Zahra, the narrator of Sikeena Karmali’s A House by the Sea, wants nothing more than “to take my home off my back and lay it down, here, lay my burden down and sort through it.” Zahra’s “burden” is her uncertainty about her origins and her insecurity as to the true meaning of home. Born in Nairobi, Kenya, to Gujarati parents, educated in Egypt and working in London, she has spent her adult life trying to reconcile her family’s secrets and exile. Much of her sense of loss stems from the deaths of her sister and brother, killed by soldiers determined to rid what is now Tanzania of its non-black, “colonial” citizens in the early 1960s.
The opening of the novel finds Zahra and her parents on a visit to Zanzibar and in the midst of family intrigue and romance that smacks of a Bollywood musical. Seeing her parents, who have made their new home in Canada, and aware of their sense of displacement, Zahra decides to root herself in the East Africa she remembers. She becomes obsessed with securing ownership of a house that once belonged to the family and begins a love affair with a married property lawyer she believes can help her in her quest. Strewn with Zahra’s abstract and poetic musings regarding love and belonging, this first section feels fluffy in comparison to the more grounded material of the later sections.
But if Zahra’s introduction to her plight is overly sentimental and theatrical, it soon gives way to a less self-conscious and more affecting family chronicle, told from multiple points of view and looping pleasingly through time. We are privy to the hidden pasts of Zahra’s maternal and paternal grandmothers, the former an Indian bride sent to her husband in Africa sight unseen and the latter a runaway from a well-respected Egyptian family.
Karmali shifts easily between the domestic sphere of the kitchen and exquisite descriptions of the meals and “bitings” prepared there to a broad canvas of backstories of particular areas and events. This viewing of the past through various lenses not only heightens mystery by delaying resolution, but provides a wonderful resonance and demonstrates the very personal legacy Zahra has resolved to understand and articulate.