In one sentence
The sequel to Peer-e-Kamil follows Salar and Imama from the first awkward months of marriage to old age, and turns a love story into a long argument about interest, money and what a believer owes the world.
What this novel is
Aab-e-Hayat, the water of life, is the sequel readers of Peer-e-Kamil waited ten years for. It ran as a monthly serial in Khawateen Digest for twenty-five instalments, from November 2014 to the end of 2016, and Ferozsons then published it as a hardback of roughly 730 pages. It is nearly twice the length of the first book and covers more than twenty years.
It starts the morning after the first book ends. Salar Sikandar and Imama Hashim are married at last, and the novel's first surprise is that marriage is hard for them. From there it widens: Salar's career takes him from a Pakistani bank to the World Bank and to the Congo, Imama pushes him to leave interest-based finance altogether, children arrive, illness arrives, and the second half belongs as much to the next generation as to the couple.
I should say plainly that this is a different kind of book from its predecessor. Peer-e-Kamil is a single tight arc. Aab-e-Hayat is a family saga with an argument running through it, and it asks for patience in return for a much larger canvas.
The story, without spoilers
It is Ramadan, and Salar and Imama have been married for a few weeks. Nine years of near-isolation have left Imama uncertain of herself and quick to take offence; Salar, attentive but clumsy, keeps getting small things wrong. The families have to be told who she really is. Her old life keeps brushing against the new one: a chance meeting with Jalal Ansar, the man she once loved, and an encounter with her father that turns violent.
Then Imama asks the question that gives the book its spine. Salar works in banking, and banking runs on interest. For the sake of the Prophet she loves, will he leave it? The novel follows what that request costs: a career rebuilt from scratch in international development, a posting in Kinshasa where Salar documents how a forestry project is destroying the lives of indigenous people, and a slow, dangerous attempt to build something that has never existed, a financial system without interest.
Alongside the big story runs a small one. A school watchman called Ghulam Fareed, crushed by debt, does something terrible, and a baby girl survives it. What becomes of her, and of the three children Salar and Imama have of their own, is where the novel finds its heart in the second half.
The full story
Show the whole plot, including the ending
The marriage settles, but not before a crisis: Salar hears from someone else about Imama's lunch with Jalal, loses his temper and turns her out of the house. Dr Sibt-e-Ali, their mentor from the first book, rebukes him; Salar apologises, brings her home, and hands her papers she takes to be a divorce. They are the transfer of his property to her. Imama's father, Hashim Mubeen, confronts them in a restaurant and stabs Salar in the shoulder; Salar drops the charges. Her brother Waseem quietly seeks peace.
After Imama's challenge Salar leaves commercial banking for the World Bank and rises fast, becoming country head in the Democratic Republic of Congo. With a Harvard-educated Congolese colleague, Petris Ibaka, he documents how a deforestation project is harming forest communities and lining pockets; when the story breaks in the international press, headquarters blames him. The pressure escalates into something closer to a thriller: stolen documents, a tapped phone, Ibaka attacked and later killed, and overtures from an American intelligence officer that Salar refuses. He is eventually made a vice-president of the Bank and accepts the post reluctantly, as a platform for the interest-free system he has begun organising with like-minded people around the world.
Imama, pregnant and living in America, learns that her brothers have been killed in an attack on their place of worship and sinks into depression; she nearly leaves Salar before an old woman's lesson on gratitude pulls her back. Their youngest, Hameen, is born prematurely. The watchman's surviving daughter, Chunni, is taken in and formally adopted as Raeesa. The eldest, Jibreel, is the kind of serious, gifted child who finds out before his mother does that his father has been diagnosed with a brain tumour. Salar resigns from the World Bank, turns down the chance to lead it, launches his interest-free fund with five partners on the eve of surgery, and survives. Hashim Mubeen, by now an old man, has himself embraced Islam and is searching for his daughter.
The last act jumps more than a decade. Salar is about sixty. Jibreel is a surgeon who cannot save a young patient and is drawn to the boy's mother, Ayesha, whose former husband, Ahsan Saad, is the book's portrait of a pious hypocrite. Hameen has founded a platform for young entrepreneurs, with Raeesa quietly keeping a ledger of every rupee she has lent him. Anaya, the daughter, loves the neighbours' son, who has become a Muslim; Imama resists, wanting Pakistani Muslim spouses for all her children, and is slowly brought round. Salar's father, Sikandar Usman, dies. Hameen is shot in an attempt on the family and survives, taking up his father's mission. The book closes on an open scene built around the phrase turup ka patta, the trump card, and leaves unanswered the question it has asked for seven hundred pages: whether a financial system without interest can actually win.
The people in it
Salar Sikandar سالار سکندر
No longer the boy who played with his life. He is a husband trying very hard, then a banker who gives up the career he is best at because his wife asked him to, then a public figure with a tumour and a mission. Readers who found his conversion in the first book too quick will find its consequences here worked out in full. He is the reason most people keep going when the story drags.
