Graveyards have long haunted the chronicles of literature, from ancient epics and medieval elegies to modern novels, serving as sites where mortality, memory and meaning converge. In these spaces, the boundary between the living and the dead blurs – Hamlet speaks to a skull, Charles Dickens’ Pip meets a convict among the tombstones, and Juan Preciado chases ghosts in Comala’s dusty graves.
In his latest novel, Tales from Qabristan, Sabin Iqbal draws from this tradition, but the qabristan (graveyard) is more than a setting; it is a threshold, a repository of suppressed histories and family reckonings. Here, graves do not conceal – they reveal, whispering truths the living would rather forget. The past rises from the earth, not as a distant echo but as a presence that demands to be faced.
At its core, the novel is a meditation on memory, grief and the inescapable weight of familial and social legacies. The protagonist, Farook, returning to his childhood village after his father’s death, must come to terms with the shifting contours of home, identity and belonging. The fragmented narrative interlaces past and present, tracing intergenerational trauma through a multitude of characters. History permeates personal struggles that shape the village, reinforcing the cyclic nature of ambition, exile and nostalgia.
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Farook is the central figure in the novel, both an observer and a reluctant participant in his family’s quiet tragedies. Caught between past and present, he confronts the erosion of old values, shaped by frustration, forced resilience and an awakening to societal injustices. His early life is bound up with figures like his father, grandmother and cousin Jami, each reflecting a world in flux.
Sabin Iqbal
Tales from Qabristan
Penguin Random House India, 2025
Farook’s struggles begin in childhood, marked by family power relations and rigid hierarchies. Exposure to religious rites becomes a metaphor for the inescapable weight of tradition. His relationship with his father, Pa, is a curious mix of admiration, frustration and emotional distance. Pa places great expectations on him, yet fails to connect with him emotionally. This disconnect is exacerbated by his father’s failure in the Gulf, which becomes a defining source of Farook’s resentment. Unlike the many migrants who return wealthy, his father fails to adapt to the materialistic demands of expatriate life, coming home not with financial success but with books and a terminal illness. The contrast between his father’s idealism and economic struggles creates a quiet but lasting frustration in Farook.
Pa often murmured, Perhaps the fault is mine, but I cannot take this anymore. One or two years more, then I’ll return for good.
The family scoffed, Why does he come home every year? He should slog it out in the desert, make some money.
Farook’s mother heard it all, sat quietly in the kitchen, her cheeks flushed red with silent tears.
Farook grew up in the shadow of this quiet collapse – his father’s failure, his mother’s grief, their family’s isolation. The Gulf dream, he learned, wasn’t just about money; it measured a man’s worth in what he could not bring back.
Years later, Farook summed it up in a single line: Pa came back with four cartons of books, not much money, and cancer in his lungs.
That was the cost – life traded for a lie, leaving behind neither wealth nor health, only disappointment dressed as legacy.
Pa and Ma’s marriage appears conventional, but beneath the surface lies unspoken conflict and quiet defiance. Pa holds authority, dismissing Ma’s aspirations – What for? To use as a wrapper? – when she wishes to collect her degree. Ma goes through both domestic restrictions and the humiliation of Pa’s financial failures, re-reading his letters in search of the man she once knew.
To outsiders, theirs is an ideal marriage, but Farook sees the hidden truth: “I have seen it all… the frustrations, solitary sighs, timid protests, and tears others never see.”
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Ma resists subtly – silent tears instead of arguments, and later, rejecting Farook’s financial help to assert her dignity. The novel critiques how economic dependence silences women. Though Pa is a loving father, he cannot see Ma beyond her roles as wife and mother, reinforcing a patriarchal order that erases women’s identities. Ma’s quiet endurance and defiance make her one of the novel’s most powerful figures.
In Tales from Qabristan, Gulf migration is not a story of ambition but of compulsion, marked by broken dreams and weary returns. Pa symbolises this disillusionment – his idealism and ethical rigidity make him ill-suited for the ruthless migrant economy. He returns not with wealth but with books and a tumour, a haunting symbol of the personal cost of migration.
Jami, a gifted cricketer, is forced to abandon his passion for the Gulf’s economic promise, leaving with resignation, not hope. In contrast, Podiyan thrives through pragmatism and compromise, embodying the exploitative side of migrant success. Mohammed, Ramia’s husband, secures financial stability, showing how Gulf remittances shape social status back home.
Farook’s brief stint in the Gulf reveals it as a place of exhaustion and alienation, not opportunity. The novel critiques the romanticised Gulf dream, exposing the psychological toll on both the successful and the failed. It’s a quiet elegy to those who return with little more than memories, regrets and the weight of years lost.
Tales from Qabristan also situates itself within subaltern literature, where the oppressed do not simply suffer – they persist, question and defy.
In the novel, the Veda (tribal) community exists on the margins, shaped by caste, exclusion and social hierarchies. Yet, through characters like Pankan, Kochukarumban and Neelan, the novel reveals not victims, but individuals asserting dignity through quiet defiance.
Pankan, scarred by caste violence and gender non-conformity, lives as a trans woman, unsettling the village and exposing the cruelty that enforces social order. Kochukarumban and Neelan seek dignity through conversion to Islam, only to face persistent caste prejudice. The education system fails Veda children, trapping them in cycles of labour, their potential stifled.
Yet, resistance continues – Pankan’s identity defies erasure, Kochukarumban attends mosque prayers despite rejection, and Veda women embody silent resilience. Their lives challenge structures designed to keep them invisible.
Tales from Qabristan rejects romanticised struggles, exposing the hypocrisies of caste mobility in Kerala. Pankan becomes more than a person – a symbol of survival, a ghostly figure at Pa’s funeral: Far away, under a lonely mango tree, stands Pankan. I strain my eyes to look again… Is it really Pankan or an apparition?
Through Pankan’s defiance and Ma’s silent endurance, the novel critiques patriarchal, casteist and gendered oppression, forcing us to confront what it means to exist beyond society’s definitions.
Sabin Iqbal’s two earlier novels, The Cliffhangers and Shamal Days, and Tales from Qabristan share a thematic core rooted in migration, alienation and the shifting terrains of identity. The Cliffhangers explores the disillusionment of youth in a coastal Kerala village, grappling with social exclusion and political violence – outsiders in their own land. Shamal Days shifts to the Gulf, exposing the harsh realities of migrant life where dreams of prosperity clash with exploitation and disposability. This critique reappears in Tales from Qabristan, where Pa’s failed migration story exemplifies the illusions and heartbreaks of the Gulf dream. Iqbal’s novel is lyrical and introspective, blending social fiction, autofiction and realism. His atypical storytelling and intertextual depth fit within the new genres of postcolonial literature that defies linearity, engaging readers in a world where memory and myth meld, and every grave holds a story waiting to be unearthed.
K.M. Seethi is Director, Inter University Centre for Social Science Research and Extension (IUCSSRE), Mahatma Gandhi University (MGU), Kerala, India. He is also the editor of Journal of State and Society. Seethi also served as Senior Professor of International Relations and Dean of Social Sciences at MGU.
