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Arifa Akbar, chief theatre critic of this newspaper, is used to working at night: the journey from curtain call to home computer screen, writing into the early hours to make sure a review can appear as soon as possible, is familiar and comfortable – indeed, often actively comforting – to her. But all this exists very close to far more troubling thoughts and feelings. A childhood fear of the dark has persisted into adulthood, and is linked to recurrent bouts of insomnia; her rational awareness of the dangers inherent in being a woman out of doors at night are augmented by a less easily definable anxiety at what the shadows might conceal; and darkness also functions as a painful and complicated metaphor for the frequently impenetrable world of her elderly father, who has frontal lobe dementia and often, the staff at his care home tell her, passes a “difficult” night.
That last is a compact description, a kind of shorthand – easy to understand at surface level, but also vague; the nature of the difficulties, either for Muhammad Akbar or for the care home staff supporting him, is not revealed. His daughter’s book keeps returning to what happens under cover of darkness – what we fail to see, what we misinterpret, and what we allow to go unrecorded. For those who work at night, that will likely entail disturbed sleep patterns that, over time, have severe consequences for physical and mental health. Care workers, nightclub bouncers, transport staff, those in the hospitality industry, sex workers – all find themselves at risk of paying heavy penalties for their nocturnal lives.
And yet if there is something unheimlich about turning night into day, there is also significant potential for liberation and metamorphosis. Akbar’s narrative itself shifts from chronicling the negative impacts of sleep deprivation to the freedom of choosing to stay awake, as she recalls youthful late-night cinema trips with her sister Fauzia, whose life and premature death from undiagnosed tuberculosis Akbar described in her first book, Consumed, and the aimless night bus trips her brother, Tariq, took with his friends. They were each looking for escape, not merely from a home life that sometimes felt oppressive and unstable, but for anonymity, a chance to pass unnoticed amid crowds of strangers.
That relationship with the night, and with the faintly transgressive sense of slipping into another realm, changes with context. The relaxed enjoyment that many women experienced as they took to the relatively unpeopled but more closely monitored open spaces of London during lockdown, for example, was radically changed when Sarah Everard was abducted by a serving police officer on her lockdown walk home, and subsequently raped and killed; it is a terrible reminder that the real threat is not the ghouls or monsters of folklore, or the ghost of Jack the Ripper invoked on popular tours of Whitechapel, but “the very real hazard of murderously angry men”.
Akbar also introduces us to the all-night light of Svalbard, and the exuberant singers, dancers and actors of Lahore’s after-hours theatre scene. But it is the book’s more abstract meditations that really capture the imagination. It is unsurprising that her love of sitting in an enclosed space watching players enact a drama is linked to the fantastical stories of djinns and dayaans that her parents used to tell. The night-time rambles that she still feels impelled to undertake mirror her father’s childhood walks around Shimla, excursions in which not only nostalgia but the trauma of emigration are embedded.
The spectres that haunt our dreams and hypnagogic states are unreal, but they are also vivid manifestations of what troubles us, Akbar concludes. Acknowledging that is not a cure for the vulnerability that night ushers in, but it is a step towards allowing a little light into the darkness. This imaginative and empathetic book will probably not guide you to better sleep, but it will be a fine companion for the wakeful hours.
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