by Azra Raza
I recently read about a man who arrived in the United States from India with just thirty dollars in his pocket and, three decades later, had become a billionaire. When asked about the most important lesson of his journey, he answered without hesitation: money matters.
Tara, the protagonist of A Splintering by Dur e Aziz Amna, learns that lesson early, though under far harsher conditions. She grows up in the soul-destroying poverty of a lower middle class family of four sisters and a brother somewhere in a remote Pakistani village, surrounded by brutality, superstition, ignorance, and a rigid patriarchal social order that consigns girls to early marriages and lives of numbing domestic repetition. Cleaning, cooking, washing, bearing children—these are not choices but destinies.
Her mother, one of the novel’s most striking figures, senses something different in Tara and insists on educating her, sparing her from household labor. It is an act of quiet rebellion. But Tara, sharp and observant, has her own ambitions. Education, for her, is not enlightenment or self-empowerment. It is escape.
With it, she secures a proposal from a middle-class urban family and seizes the opportunity. The village, with its suffocation and grime, is left behind. In the city, Tara learns quickly; watching television, studying the women around her, absorbing codes of behavior and aspiration. She adapts with startling ease.
Though she finds neither intellectual companionship nor emotional fulfillment in her husband, she builds the life she had envisioned: two children, financial stability, independence from her in-laws. She has her ugly, protruding teeth fixed, gets her tubes tied, learns to drive, finds a job and moves her nuclear family to a home of their own.
The village girl, it seems, has arrived.
I am not giving away any of the plot as all this is essentially told within the first three pages and this is where the novel truly begins.
Amna asks us to watch—patiently, unflinchingly—as Tara’s desire not just for comfort but for affluence, for ease without compromise, leads her to make a choice that is quietly, unmistakably wrong. One decisive act gives way to a series of smaller transgressions. What is remarkable is not simply the descent, but our response to it: we are slowly, almost imperceptibly, desensitized. We continue to follow Tara without quite turning away.
Tara makes this evil decision deliberately and with her husband’s permission, one that both fully understand could destroy her and their family. The first major slash leads to a thousand minor cuts, and we the readers are slowly lulled into accepting each without hating the protagonist even as we witness one hideous act after another. This semi-acceptance is what I find terribly unnerving.
How does Amna achieve this alarming effect?
Her genius lies in telling the unfolding story in the voice of Tara just as Vladimir Nabokov did in Lolita, where the narrator is Humbert Humbert, the depraved protagonist. Both achieve the unsettling and brilliant effect in that the narration from the perspective of the protagonist doesn’t excuse Tara or Humbert Humbert—it seduces us into complicity, which in turn softens our immediate hatred.
We are locked inside their minds, we hear their justifications, their rationalizations, their moments of doubt explained away. Moral revulsion is somehow diluted because of familiarity with the protagonist’s way of being. There is just enough vulnerability to create emotional ambiguity.
Both seem to be asking what happens when writers give moral intimacy to someone who does not deserve moral pardon? They don’t try to dazzle us. They trap us into having a softer view through understanding.
In A Splintering, the softening happens as Amna patiently builds our empathy for Tara’s choices layer by layer, as she traces her heroine’s psyche back to deprivation, humiliation, microinsults and microaggressions through reminders of her ruthless past and the pitiless class differences driving her demonic desires.
Amna also does something more ambiguous as she narrows the distance between reader and protagonist so that the moral line begins to blur. You don’t simply feel complicit. You feel protective, even as you recoil.
The more dangerous achievement of A Splintering is that Amna makes it impossible to hate simply. Rather, she exposes something deeper and more troubling: the possibility that understanding and condemnation cannot fully coexist.
In A Splintering, suffering is central; it does not excuse the heroine, but it reframes her actions as damage rather than pure monstrosity. This is closer to a psychological and even clinical lens—one that I, as a physician, recognize: pathology without absolution. As I read through the story, I felt heavy, sorrowful, conflicted in a more humane way, asking the same question repeatedly: How does someone become this?
Amna’s observational powers are extraordinary. The textures of village and city life, the subtle hierarchies of class, the evolving dynamics between Tara and her mother, and later between Tara and her own daughter, are rendered with precision and emotional intelligence. There is wit, too—unexpected, sharp, and utterly disarming.
The narrative moves with confidence, its turns unpredictable yet earned, making it difficult to put aside. What lingers, however, is not just the story, but its moral aftertaste.
In both Lolita and A Splintering, the initial impulse—whether of carnal desire or ambition—hardens over time into entitlement. And entitlement, once rooted, begins to erode the boundaries that hold moral life together.
What begins as longing gradually seeks justification, then permission, and finally absolution. At that point, even acts of profound violence no longer appear as ruptures, but as extensions of a logic already accepted.
The true horror lies not in the act itself, but in the quiet reasoning that precedes it.
We recognize this pattern beyond fiction—in the way repeated exposure dulls our response, how singular tragedies dissolve into statistics, how outrage fades into acceptance.
Ultimately, A Splintering leaves us with a difficult but necessary reminder: understanding the forces that shape a person may deepen our empathy, but it also demands that we hold fast to our moral clarity—even when that clarity becomes uncomfortable.
As Socrates pointed out wisely, “Virtue and excellence do not come from money, but money and all other good things in life come from virtue and excellence”.
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