WHEN THE FIREFLIES DANCE

A young man plots his family’s escape from slavery in modern Pakistan.

Hassan’s debut novel centers on Lalloo, a young man living in the outskirts of Lahore. When he was 7, his older brother, Jugnu, was killed under mysterious circumstances on the grounds of the bhatti, or labor camp, where his family made bricks to work off an insurmountable debt. To earn money for the family and escape the bhatti’s degradations, he was soon sent to work at a garage; now in his 20s, he works as a driver for a wealthy family. Lalloo’s lifelong determination to get his family out of the bhatti accelerates when his father falls ill and his sister is engaged, prompting a need for more money. The plot of the novel turns on Lalloo’s ill-fated attempts to secure funds, ranging from begging to blackmail to outright theft. In the process, he exposes the corruption of the system he’s been trapped into. Hassan, a playwright, poet, and Lahore native, has a gift for lyricism and metaphor, particularly around the fireflies of the title, symbols of a freedom that seems remote to the point of otherworldliness. But she’s also careful not to sugarcoat a narrative that uses various euphemisms—“peshgi,” “indenture”—to rationalize slavery. (One early scene has Lalloo literally mired in muck and sewage.) This is all embedded in a dense but speedy plot as Lalloo schemes for cash, explores the circumstances of Jugnu’s murder, and negotiates a budding romance with a childhood friend. Some plot twists defy believability, and some characters deliver cardboard dialogue, but throughout, Hassan cannily reveals the ways that a broken financial and caste system in “an upside-down world” thrusts its poorest people into making rash decisions.

A socially savvy study of caste and its abuses.