Imama Hashim امامہ ہاشم
The book's most argued-over character. The woman who gave up everything in Peer-e-Kamil spends the early chapters insecure, grudging and easily hurt, and many readers felt betrayed by that. I read it as the author's honest answer to a question most romances avoid: what nine years alone does to a person. She also gets the novel's single most important line, when she asks Salar to leave interest behind.
Jibreel جبرئیل
The eldest child, a prodigy who carries the secret of his father's illness and later becomes a surgeon. The scenes between the boy and his father, especially the one where he begs Salar not to die, are the passages readers remember years later.
Hameen حمین
The youngest, born too early and never quiet again. Mischievous, quick, a born entrepreneur, and the heir to his father's project by the end. Several reviewers named him their favourite character in the book.
Raeesa رئیسہ
The watchman's daughter who survives the novel's darkest sub-plot and grows up as Salar and Imama's adopted child. Her bond with Salar is the cleanest thread in the book, and her story is the one most readers wished had been given more room.
Ahsan Saad احسن سعد
Introduced as a boy taught that women deserve beating, and grown into a religiously self-righteous abuser. He is the novel's human villain and its warning that outward piety proves nothing.
What it is really about
Riba, and what it costs to refuse it
Every review of this book agrees that the prohibition of interest is its spine. Umera Ahmed does not treat it as an abstract rule: Salar gives up the career he is best at, loses investors when he falls ill, and spends twenty years on a system that may not work. The watchman's story shows debt from the other end. Whether you find the interest-free dream inspiring or implausible, the book takes it seriously enough to make you think about where your own money sits.
Marriage between two good people is still work
The first third is a brave thing for a sequel to do. Instead of a honeymoon it gives us two devout, decent people getting on each other's nerves. A reviewer summed up the lesson well: however pious you become, you will never fully understand the person you married. Readers who wanted romance were disappointed; readers who had been married a while recognised themselves.
Faith lived in a modern house
The Sikandar household, with its arguments, its honesty with children and its Islamic values practised in Washington and Lahore alike, is set against Ahsan Saad's rigid, cruel one. The contrast is the book's answer to the question of what a religious family should look like, and it is more generous than the first novel's.
The Last Sermon
The Prophet's farewell address, with its insistence on human equality, recurs: Imama asks Salar to recite it, and he does so again at the funeral of a Black colleague killed for telling the truth. It is the author's way of tying the book's politics, race, money and power, back to its faith.
Is it worth reading?
Worth reading if you loved Peer-e-Kamil and want to know what became of its two people; you will get an honest, often moving answer, and in Jibreel and Hameen two of the best children in Urdu popular fiction. The riba argument is the most sustained treatment of money and faith I know of in a novel written for a general readership in Pakistan, and it will change how some readers think.
It is not the better book. It is slow for the first two hundred pages, it keeps adding characters, and it ends abruptly with its central question unanswered. Read it as a sequel, not as a stand-alone, and read it with time to spare.
Where it falls short
The pace. Seven monthly instalments passed before the story moved beyond domestic quarrels, and in book form that is a long stretch of lights left on and compliments not paid.
The premise strains. A Pakistani banker becoming a World Bank vice-president, pursued by intelligence agencies, while founding a global interest-free fund, is a lot to ask a reader to accept, and the author knows it.
The ending. After twenty-five instalments it stops rather than finishes, and the fate of Salar's great project is never settled. Readers at the time were openly annoyed, and they had a point.
The preaching. Less than in the first book, but the superlatives pile up, and the children are a little too gifted to be true.
Questions readers ask
Do I need to read Peer-e-Kamil first?
Yes. Aab-e-Hayat begins the morning after Peer-e-Kamil ends and assumes you know Salar, Imama, Jalal, Dr Sibt-e-Ali and Imama's family.
What does Aab-e-Hayat mean?
Water of life, the legendary water that grants immortality. In the novel Salar is writing his life story under the title Taash, playing cards, and Imama suggests he call it Aab-e-Hayat instead.
How long is Aab-e-Hayat?
About 730 pages in the Ferozsons hardback, covering twenty-five monthly instalments and more than twenty years of story. Allow three to four weeks.
Who are Salar and Imama's children?
Jibreel, the eldest, who becomes a surgeon; Anaya, their daughter; Hameen, the youngest, born prematurely; and Raeesa, the adopted daughter of a school watchman.
Is there an English translation of Aab-e-Hayat?
Not an authorised one that we could confirm. Unlike Peer-e-Kamil, which Ferozsons published in English in 2011, the sequel exists only in Urdu from the publisher; translations found online are unofficial.
Has it been made into a drama?
No, and nothing has been announced.
Where to read it
The hardback is in print. Free PDFs and episode uploads are unauthorised; buy from the publisher or a bookshop.
- Ferozsons, the publisher – hardback, about Rs 2,000, in stock
- KitaabNow – same edition
- BookMart PK – original hardback
Share your thoughts
Read it differently, or think a detail here is wrong? Email support@mybytenest.com. I read everything and correct the page when a reader is right.