BOOK REVIEW: Best Of Friends – Kamila Shamsie

The Valour Of Brown Women, The Validation Of Our Friends

I’m returning to Kamila Shamsie after years, having loved Salt and Saffron and Broken Verses over a decade ago. This book came highly recommended by someone who had just finished reading it. And considering it was launched just two weeks ago, this is very nearly fresh off the press. The title ‘Best of Friends’ felt serendipitous, the blurb even more so and the reading, well, it brought something deeply valuable back to me between the pages. And perhaps, I had never really lost it after all.

My joy in Shamsie’s writing came to fruition with a friend I made across borders & continents on Clubhouse – a Pakistani woman close in age to me, also a writer, also from an island city and grappling with the bloodied politics of our shared history. We shared sighs and tears through a reading of ‘The Kite Runner‘ and thought about our abandoned sisterland fallen back in the hands of a misogynist regime. Like a single flower in the rubble, our connection blossomed in the hardest of times our generation has ever faced (even for the subcontinent) – the pandemic. And then the connection broke in those larger-than-life ways that brown women know only too well. But in the time that connection was growing, we each held it close to our hearts and our ears and fingers as we typed on devices. Daily messages of hope, of laughter, of worry, of commiseration. Always, I think of you, I think of you, I see you, I see you, my friend.

I am learning at the midst of my life, what it is to have a woman friend. I am tasting womanhood in my own melancholic reflections of survival and seeing it reflected across borders and gods. We have spent too much, too long on the creation and upkeep of men. Maybe those are the hard labours, the Spartan rituals of surviving men that mark our ascent into womanhood. As brown women traversing a millennium, equal parts on both sides, maybe even our connections to each other are assertions of independence. Our friendships are rebellions, the quiet kind that we subcontinent girls learn to hold steady in breath under the outbursts of our patriarchal cultures. We learn what it is to be women from each other. We hold each other in grace and in words and we validate our shared womanhood.

This is not my first Kamila Shamsie novel but like her writing, I feel like my appreciation of her stories maturing as well. And with this, how aptly titled! – I had an equal reflection across the world to live through the story. Even though, at the time I bought the book, that friend was not in my life anymore, she showed me her face in the words of another woman, same age, same country as her. A compatriot, a fellow traveller, a Pakistani and an Indian. We were all led by the stars of hope that were Indira Gandhi and then Benazir Bhutto – the first women leaders of our respective nations. They spelt such big things for the half of the world that was ours. Now in our middle age, just like the titular Best of Friends, we examine the seed that was our young hope, taste the slight acrid trails within the fruit and revel in the sweetness that still remains.

The ending was pretty unexpected for me. I like its poetic quality, considering this book was more prosaic and not as lyrical as her previous two that I’ve read. All in all, I’m so glad to have returned to this wonderful author! I have also reconnected with my friend and I can’t wait for her to finish reading this book so we can talk about it together. Truly, Best of Friends.