Where Cicadas Don’t Sing: Symbolic Saturation in Athar Tahir’s Novel

Waseem Anwar

A review of Athar Tahir’s latest book by erudite scholar Waseem Anwar.

Athar Tahir’s Where Cicadas Sing (2025) is the first independent but linked tetralogy to his Tomorrow and Tomorrow Quartet. Tahir underscores cicadas’ singing in the title, but on instant reading of the text one finds that it does not orchestrate all through; not all the time. 

Nevertheless, cicadas are prominently mentioned at three specific spots in this narrative-wordcraft of Tahir.  We first encounter the far cry of cicadas in Part A (South), chapter 42, when a Pakistan Embassy officer, ‘Abbu-jee’ and his family move from Santoza Flats in Kuala Lumpur to their new, independent, and posh residence on the Syers Road: “Insects? Really? Can they make this loud noise?”. We then get a clue about their singing in ‘Bab Empatbelas’ or chapter 14 of Part D (West), where the family listens to some music on a transistor radio while the cicada-screech keeps resonating in the background: “Cicadas are singing”.  One last time and at the final departure of the family from Malaya, cicadas reappear in ‘Bab Duapualuh Tujuh’ or chapter 27 of Part D (West): “… The plane hums endlessly like cicadas. Softer and more distant. This time too I did not cry”. Repeating the very first sentence of the novel, the narrator ends on the same, and without crying too. However, the question for the researcher-readers arises: What about cicadas’ not singing in all the 349 out of 352 pages or in 140 out of 143 chapters?

That the cicada-songs are not synchronized all through this auto-fictional oeuvre of the author, their symbolically saturated felt-presence bursts everywhere, whether it stays enticing or irritating for the readers. The cicadas’ humdrum resounds on every page continuously and consistently. Within this milieu, Where Cicadas Sing is overloaded with the hums and drums in a form of rambling story-line where a raucous-record of the dearest thoughts or powerful but uncared-for feelings flows nonstop. Based on the expressiveness of a growing pre-teen eye and his omniscient pronominal presence, his well-informed subjective ‘I’, the narrator regales us with diverse dimensions of the polar directions identified as East, West, North, or South-bound.  These are actually the directions of author’s imaginative free-flight.  Whether all this makes cicadas universal is something that lures the researchers further into tracking muffled facts through the narrator’s fictional brainwaves about provocative truths and contemplated viewpoints. This being the burden of the researchers, the story-line of Where Cicadas Sing remains crisscrossed with memories and reminiscences.

A cicada, known to be jheengar and tidda in our part of the world, is a flamboyant insect, visible in almost all the shades that are detailed on the novel’s cover page.  Mostly ecofriendly creatures, they unite for mating through occasional phonic techniques, repeating a life pattern that might be periodical or annual. Concerning their oxymoronic literary presence since antiquity, cicadas have been featured by the Greeks and Romans as well as by the African, Chinese, Japanese, Malaysian, Mexican and many worldwide literature and art lovers. Their classification as art motifs is particularly portrayed and discussed by the Malaysian and the South East Asian painters and sculptors. On such footnotes about cicadas’ appearance as an art motif or a lyrical figure, readers track for contextual modality of Tahir’s wordplay in the novel.

Tahir’s wordplay in Where Cicadas Sing gets strung to textual symmetries captured through candid vignettes and shortest possible clauses, which are neither proverbial nor aphoristic.  Also, whether these structural strategies are poetic raise the question as to where in the author resides his past poetic playfulness, now an experimenter of the prosaic cultural discourse?  The structural symmetry of the story-line is based on polar directions as much as it relies on the short observatory logs of the narrator. The keenness of narrator’s I/eye translates all the recorded minutes into a curiosity that transforms a cross-cultural curation through lexical-games. To a great extent, Tahir adopts a deliberate matter-of-fact tone about: look what’s this and look what’s that. The directional curiosity of the story-line churns a pace as well as a space that the author pragmatically employs. The novel remains a single character story, with the budding I/eye laying down large insectivorous canvas for all other characters to respond or react to. From words to numbers and from chapters to ‘Bab[s]’, the reader voyages with the narrator, trusting his reliability to show or not-show, reveal or conceal the facts through fantastic vexations. Much activity-based and happening-haunted per the narrator’s sweet will, the novel proceeds like a passage that has a beginning in the end.  It is like a global journey that opens some Pandora’s box of trips within trips, picnics within picnics, films within films, and fun within fun—no sorrows or crying, though witty seriousness now and then.

(The novel is) like a global journey that opens some Pandora’s box of trips within trips, picnics within picnics, films within films, and fun within fun—no sorrows or crying, though witty seriousness now and then

Overall, Where Cicadas Sing is a jolly book. Its structure is based on a passage to Malayasia/ Malaya.  Its descriptions are realistic and picturesque, but rarely scenic or idyllic.  Its people are moving-sketches, at times pencil-figures or stick-pictures. The characters hardly engage in emotional debates, except involving straight forward arguments, soaked with censored sentiments. As in Chapter XV of Part C, Ananda tries to impress the narrator with his knowledge about bicycle-races.  He tells that wearing metal strips or bangles on one’s ankles keeps the trouser ends tight for the runners to run faster.  The narrator points out to Ananda, “But you never wear trousers. You are always in shorts.”  Ananda pretends he has not heard, but the narrator know that he is hurt: “I can tell. His glasses fog”.  Such is the subtle, humorous, riddling childhood that the reader encounters throughout the novel.  If the narration carries some stream of consciousness formula, it stays at the most obvious surface; no mysterious, oblivious, or opaque depths nor many horizontal philosophical elevations.

