THE SCENT OF WET EARTH IN AUGUST By Feryal Ali Gauhar Penguin Price: Rs 250 Pages: 281

With an utterly unoriginal title and a photograph of an old woman clutching her breast in longing, this book is going to have a very short shelf life if judged by its cover. But if you are given to cutting the occasional slack, now is a good time. Set in Kucha Miran Shah, the natural habitat of Lahore's addicts, hijras, hustlers and whores, Feryal Ali Gauhar's first novel, The Scent of Wet Earth in August, is based on her film Tibbi Gali and offers a slice in the life of Fatima, the mute, illegitimate daughter of the once-lovely Mumtaz, a junkie-prostitute, and her lover, Moulvi Basharat of the local Masjid-e-Mehbubia. Right from the start, the inhabitants of this book are dismal enough to offend the infidel and the faithful alike and, consequently, to keep them reading.

As is the case with most novels that deal with life in hell, there is a palpable moral force behind it, but in the attempt to put into words the experiences of people for whom "grief is a way of life", Gauhar often does a lot more telling than showing. The narrative can be gratuitously sentimental, the poetry sometimes ripe enough to rot. Add to that sentences like "... the bastion built with the bones of bereavement" or (brace yourself), "What were you doing with the new shoes? Wearing them to pass urine in the latrine?" and you may want to run a mile. But despite the often ungainly turn of phrase assigned to them, the characters are robust and realistic and manage to reel you into their stories.

Choosing morphine over motherhood, Mumtaz forfeits Fatima who is brought up by three former prostitutes, evil stepsister-style. In between her chores, Fatima, like all disenfranchised young ladies of dire circumstance and delectable form, is on the lookout for Prince Charming. But what is the chance of any shoe fitting, and haven't you heard this story before? What is striking about this novel, and what separates it from others off the Last Exit to Brooklyn (Hubert Selby Jr) block, is that its urban scum is of the Islamic South Asian variety, where immigrants come from the banks of the Euphrates to settle on the banks of the Ravi, paedophiles listen to qawwalis, prostitutes wear burqas, tokens of love are pendants that read "Live like Ali, Die like Hussein" and the illegitimate are born to the inevitable "Allah o Akbar" blaring through loudspeakers.

Born and/or raised among Shaitaan's spawn, Gauhar's characters are both victim and perpetrator, and to grant them some degree of impunity, we must often suffer through romanticised, italicised flashbacks of how they got there. But the plucky protagonists and the visual detail keep you tuned in and by the end of the novel you know your way around the mohalla and can smell the raat-ki-raani ka attar on Moulvi Muzaffar even before he enters the page. This, in addition to the fact that the novel is based on a film, leaves you feeling that you would rather have watched the story than read it, but also that you would rather have read it than not known it at all.

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