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Book Lovers and Writers Newsletter
Book Channel Author Interview with Ikhtisad Ahmed about his book The Deliverance
of Sanctuary.
Authors:
Ikhtisad Ahmed
Listen to the author...
About the book: A man of no significance and no real identity embarks upon an ambitious and perhaps ill-advised journey to Sanctuary, a mental hospital at the peak of a tremendous hill. Reaching Sanctuary is of paramount importance to the man; indeed it is what keeps him going. Along the way he encounters a bizarre cast of players, each trapped by his own malaise and desperate to travel with the man in a bid to reach this mythical destination. The man soon marries and his new wife gives birth to their twins on the road; a blind boy called Adam and a deaf mute girl named Eve. Together the family continue their pilgrimage to Sanctuary, collecting as they walk further strange and sinister hangers on, in the form of a doctor, a knight, a jester and a court advisor. Each is waiting in ever decreasing hope that someone will arrive for them and take them away to a better place, but as no one ever comes they leap upon the chance to travel to Sanctuary with the man and his family. Lost in a timeless, faceless limbo, the thought of reaching Sanctuary imbues the group with a sense of purpose and belief. But just what awaits them at the top of the hill?
Ikhtisad Ahmed’s three act play The Deliverance of Sanctuary owes much to the influence of his literary heroes, many of whom paved the way for the theatrical absurdist movement of the early to mid twentieth century. The Deliverance of Sanctuary is a multifarious play with the absurd at its very core, exploring man?s faith, his need for structure through organised religion and his ultimate infatuation with the promise of salvation, all in an effort to ease his suffering, the unspoken awareness of his own mortality. Ikhtisad leads his readers and audience through a maze of curious dead ends, unsettling them with a steady stream of bizarre events, rapier language and disconcertingly illogical plot development. Ikhtisad, like Beckett before him, uses absurdity to allow his reader to get closer to the truth of the human condition, exploiting and referencing the bizarre rituals and emotional routines we utilise in order to give our lives meaning and structure. And, deprived of tangible conclusions and a lack of emotional resolution, we, like his characters, are left at the mercy of a higher force. ?This bold and entertaining play marks Ikhtisad Ahmed out as a name to watch in contemporary theatre.
About the author: Ikhtisad Ahmed was born in Singapore in 1984 to Ishtiaq and Safina Ahmed. His mother is the daughter of the legendary Bangladeshi poet Mahbub ul Alam Chowdhury and the intellectual Jowshan Ara Rahman. When Ahmed was a baby the family returned to Bangladesh where he would spend his formative years. In 2003, Ahmed moved to England to study law, and, having completed his extensive training, he was finally called to the bar earlier this year by the Honourable Society of Inner Temple. He currently works in alternate dispute resolution at RJ Global Consultants, as well as working as an associate of the Akhtar Imam and Associates law firm in Bangladesh. In addition to writing extensively in his spare time, Ahmed established the Shimanto organisation which explores solutions to international poverty and development issues, focusing on the importance of human-rights in the fields of law and education. The Deliverance of Sanctuary is Ahmed?s first play, but he has previously published a collection of poetry, Cryptic Verses (published by Palok Publishers, 2009) as well as having written numerous legal articles for some of the world?s leading legal publications. Ikhtisad Ahmed lives and works in London.