Review: Into The Forest by Avtar Singh
A novel that is as much a meditation on the relationship between need, love and freedom as it is on forging bonds
A stalker reports that his ex-girlfriend has gone missing in the early days of the lockdown in 2020 Germany and accuses an Afghan immigrant for it. The police have to investigate the disappearance during the dire health crisis even as they are conscious that the immigrant might be a target. Months later, a reporter comes seeking the story. Thus begins Avtar Singh’s Into The Forest.
Ahilya moves to an unnamed quaint town situated at the foot of a forest in Germany with her husband and a teenage son. She is detached from her husband and isn’t needed by her son who is growing fast. She is neither interested in befriending people from the Indian community nor in being polite to the Germans, who make it clear that they are doing immigrants a huge favour by letting them stay in their country. As she inclines into her new life even as she misses the familiarity of Mumbai and her work as a lawyer, she begins going for walks into the forest with her small dog. There, she comes across an elderly Czech woman, Liesl, an immaculate gardener who, once they cut through the language barrier, offers to accompany her. In the forest they meet a Bosnian woman with two young sons. Up in the forest is a beer garden run by a half-Cuban woman. They notice a young Afghan man, Nabi, sitting on one side of a bench every day at the same time. He works as a janitor at a hospital nearby. The other side is occupied by a younger German woman, Mia, who has come from Berlin to look after her parents’ dog in their absence. One day Mia disappears and her phone is unreachable.
Avtar Singh displays the lives of all his diverse immigrant characters in incisive vignettes. The forest here is both a setting and a character. It becomes the space where the people are alone and free. They do not go looking for company or a sense of belonging. The reporter comments in the beginning, “You can’t call someone lonely if they go looking for solitude.” This inference rings louder through the pages.
Forests are often shown as mystical places, places of transformation in mythology and fairy tales. The forest in Singh’s work is all encompassing and alive. Ahilya notices minute differences in the trees that look alike from far; she learns to observe the movements of animals and birds. The place is dense enough to hide secret lives and open enough to invite people to hide there. It changes through the seasons, and the characters observe it as they observe each other: from a distance, engaging only if needed. Nabi muses that, back home, he could never go up the mountains, into the forest. Here, in Germany, in his migration, the forest is open and accessible.
Towards the end, when the characters come together in their silent nods and affirming acts, their solidarity doesn’t come simply from their immigrant experience or their gender. It comes from their desire to be with the forest in search of solitude. It is the forest that aids their understanding of each other’s lives and of their aloneness.
The setting of the story during the sickness makes it inadvertently a story about isolation and loneliness. Unlike the central characters, we find two peripheral elderly characters musing about the lack of connection that manifested itself throughout their lives because there was always something to do, to get – a degree, a job, wife, kids or a house. They reflect that there was no time or money to travel and connect as young people do today.
The book is as much a meditation on the relationship between need, love and freedom as it is on connection. Can love exist without need? Does constantly being needed suffocate one to the point of indifference? Can people feel loved if they aren’t needed? Ahilya says, “The forest doesn’t need me.” Liesl responds, “We can all be free in it.” Meanwhile, Harpreet, another Indian who works at an incinerator asks, “Is that why we have children? To be needed? Is that really all it is?” The nature of need and people’s desire to be needed is explored thoroughly.
Slow-paced and dialogue-driven, the story is also not narrated in detail. Unexpectedly, it is entirely based on the movement of the characters, and their brief interactions with each other during that time when the world seemingly came to a halt.
About the vanished girl, the reader expects discoveries and revelations that help the investigation. But Singh, quite like the lockdown, forces readers to slow down to observe his characters making their way to the forest, a mundane everyday activity. Also quite like the people waiting in frustration for the lockdown to end, readers become resigned to the unravelling of the plot at its pace. The author captures the very essence of those stultifying locked-down days in his writing, and ends the story with a sublime resolution that transforms unremarkable details into glaring hints that were missed by readers.
Despite being populated by immigrants, the book doesn’t dwell on finding a sense of belonging in an alien country. It moves its focus towards learning the rhythm of a place and the lives inhibiting it. It highlights how, even when people were forced to look at the quotidian routines of their own lives and surroundings, things still happened and were still hidden away from their sad attentive eyes. An impeccably written short and dense mystery, Into The Forest forces the reader to reread it immediately after the last word.
Akankshya Abismruta is an independent writer.
