The mythos of The Mother has always been strong, with the sacrificing, self-effacing mother serving as the global gold standard of patriarchy. She exists in religious iconography. She has inspired art. Michelangelo sculpted her, heralding the High Renaissance. The Pietà, created in the closing years of the 15th century, captured love and vulnerability, framing the idiom of suffering motherhood – the mother grieving her child, holding his splayed form. In the early years of the 21st century, Marjane Satrapi, in her graphic memoir, Persepolis, re-visited the image, painting her post-Iranian Revolution Madonna in a veil, holding the broken body of a martyred soldier. Mirza Waheed’s Maryam & Son speaks, palimpsestically, to this tradition of the Great Maternal.

Maryam Ali, named in close approximation to Mary, the bereaved mother, wakes up on a cold February morning in her nondescript London neighbourhood, to find her son, Dilawar, missing. The only sign of something unusual – his blanket, neatly folded at the edge of his bed, signifying a finality, a coded farewell only his mother can read. The story unfolds with Maryam’s endless wait, her interrogation of the past, her changing dynamic with her family and friends as she treads the line between anguished mother and woman afraid...

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