Chasing Shadows in Borrowed Light by Safinah Danish Elahi — reviewed

The history a group of friends shares is never the same history. Four people may inhabit the same afternoon — the same school canteen, the same humid Karachi classroom with its single whirring fan — and each will file away something different, something weighted according to what they already carry. Safinah Danish Elahi’s third novel understands this. It is a book about the divergence of memory and the cost of collective silence, and it arrives with enough structural ambition to make its occasional stumbles feel like the falls of a writer reaching, rather than one who has miscalculated.

The novel opens with a crisis. Areen, an artist living in New York, sends her old school friend Saira a WhatsApp message that means what it says: she doesn’t think she’ll be around much longer. From this moment Elahi deploys a dual timeline — present day, August 2022, with the friends scattered across Karachi, New Jersey, and Melbourne — and the year 2008, when they were all still in school in Karachi, still orbiting the event that would eventually drive them apart. The structure is familiar to readers of contemporary literary fiction, but Elahi handles the interweaving with care, and the 2008 chapters do not feel like mere backstory. They have their own atmosphere, their own slow accumulation of dread.

There are four narrators, each with a named chapter. Saira, now a filmmaker and single mother, controls her surroundings obsessively: countertops wiped clean, tissue boxes aligned at precise angles, anxiety expressed in the domestic geometry of a woman who has learned that surfaces can be managed even when interiors cannot. Usman, driving through New Jersey traffic to check on Areen at Saira’s request, argues with himself across the full length of the novel — irritable, guilty, self-serving, then ashamed of his self-serving. Ashar, the quietest of the four, wraps a guitar-playing injury in his Melbourne flat and thinks about how August in his adopted city is a different kind of lonely from the Augusts of his childhood. All three are rendered with intelligence and attention. But Areen is the novel’s true subject: a woman who carries what was done to her like a stone in the chest, who has a list in her denim jacket pocket of things she can still bear — green sofa, caterpillars, chess, pickled mangoes, her best friend Ashar — and whose presence radiates danger precisely because everyone who loves her has, at some point, chosen not to look directly at the source of her pain.

Elahi is a novelist who trusts implication. The worst thing in this book is never stated outright in the early chapters; it is felt, the way a bruise is felt before it is seen. The teenage Areen smokes weed to feel numb and retreats to Ashar’s sofa and “let dreamless sleep take over” — a phrase of four words that carries the weight of what she cannot yet say. The novel’s adult Areen is a woman who has tried therapy and called it “a capitalist construct,” who cuts her hair unpredictably, who is both the most vivid person in any room and the one most likely to be consumed by it. Elahi does not sentimentalise this. She does not offer Areen up as a symbol. She writes her as a person — difficult, blazing, depleting, worth the trouble — and that is considerably harder to do.

Where the novel occasionally loses its footing is in the calibration between the two timelines. The present emergency — the opened chasm of Areen’s message, the convergence of the scattered friends — has a genuine urgency that the 2008 chapters sometimes bleed away rather than deepen. There are passages of school-corridor life that are well-observed but that stall the reader at precisely the moment the plot has generated real momentum. A few secondary characters carry the faint quality of load-bearing walls: present, functional, not quite inhabited. And there are moments when Elahi explains an emotional note that the scene has already sounded, a hesitancy that suggests she does not yet fully trust the reader to follow her.

These are the marks of a writer still finding the outer edges of her form. But Chasing Shadows in Borrowed Light does something that many more polished novels do not: it makes Areen’s survival feel genuinely uncertain, and therefore genuinely necessary. By the time the secret of the 2008 afternoon arrives, it matters — not as a plot revelation but as a moral one, the kind that implicates everyone. The novel’s epigraph — “Hurt people, hurt people” — is almost too neat a key to what follows, but Elahi earns it in the end, because the novel she writes is not about cycles of damage so much as about the small, daily decision not to see what is in front of you, and the long reckoning that waits on the other side of that decision.

Elahi’s previous novel, The Idle Stance of the Tippler Pigeon, was shortlisted for The Asian Prize for Fiction 2023, and the work there — three adults, a childhood wound, the same geography of diaspora and return — now reads as preparation for this. She is building something novel by novel, accumulating understanding of a particular kind of damage and the particular silences that enable it. Chasing Shadows in Borrowed Light is not yet the complete expression of that understanding. But it is closer.

By Maria A Perdomo