“It seems Allah wanted children around him to celebrate Eid,” the mother of six-year-old Mennatallah Abu Libda wailed on Al Jazeera. Her daughter had been killed when two Israeli helicopters attacked a tent encampment for displaced persons in Khan Younis, southern Gaza. Mennatallah’s grandmother described the girl as “a little bird from the birds of paradise”.
The Israelis claim they were attacking a Hamas hideout etc, but since October 2023, when Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel, over 21,000 Palestinian children have been killed, according to UNICEF’s latest figures in February. (Over 44,000 children were injured during this period.) A ceasefire has been in place since October 2025, yet Israel keeps killing children under the pretext of hunting down terrorists. Few around the world buy this nonsense; so much so that László Nemes, who directed the wonderful Son of Saul (2015), claimed during the opening of this year’s Cannes film festival that “an absolute shameless orgy of antisemitism” had overtaken the West.
Of course, European Jews suffered the death of children horribly during World War II. A terrifying glimpse into this is the 1982 film Sophie’s Choice (based on William Styron’s 1979 novel), in which the titular character relates, through flashbacks, her internment in the Auschwitz concentration camp with her two children; in the climax, she is asked which of the children she would choose to live, and she chooses the son (both die, in any case).
This is why a novel this year by the Kashmiri-British writer Mirza Waheed, Maryam & Son, is a bold writing choice and a compelling literary experience. His first novel, The Collaborator (2011), was set in a border village in Kashmir, where a boy is forced into collaborating with the Indian army by going to a nearby “valley of death” to collect identity cards from boys killed in clashes. It is a novel of tension, where Kashmir’s landscape itself is alive: beautiful, but wounded.
The current novel is about a widow Maryam Ali, whose son Dilawar disappears from their modest residence in Walthamstow, a gentrified town in East London. The boy is described as quiet, and something of a computer-network whiz. Things take a turn for the worse when the British security services arrive (and invade) her home to tell her that they suspect Dilawar has joined Daesh, the violent extremist group known also as Islamic State, or ISIS/ISIL, etc.
The evidence is thin: a fuzzy video capture of “the swordsman” that the American intelligence services say could be Dilawar. That’s enough for the espiocrats, who would rather err on the side of caution then witness another beheading or suicide bombing, though the British officials themselves speculate that Dilawar would probably be recruited as an Islamist hacker rather than as a cold-blooded killer. They insist it is Maryam’s son. (As an aside, it’s quite clear the Brits are the junior partners in the trans-Atlantic alliance and are not always in the loop.)
The mother refuses to accept that her son has become a terrorist, though there are several families in Britain where a son (or daughter) have rushed off to join ISIS. Though she receives regular visits from the security services’ “liaison”, a man who like Dilawar is lonely and who feels attracted to the 40ish Maryam, she refuses to accept that her son is a terrorist without concrete proof.
Waiting in uncertainty
Thus, the novel is a gradual disintegration of a mother. Her life is frozen. She no longer participates in the activities she used to – like a picnic in the park with her two younger sisters. She tries, but it does not work. She loses touch with her judgmental extended family, though she remains emotionally connected to her mother, who tries to offer solace through gestures and food, rather than through words. Words are meaningless to a parent whose child has disappeared.
Her isolation and disorientation get worse when news of his disappearance and her photos appear in the media. She now does not want to show her face in public. The security services want her to broadcast a public appeal to Dilawar to return, but she refuses. Ultimately, the Americans and British intelligence community decide to launch a missile on his location; though it is still not clear to Maryam whether or not it is her son that they claim is a terrorist, she is finally, and formally, told that he is dead.
The sensitively written Maryam & Son is successful in depicting the slow, claustrophobic tension that builds up in the mother’s psychology while she waits for her son, whom she realises eventually will not be returning. And when he is reported dead, then it is as if she has evaporated. An outcome foreshadowed by the psychic debilitation she is already undergoing.
Waheed‘s novel reminded me of the 2005 novel by Uzodinma Iweala, Beasts of No Nation, wherein 12-year-old Agu joins a militia in a civil war in a west African country. This child is raped by his commander and commits grotesque acts of violence with a machete; and Agu also commits rape. The saddest part of the novel is the end, where Agu is confessing to an American missionary, and the last line is: “I am all this thing, but I am also having mother once, and she is loving me.”
Therefore, this Eid al Adha (though it is celebrated in Kashmir on Wednesday), do give thought to the 21,000 Palestinian children, all of whom have mothers that have been emotionally decimated, trying to comfort themselves with the belief that God needed their child to spend Eid with.
Aditya Sinha is a writer living on the outskirts of Delhi.