This approach is of a piece with the book's concern for communication beyond the level contaminated by considerations of status and nation. When Raza is suspected of participating in Harry's assassination and goes on the run from his American pursuers in Afghanistan, he glimpses, while hiding under a pile of sacks on the back of a truck, a group of colorful nomad women making their way across the desert. We learn that "just that glimpse moved Raza into a profound melancholy. No, not melancholy. It was uljhan he was feeling. His emotions were in Urdu now, melancholy and quiet abutting each other like the two syllables of a single word" (332). … Spivak claims that translation is always a watering down of difference, a way of continuing to privilege the European languages into which most translations are rendered. And, of course, translating invariably carries with it shortcomings. Nuanced concepts cannot be fully translated, where meaning has to be felt in between the words, so to speak—as when Raza and his mother invoke the incomparable Japanese aesthetic idea of the value of imperfection and transience, "wabi-sabi" (200).

DEFINE: Explains uljhan as a word whose bilingual resonance abuts melancholy and quiet, and wabi-sabi as untranslatable aesthetic imperfection. XREF: Connects to Spivak's translation-as-watering-down argument, echoing reader's interest in postcolonial literary theory.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 421