O Yasmeen… Book Launch
The “Why” of O Yasmeen… I wrote O Yasmeen... to bypass the forensic history of 1947, for example, who killed whom, where the border lies—and replace it with a spiritual cartography. The novel opens in Chand’s Tea House, a metaphysical space that wasn’t "built" but “arrived” between a cobbler’s stall and a heap of broken radios. Here, the visitors are not merely characters but archetypes of moral injury, and the book itself becomes a testament to the dignity of the unfinished. In most trauma literature, the goal is “recovery”—an attempt to put the pieces back together. O Yasmeen... argues the opposite. My protagonist, Bose, fails precisely because he tries to “repair” the past—to find Aslam, to recover Yasmeen, to suture a wound that history intended to stay open. The book posits that some betrayals, like the Partition, are absolute. To try to “fix” them is to lie about their gravity. This narrative establishes a moral boundary: we do not own the pain of others. We cannot na...
