The Royal Abduls

In America, we’ve been living in the shadow of 9/11 for so long that even those of us who were adults at the time sometimes forget what the years immediately after were like—how formative their bigotry and paranoia. Ramiza Shamoun Koya’s brilliant debut, The Royal Abduls, which traces the experience of an Indian American family caught in the ugliness of that time, is a compelling reminder of how brutal and complicated the collateral damage could be. With wit, storytelling skill, and moments of well-timed humor, Koya distills that experience, letting us see it through the eyes of a young scientist, Amina, and her middle-school-aged nephew, Omar. Both protagonists are introduced in one of the most intriguing opening sentences I’ve read in a long time: “Amina Abdul’s nephew had begun to speak with an Indian accent.”  

Koya reminds us that the backlash against Muslim culture (whether or not the recipients of that backlash were actually Muslim) was about more than the very real danger of being placed on a no-flight list, attacked at a gas station, or randomly hauled off to Guantanamo Bay. It could work on a deeper, more insidious level, producing a kind of claustrophobia of the mind, crowding out psychic space normally reserved for life’s more routine challenges—the awkwardness of adolescence, the ups and downs of a marriage. Yet as Koya expertly shifts between Amina’s and Omar’s voices, spinning poetry out of their scientific interests—her hybrid-zone moths, his distant galaxies—the tragedies that drive the narrative also point, by the end, toward a place of hope and redemption that, I must admit, left me in tears. 

As a culture, we have a long way to go before righting the prejudicial wrongs done in the name of 9/11 (not to mention all the ones that came before). But The Royal Adbuls, like so much recent post-colonial literature, gets us a little closer. Highly recommended.