Mirage

There is a simplicity to 'Mirage', this story of star-crossed lovers whose brief happiness is cut short, which belies the skill of the telling. Set in a closed desert kingdom in our own time, it has the timeless appeal and delicacy of a fairytale, combined with the moral weight of the great nineteenth-century novelists. It tells how Sayeed, a good but unexceptional man, finds love with a woman who might have been beyond his reach, had widowhood and misfortune not brought her within it.

The scene for Sayeed's marriage is set with unpretending tenderness: the city hospital where he works, the shanty town he inhabits, his brother's village home, the simple wedding, the struggle to make a decent life for his new wife and her child. Heat, dirt and squalor form the backdrop to a tragedy. Petty jealousy, sexual desire and religious fervour are the engines of the tragedy, and Latifa, a village girl unused to the harsh conditions in the city, its ultimate victim.