depressed, they said, because he couldn’t practice medicine. Still everyone called him Doctor Chacha. While Doctor Chacha silently mourned the loss of his life’s work, Soofia kept hoping that her daughter would send for her. “Visa problems,” she always said. “But it will happen soon. You know daughters, they need their mothers.”Everyone nodded patiently and no one pointed out that Soofia’s daughter rarely wrote and when she did the letters were filled with excuses as to why she couldn’t find the means to bring her parents to America. Soofia read out the letters to whoever would listen and would try to put a positive spin on her daughter’s excuses.“You are just like my daughter, my Deena,” Soofia told Raihana when they met at a birthday party. Habib and Jameela were celebrating their son’s first birthday and had invited all the Afghans in Skive for a party. It had been a tumultuous first year for the boy, who had been born with heart problems, but after two surgeries he seemed fine and the doctors predicted he would have no further problems.Raihana was barely paying attention to Soofia, who talked constantly, either about her daughter or about local Afghan community gossip. But soon enough, Soofia got to Raihana.“So, where is your husband?” she asked.Raihana was not stupid. She knew people were curious.“Dead,” she said quietly and then tried to change the subject by asking Soofia about her gold bangles. Soofia was easily distracted, especially when ...
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17 of 19 people found the following review helpful. Malladi's best novel yet By Ratmammy THE SOUND OF LANGUAGE by Amulya MalladiRating ***** (5 Stars)February 23, 2008THE SOUND OF LANGUAGE is by Amulya Malladi, a writer who has come a long way since her debut novel A BREATH OF FRESH AIR. This reviewer has been privileged to watch this writer grow, and with each new book she writes she gets better and better. THE SOUND OF LANGUAGE is a departure for Malladi, because this is the first book in which the central characters are not of Indian descent, and the main body of the story takes place in Denmark, not India or America.Raihana is a woman escaping the horrors of Afghanistan and settles in a foreign country with relatives. Denmark is as far away and as different as one can get from Afghanistan and her initial experiences in this new country are not happy ones. She cannot speak the language, finds learning the language quite difficult, and misses her husband Aamir, who was taken prisoner by the Taliban and is presumed dead.As she learns to speak the language, Raihana equates the Danish speech akin to the sound of bees. Coincidentally enough, she is placed into a program where she is asked to work for an elderly man, Gunnar, who is a keeper of bees. Through him, she will improve her Danish and find a means to earn a living at the same time. She cannot forever live with her cousins Kabir and Layla, although they have been very kind by inviting her to live with them in Denmark. But, eventually Raihana will have to move on and make a life for herself.Raihana's Danish is actually very good relative to her time spent in the country, but with her work with Gunnar and his bees, she begins to feel comfortable speaking the language, and becomes somewhat comfortable with the culture. Gunnar's own story is that he has lost interest in life since his beloved wife had passed away. A good friend of his recognizes that maybe if he got involved in something important, it may bring him back to life. Raihana's past experience with bees is what brings the two unlikely people together, but what is extraordinary is the friendship that develops between them, despite the prejudice that goes on around them, and the language barrier that they eventually break down.This is Amulya Malladi's best novel to date. She obviously did immense research on the industry of honey and bees, and she was able to make the culture and the people come alive. The reader will feel a connection and empathize with the immigrant Raihana. She is alone in the world, living far away from her native Afghanistan, a young widow with no means of making a living. Through the kindness of her distant cousins, she is able to make a new life for herself. Her future is very vague, and without the skill of speaking the native language, Raihana knows her future is doomed.This reviewer loved the pairing of Gunnar and Raihana. The two very unlikely friends will strike a chord in the reader's heart. It is a friendship that is highly unlikely in this world of Danes and Afghanistan immigrants, as there is a lot of racial tension between the two groups. Both Raihana and Gunnar know the danger of befriending the other, yet their conscience tells them that there is nothing wrong with it. Gunnar sees new life when he begins to trust Raihana and opens up his house to her. And Raihana becomes confident with her beginner's Danish, as she soon becomes comfortable with the language and impresses those around her with her ability to learn it quickly.Having always had a fear of bees, this reviewer is now ready to learn more about making honey. Malladi gave an in-depth look into this fascinating industry, and did so with meticulous detail. The reader will be intrigued not just by the relationship between Raihana and Gunnar, but by the work they do every day. Malladi paints the process as a thing of beauty, and the characters' love of bees can be contagious. Other various themes in the book include the prejudice encountered by the Afghans after 9/11, as well as the fear and uncertainty any immigrant feels coming to live in a foreign country where they cannot speak the native language. The reader will see Raihana grow as a person, and while she never loses her yearning to return to the country she fled, she embraces a new culture that reluctantly welcomes her and her people with open arms. THE SOUND OF LANGUAGE gets 5 hearts. - Courtesy of Love Romances and More - M. Lofton
15 of 17 people found the following review helpful. A solid read By S. Siraaj While I wouldn't say this book was phenonmenal, it was enjoyable to read. Ms. Malladi developed characters who were interesting and intriguing. There was one thing that disturbed me about this book, however. I felt slightly annoyed with Ms. Malladi's portrayal of practicing, observant Muslims as extremists and non-practicing Muslims as preferable- the "good ones." The fact is the Muslim communuity is much more diverse than that and is far more complex. There are practicing Muslims who are outgoing, open-minded and tolerant. At one point in the book I thought Layla would serve as an example of such Muslims. Yet, when she is contrasted with the main character, Raihana, who does not wear hijab and wears "Danish clothing" it is clear that Raihana is the preferable Muslim. It's unfortunate that Ms. Malladi's characters fall into the same boring stereotypes of Muslim women. Nonetheless, The Sound of Language was a solid read.
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful. Fascinating 5-star read By Armchair Interviews While it is not difficult to find books depicting the refugee/immigrant experience in the United States, Amulya Malladi has given this book a twist by setting it in Denmark. Raihana Khan is an Afghani woman who was able to leave her Taliban-controlled country. She is alone in a Pakistani refugee camp when she receives word that a cousin living in Denmark would take her in.Raihana arrives in Denmark with no knowledge of the language or culture. To her ears the Danish language sounds like the hum of bees - completely unintelligible. But Danish law requires her to go to language class and learn to speak and read it. Her cousin's wife, Layla, is also in the class and is initially helpful in translating Danish into Dari - Raihana's native tongue.She is a good student and her teacher, Christina, pairs her with an old friend who has recently lost his wife, to practice speaking Danish with a native speaker, and also to learn beekeeping. Gunner is not initially excited about his new assistant. He harbors several prejudicial ideas about what an Afghani woman might be like. But Raihana is bright, educated, hard working and truly interested in the bees. She wins him over and at the same time finds that she truly loves working with honeybees.This book deals with the many difficulties of being a refugee and a widow - particularly in a small homogenous country such as Denmark. People are not generally happy to have an influx of non-Danish people in their midst. The refugees themselves are not sure they even want to be in this cold, damp place where everyone eats pork and seem to look askance at all Muslims. Malladi currently lives in Denmark and has firsthand immigrant experience.I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The play of cultures was fascinating. I have read two other enjoyable novels by Malladi - Song of the Cuckoo Bird and Serving Crazy with Curry. This book is even better than those.Armchair Interviews says: Well-written story that brings this person's struggle to life.
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