Cross-cultural and cross-lingual between Pakistan and the peninsula of Malaya, the novel is abundant with multilingual, multireligious, and even multicultural and transcultural experiences. And all these get integrated through the rhyming puns on vocabulary items that pronounce learning points for a growing child’s slate mind.  “Rattan, rotten, written” or “Dollars … ringgit … poundshillingpence”, “High Commissioner [or] Junior Choir”, “Maulvi Sahib [beside] Gora Sahib”, “Hindu gods [alike] Moses, Jesus, Job and Joseph”, and the “Holy Prophet [and his] Mi’raj”. Quite symphonically, the word-game in Where Cicadas Sing invents abilities for the narrator-child to connect to “Muslim mathematician al-Khwarizmi” while the “Palm lines” transform into “Palmistry” and “Biriani” collates with “jaggery rice”.  “Singer Sewing Machine” starts outshining a “Phillips radio”, while the “Three Musketeers,” “Gachak-wallah” and “Golla-wallah” supersede Gogo, Baby, Pinto. “Ustani Amma,” “Mr. Rafek,” “Police-wallah”  and “Ghanta-Ghar in Lyallpur”and “Jhang Bazaar” turn into Enid Blyton’s “Secret Seven, Famous Five and Adventure books”.  And, all of a sudden, “Ananda [becomes] Amanda”. Many such transitions reflect impressionistic chronicles that a cross-bordered child-narrator’s mind may replicate and reflect.  From airport schedules to school and classroom timetables, from home-bound bounciness to institutional routines, our vicariousness and voyeurism convert into friendly visits, festivities, birthdays, hullabaloo, tamashas, and what not, all multiplying like multiplication. There are many more mentions that add to such multilingual and multicultural noise recorded by the narrator in his NCR (the Japanese National Cash Register Company) business diary and his Phillips Pocket Diary.

If all the flashing, crashing, and saturating rush quoted above is about where cicadas do not sing cicada-songs, hearable or not, deserve a researching attention as well. Cicada-songs have always and mainly been a signature-tune for their courtships and love-making. A worldwide sensation filled with modulating and amplifying techniques, the sound-chambers of cicadas resonate so abruptly that a hairline friction may change the tones they produce. Above all, if cicada-songs are their chorus and their chorus their communication, how to portray this communication is an artist’s option, an author’s prerogative, and a poet’s privilege. 

Tahir’s Where Cicadas Sing is a sincere attempt to represent cicadas’ conundrum, be it a pleasing annoyance or annoying pleasure for the readers.  Tahir’s effort to solve “a mystery” about love-revealed or love-concealed, about cicadas singing more in “the innocent heart” than “in dense bushes”, awards meaningfulness to meaningless encounters where fiction may belie the fact. 

That the novel ends on a tuneful style brings relief to the readers that Tahir, whatever he attempts to compose, knows how to remain poetically precise one or the other way: “The colours of sunset. I see them. They are so vast. They stretch across the sky. They invade the sand and the sea. There is yellow and orange and blood red and violet and gray of many shades. God knows how to paint. I watch their brilliance. I watch it begin to fade”. And, so fade for us the spaces where cicadas sing or don’t because, as readers, we just relish and cherish.

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Waseem Anwar is Professor of English and Director ICPWE (International Centre for Pakistani Writing in English, https://www.kinnaird.edu.pk/icpwe/ ) at Kinnaird College for Women, Lahore.  He has been at FCC and GC universities in the capacity of Dean (Humanities) and Chair (English).  Recipient of the Fulbright award twice, for doctoral studies in 1995 and as Visiting Scholar in 2007, Dr. Anwar served as the President of the Pak-US Alumni Network (PUAN) and Fulbright Alumni Association.  A Gale Group American Scholar, he also received the Punjab Education Department Salam Teacher Award – 2004 and Pakistan Higher Education Commission Best Teacher Award – 2003.  He is a Lifetime Member of the South Asian Literary Association (SALA), USA, and has been on its Executive Committee for three times.  Apart from being on the Advisory and Editorial Boards of several renowned research journals, and publishing scores of articles, his credit includes books, “Black” Women’s Dramatic Discourse (2009), the South Asian Review (SAR 2010—special issue on Pakistani creative writing in English), and very lately Transcultural Humanities in South Asia (Routledge UK, 2022,  https://www.routledge.com/Transcultural-Humanities-in-South-Asia-Critical-Essays-on-Literature-and/Anwar/p/book/9780367483715 ).  He is also the founding Editor in Chief of the journal of English studies, JELLS at FCC university.  Athar Tahir, Where Cicadas Sing. Pakistan: Lightstone Publishers (Pvt) Limited, 2025. 360 pages. Price Rs. 2,500/-.