O Yasmeen As A “Switchboard Of Phantoms”

 “Some silences are ethically superior to speech.” - Rajiv Mudgal 

O Yasmeen took fifteen years to write. It intensifies what is only briefly mentioned in the appendix of The Loom of Time as saturated Time.

Modern literature, especially the Western novel—typically relies on linear plots, clear character arcs, and an “industrial” logic: a beginning, a middle, and an end. O Yasmeen refuses this structure. Instead of a linear narrative, it employs a “switchboard of phantoms”. It blends poetry, philosophy, and prose without hierarchy, creating a work of hybrid literature. In doing so, it argues that standard modern prose is insufficient to capture the true horror and fragmentation of the 1947 Partition.

The critique suggests that O Yasmeen hints at the incapacity of modern literature rooted in industrial logic to confront deep trauma. It challenges the “rational” or “journalistic” modes through which modern novels often narrate history, exposing them as attempts to present trauma as evidence rather than experience. The novel instead adopts a fragmented, “unfocused” narrative—filled with ghosts, silences, and memory—to convey the reality of grief. Where modern books prize “focus” and plot discipline, O Yasmeen values wandering, particularly metaphysical wandering.

Within the novel lies Chand’s Tea House, a setting stocked with “books that their own authors had drowned.” This image functions as a central metaphor: the novel gives voice to stories rejected, silenced, or destroyed by triumphant modern history. In doing so, it advances the unsettling idea that accepted literature may be little more than a collection of sanctioned narratives, and it demands that the reader abandon expectations of a conventional story and accept, instead, a cartography of grief.