Arithmetic of loss | Review of Mirza Waheed’s Maryam & Son 

Last year, when the spectre of war between India and Pakistan seemed to crystallise, my mother compelled me to return from Delhi on the final flight to Kashmir before they were suspended. Her logic was precise in its irrationality. I would be safer with her, even though Kashmir stood closer to the line of fire. For her, it seemed to me, safety was not geography but proximity: the fact of having her son within reach. Mirza Waheed’s Maryam & Son begins with the ostensible collapse of that logic, when a mother discovers that proximity is no longer hers to command.

Maryam Ali, a widow, who lives in Walthamstow, London, wakes up one morning to find Dilawar, her only son, missing from his bedroom. At first, Maryam and her sisters, Zarrine and Saffina, assume he has gone away briefly, but their anxiety deepens when he does not return, and they go to the police. 

Intelligence officers from the ‘Joint Section’ become involved, bringing into Maryam’s life Julian Chapman, a counter-extremism liaison officer, whose professional detachment gradually gives way to a complicated intimacy. The unit suspects that Dil may have travelled to Iraq and could be the masked IS (Islamic State) recruit they nickname the ‘Swordsman’, identified through their 72% algorithmic match from a video posted online.

The way Maryam & Son opens, without spectacle or rupture, establishes the novel’s psychological gravity. Dil’s disappearance does not register immediately as catastrophe. Maryam refuses to let her situation erupt outward, especially towards her sisters. The disappearance is not an explosion but an inward collapse as Maryam protects them from her suffering even as they stand ready to share it. Their bond is so tender that the novel could just as easily have been called Maryam & Sisters.

Shape of grief 

One of the novel’s most unsettling insights is how the intelligence apparatus entangles Maryam in the logic of suspicion. She, a British-Indian Muslim whose faith and identity become a part of the investigation, is neither accused nor absolved but made to inhabit the space of guilt by association. The officers who enter her life operate within an impersonal regime bereft of ‘feelings and ethics’, while the media compounds this abstraction by circulating her image in a headscarf she does not ordinarily wear, reframing her to fit a familiar narrative of Muslim culpability. 

This estrangement seeps into her everyday life, in graffitis branding her a ‘Paki traitor’ or a kindergartener calling her ‘ISIS mum’. Waheed, parallelly, resists flattening, preserving the dignity of Maryam’s lived reality where ordinary kindness, embodied by figures like her neighbour Tony, persists alongside bigotry.

Author Mirza Waheed

Like Shahnaz Bashir’s 2014 novel Half Mother, which follows a woman waiting for her disappeared son, Maryam & Son inhabits the emotional afterlife of loss. But where Bashir situates absence within the visible machinery of enforced disappearance in Kashmir, Waheed examines its ambiguous form within Muslim-immigrant life in suburban London. Maryam & Sondoes its finest work in illuminating the uncertain condition of a mother forced to live with the looming awareness of who her son might have become. Instead of following Dil’s potentially sensational trajectory, Waheed compels a reader to remain with Maryam, restoring attention to her ‘ordinary’ life.

Sustaining the composure of its opening, Maryam & Son captures the slow accommodation of grief without ever dramatising it. Maryam beats Dil’s clothes in frustration, reproaches her dead husband for leaving her to endure alone, indulges in self-blame, and yet continues to walk, to shop, to inhabit her days with a fragile, stubborn hope. It reminded me of Joan Didion’s beautiful book The Year of Magical Thinking. Didion wrote of grief as a condition that alters perception itself, that makes someone’s absence feel provisional, that “grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it”. 

Waheed arrives at the same emotional truth when Maryam, alone with Dil’s photograph, reflects that grief “is not a state of mind, it’s not something you do or don’t, nor something that fades away with time, but that it’s a living, breathing thing that resides within you, somewhere behind your eyelids. You close your eyes and you feel the shadow of the lost one flit across. It’s best to let it live there and make peace with it. Carry it with you.”

Different truths 

Quite unanticipated, Waheed’s rendering of the ‘Joint Section’ and its counterparts is executed with remarkable technical precision. It lends the novel a tensile, thriller-like atmosphere, invoking the propulsive world of Forsyth while remaining grounded in the quiet social tumult characteristic of Coetzee. Yet, the transitions never feel jarring.

Waheed captures a parent’s bewilderment when forced to inhabit two incompatible truths: Maryam must defend her son against the world’s accusation even as she quietly interrogates her own memories for signs she may have missed.

Motherhood, after all, can’t be only contingent on proximity. Love does not end when presence ends and is neither revoked by distance nor ideology. As the algorithmic probability of Dil being the ‘Swordsman’ rises from 72% to 78%, Maryam confronts the arithmetic of her loss: “I don’t know how to look for the 22 per cent of him that isn’t a terrorist.”

The reviewer is a writer and journalist with experience in publishing.

Maryam & Son

Mirza Waheed

Context

₹699

Published – March 06, 2026 07:58 am IST