Doctor in despair: Tell Her Everything, by Mirza Waheed, reviewed

‘No one dies without regrets,’ says Doctor Kaiser Shah in Mirza Waheed’s melancholy third novel, an exploration of guilt through the eyes of a doctor haunted by his past, which won the Hindu Prize for Fiction 2019 and was nominated for two further prizes in Asia.

While both Waheed’s previous novels – The Collaborator, a Guardian First Book Award finalist, and The Book of Gold Leaves – deal with the turbulent recent history of his homeland, Kashmir, Tell Her Everything tackles the moral cost of a professional choice that compromises personal ethics.

Set between India, London and an unnamed oil monarchy, it tells the story of the regretful doctor, now retired in London and living in a luxurious Thameside flat. Desperate for absolution as death approaches, he imagines confessing everything to his estranged adult daughter Sara, who lives in America. He is tormented by the unofficial work he undertook while employed by a state hospital in a country that strictly enforces Sharia law: namely, performing penal operations, such as amputation for robbery.

This work has tainted his whole life ‘like a dark and corrosive drip’; his shame even led him to send his daughter to boarding school in America after her mother’s heart unexpectedly stopped when Sara was seven. She gives her side of the story in letters that sound an artificial note (‘I’m not kidding with you’ ) next to her father’s earnest narrative. In them, she describes feeling orphaned, and berates her father for sending her away. As the doctor reflects on his childhood in Uttar Pradesh, we see how feeling ashamed of his family’s poverty led him to prioritise financial security over his conscience and a relationship with his daughter.

The problems with the novel are ones of form and structure.