There is Khurram Qadir, a senior student whom Yashab Ahmed meets in his final M.A. and who wields a strong impression on his as yet indecisive character. Khurram has decided to be a teacher and is moulding his consciousness and character in accordance with this objective. He appears to be a catalytic agent for the development of Yashab Ahmed's personality.
Imran is a character who appears briefly. He is a teacher who cannot cope with the conditions of the teaching profession in the country, and is forced to commit suicide. He seems to have been brought in to reveal the corruption rampant in the educational system.
Sara Ahmed is one of the major characters. A foreign qualified university teacher, equipped mentally and professionally for creative thinking she makes a nucleus, along with her foreign friends and a mystical saint-like figure she calls "Father", for an organisation, aiming at transforming society on mystical cum revolutionary lines. Under her influence both Khurram and Yashab Ahmed come to be associated with this organisation. Even the Vice Chancellor of the University, a weak willed careerist, is impressed by her courage and talent.
The novel ends on the theme of resistance and struggle. In the midst of a mass arrest of many thousands of "miscreants", Sara Ahmed, Yashab Ahmed and a person called Mansoor, are also arrested. (Strangely we have mention of Mansoor in various places of the narrative, but we never meet him in person.) It seems as if the author is referring back to the Sufi martyr of 9th century Baghdad as a symbolic figure. Sara Ahmed is released through the efforts of Sattar Asif. While Sattar tells her his intention of publishing a portion of Yashab Ahmed's thesis, Sara shifts to the house of Yashab Ahmed and starts struggling for the release of the other arrested persons.
Thus we come to the end of the novel, but not to the end of the process which has been set off by the political impulse with which it began. Only now we know that the struggle has arrived at a higher level with the association of a number of socially, politically, philosophically and spiritually mature members of the intelligentsia. Their participation is not peripheral or tentative but total and final. They have burnt their boats - and literally so, for at one point one of the characters burns, along with other papers, his passport which could be a temptation to escape from responsibility.
[Gratefully reprinted from Dawn (Karachi), 12 August 1988.]
Annual Of Urdu Studies, #7 52