A Review of Indian Winter by Kazim Ali

From the first sentences of Indian Winter, I feel my soul exhale, for it no longer needs to struggle to find its own language. “As I fall, I grieve for the body, the weak one, the stupid one that makes always the same mistakes, this one: mine.” Kazim Ali takes the words out of my insides, soon thereafter introducing us to “dévasté”—“devastated”—the state of the narrator’s existence after learning about the death of an old love, in a Midwestern town with its incipient hazards he must escape (“falling on the street, falling into a chasm of loneliness”). So he does, to his ancestral land, alone.

The mind’s proclivities toward a linear story collide with a journey filled with chance encounters and cyclical meetings in this fictional travelogue. Ali depicts a queer Indian experience through the lens of the kurta-with-blue-jean-wearing Indian American narrator, offering us an intimate witnessing via the portal of a familiar outsider—one who knows of India through his lineage but feels alien as a queer Muslim raised in America. While we learn of the macrocosm of queer Indian culture and the emotional and physical threats that continue to ambush queer folk, the power of the narrative lies in the microcosm of intersectional experiences the narrator confronts, singularly and unintentionally, boundaried by the body.  

Juxtaposed with these ambivalent explorations is a consummate emptying. “Is it true that ‘beauty’ requires emptiness, a space where nothing exists?” The narrator poses this question before imparting on his journey. He wants to believe this—that his own sensation of emptiness and loneliness may perhaps be serving a higher purpose. He returns often to this line of inquiry, yet the words he seeks to channel through this emptiness do not come, not in the way he envisages. “Your poetry is not the most important thing about you … even if you never write again, you would still be an important, valuable person,” the narrator recalls of an antecedent moment during which his current partner tries to reassure him against the threat of emptiness, ironically cementing the loneliness from which he now attempts to escape.

And thus, the most mysterious transformation occurs not in one of the three notebooks the narrator keeps in India, but inside his body, a whisper that emptiness does not mean absence of everything.

What remains then, if not love that has been lost, if not words that might hold one together? The narrator is not sure, and he begins the journey to India with a familiar reason, ostensibly to write a book about the lost love. But almost immediately, the sensuality of the land awakens a wondering and wandering outside words. As the narrator receives Ayurvedic treatments, he compares shirodhara to writing “because it asks you to channel the constant wash into a trickle along a thread.” This time, he doesn’t dwell on the fact words are not trickling, “better to do what I’m doing: live in the body … be awake without processing and distilling.”

By choosing to focus on shirodhara over words, the narrator, perhaps for the first time, allows his body to experience the essence of the living—even while part of him cannot grasp what it entails—and chooses to accept nourishment and breath anyway, opening to the unseen, the unfathomable, beyond the protective grip of the human ego. And thus, the most mysterious transformation occurs not in one of the three notebooks the narrator keeps in India, but inside his body, a whisper that emptiness does not mean absence of everything. The various points in time when the narrator surrenders to the emptying out happen to be sites of alchemy, transforming raw materials judged so desolate and shameful they are equated to nothingness into tangible tendrils grasping onto the living. While the narrator spends much of the journey trying to be alone so he could involute to dissect, merge with, and bury the lost love, something from within those depths refuses to release the connection to the breathing and to both the sun and the men named after it. Even he forgets what exactly he is writing and dissecting at times, the tincture of the past he tries to distill escaping his consciousness the closer he examines.

Alchemy or not, the beleaguered ego nevertheless demands to know how the book ends. The narrator appears torn between inhabiting the liminal spaces of each unfolding moment and the known satisfaction of a sense-making story confined safely within what the mind is capable of conceiving. “Can writing ever be in the present tense?” In responding to this question, Indian Winter encapsulates the cyclical, and at times simultaneous, euphoric expression and claustrophobic stagnation of a bodily existence, articulating the unspeakably desperate desire for both eternal belonging to the divine self and mystical union with the essence of every human, ocean, song, and sky, before leaving us, breathless, at the transection of our transience and totality.