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Review: Maryam & Son by Mirza Waheed
A book that bypasses the battlefield to focus on the intimate and suffocating atmosphere of a single home, this is an exploration of the effects of the so-called War on Terror on a corner of an East London suburb
In Mirza Waheed’s Maryam &d Son, the domestic threshold becomes a front line in a global conflict. Following the lineage of British-Muslim narratives like Hanif Kureishi’s My Son the Fanatic (1994) and Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (2017), Waheed bypasses the battlefield to focus on the intimate and suffocating atmosphere of a single home in Walthamstow. The result is an exploration of the effects of the so-called War on Terror on a corner of an East London suburb.
Waheed’s novels have been marked by the tussle of complicity and conscience, from The Collaborator (2011) to Tell Her Everything (2018). His characters, enmeshed in familial and social ties, often exist in a state between morality and duty, between past and present. Maryam & Son, too, follows in these footsteps.
It begins on a quiet February morning when Maryam Ali, a widowed school chef, walks into her son Dilawar’s bedroom to find him missing. There was no discord at home, no slamming doors, and no radical manifestos left on the pillow. Dilawar was a freelance tech worker whose life seemed as quiet and predictable as the suburban streets they inhabited.
From here, the narrative moves briskly through short chapters. Maryam reports the disappearance to the police; when they get back, it is to claim that Dilawar has been potentially identified as “the Swordsman”, a masked ISIS operative appearing in a hostage video from Iraq.
Waheed refuses to let the character of Maryam be eclipsed by her son’s alleged actions. He portrays her as a person in her own right with independent purposes and desires, not reduced only to the familiar figure of a helpless, confused mother.
We see her navigating the “leaden, dismal” days of grief, denial, and rage with a temperament that is “both steadfast and fragile”, resorting to “little games of distraction and deflection”. Waheed’s ear for dialogue is also sharp, in particular capturing the intonations of Maryam’s feisty sisters and their aging mother as they provide support at this confusing time.
A central, and perhaps unexpected, pillar of the book is Maryam’s relationship with Julian, a police liaison officer. Julian finds himself drawn to “a certain allure of charm, a disarming and sometimes distracting appeal about the forty-something Indian woman”. Maryam, too, starts to look forward to his visits, when the air in the house feels “lighter”, a welcome relief amidst the humiliation of having her home searched and son’s possessions catalogued by the state.
Through Julian, we also see the institutional machinery at work. While Maryam searches for signs of the boy she knew, the authorities are eagerly studying “78% face matches” and examining proxy servers at the behest of the United States.
The novel does suffer from a sagging middle, when the plot circles the same emotional drain as months pass without word from Dilawar. A more charitable way to look at it is that this repetition reflects the limbo of a parent who cannot fully mourn because they do not yet know what or who they have lost. Inevitably, the news headlines transform Dilawar into a “secretive British jihadist and internet mastermind”, and Maryam is left to reconcile this public monster on the screen with private memories of the son she knew.
Maryam & Son avoids easy answers about integration or alienation, focusing instead on the internal and external descriptions of a life interrupted. By the time the airstrikes on Mosul begin, one is less concerned with the geopolitical “liberation” and more haunted by the image of a mother in Walthamstow sifting through a life she thought she understood.
Sanjay Sipahimalani is a Mumbai-based writer and reviewer.
