Six Metres of Pavement [Paperback]

I really enjoyed it and read it very quickly. I found the characters very likeable and the writing clear and unprentious. All of the characters were treated with real care and gentleness. It's also quite romantic, and it was nice to read about a romance between middle-aged, ordinary people. A very hopeful novel about creating your own family of people who love and accept you.

I loved this second novel from Farzana Doctor. When we begin, we meet the main characters Ismail and Celia who seem destined to be stuck in the tragedy of their losses for the rest of their lives. Doctor skillfully shows us, through the multi-layered and complex Ismail and Celia, that change can happen - even when we thing there is no more hope and often when we least expect it. I highly recommend Six Metres of Pavement. You'll embrace the characters in all their frailties, flaws and tenacity. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll reckon with the human condition and the meanings of redemption.

At writers' conferences, it is often commented that it is riskier to set a novel in a Canadian city, than in a foreign locale say Delhi. The main reason being offered is that the plot may not be appealing to American readers. However, Farzana Doctor's second novel, Six Metres of Pavement, set in the Little Portugal district and other environs of Toronto, compares admirably with those set in the streets of a cosmopolitan city say in the UK. The themes of the novel such as, love, tragedy, family and multi-cultural relationships, sexual orientation, addiction, and redemption are its main appeal, while the setting in an ethnic neighbourhood adds to their flavour. These are all told by Farzana in her unique voice, and by presenting the local viewpoints, she voids the "MacDonaldification" of the writing as one reviewer has put it.

The book starts not only with an intriguing title and the cover, but also the captivating image of Ismail Boxwala, an Indian immigrant and a municipal engineer, who is attempting to overcome a twenty-year old tragedy by `staying in motion,' which among the normal daily activities involves a lot of elbow-bending at the local tavern. Farzana gradually reveals that heartbreaking event, masterfully, in snippets of flashbacks while moving the story-line forward and maintaining our concentration. We learn of the accidental death of his nearly two-year old daughter, who he'd inadvertently left in the back seat of his parked car on a hot summer morning. The child died leaving Ismail with immense grief, remorse and nightmarish images that haunt him virtually to the end of the novel. There are other repercussions of the loss. Some of these such as deteriorating job-performance, which Ismail is barely able to surmount, while the other major one, erectile dysfunction, he is not--at least temporarily. While his wife, Rehana, absolves him for the `worst mistake of his life' when she tells him while leaving the cemetery, `I forgive you ...' but she does not for his ED problem. After dragging him to several clinics, she--somewhat uncharacteristically for an Indian woman--walks out on him. This and other unexpected non-clichéd characterizations, such as Celia Sousa's, the 50-year old Portuguese widow, makes the novel that much more interesting.

The book's back cover blurb mentions two women who initiate changes in Ismail's life. Yet in the opinion of this reviewer, there is a third woman, his beer-drinking buddy and more, Daphne, who has a profound influence on his fate. It is she who first helps him to pacify his recovered sexual vigour--following his divorce--and later almost cures his alcoholism by taking him to AA meetings. Subsequently, she is the one who pesters him to take the creative writing course. Nevertheless she disappears from his life after confessing her lesbianism.

At the creative writing classes, Ismail befriends, Fatima, an undergraduate bisexual student, who is facing difficulties having her parents accepts her sexuality and has been turfed out of their home. Although Ismail is not sexually attracted to Fatima--she's just about the age his deceased daughter would have been--he helps her along, and the point that it is due to his latent love for his daughter is well made. Through Fatima he learns not only the meaning of queer, but also what it is like to be a destitute and homeless person. While Ismail does have some family and community friends in Toronto, who attempt to assist him in their own ways in his difficult time, it is really his friendship with Fatima and the writing school assignments that help him slay his internal daemons. He finally has the tears of grief pour out of him.

Meanwhile, although Ismail had been introduced to Celia--his neighbour six metres of pavement across the road--some time ago and had run into her occasionally, he does not initiate contact with her. It is again she who atypically connects with him. She had also been suffering emotionally in her widowhood and had been imagining visits by her deceased husband. We learn that while she was secretly spying on Ismail through the slits in the curtains from her bedroom windows, which while not unusual in those close nit communities, her further actions catch us unaware.

While the ending of the novel might be somewhat like a `fairytale,' as one reviewer put it, it is, nevertheless, wonderfully written in a congenial style and one that will `tug at the heartstrings' that another reviewer wrote.

Farzana has won much acclaim for this novel. She was awarded the Writers' Trust of Canada's Dayne Ogilvie Grant for Emerging Gay Writers, and this book was also nominated for an entry to the long list for the Scotia Bank Giller Prize. It is said that books on the short list for this prestigious award are already winners--at the bookstores--and the same can be said for a novel on the nomination list.

It should not be long before we would see Farzana's novels up on the bestseller lists, and with the popularity of the Bollywood movies dramatized on the celluloid screen as well.

Waheed Rabbani is the author of "Doctor Margaret's Sea Chest," the Book I of his "The Azadi Trilogy."