Mian Raza Rabbani’s novella, The Smile Snatchers, offers the reader a glimpse into stolen childhoods. Childhoods that are robbed in a free and so-called liberal world, that is aware of human rights yet fails to provide safety and justice to the society’s youngest members.
Rabbani, the author and former Senate Chairman, traces the pain and hardships of children through the journey of Zaheer Nazir, an accomplished painter, who has taken on one of the toughest jobs – to paint smiles on children’s faces – a task that is difficult for him to accomplish with just a few strokes of the brush, as the smile fails to be at home on his many canvases.
The world having witnessed a live televised genocide since October 7, 2023, The Smile Snatchers makes for a more apt and relevant read today – not that conflicts weren’t there earlier, but today, Rabbani’s novella, makes for a read that tugs at the reader, no matter how insensitive they may be because of the constant conflict-ridden news cycle of morbid images from Gaza to Sudan to Syria to Ukraine.
Zaheer traces his philosophy of art back to the mid-19th-century French realist artist Gustave Courbet. Zaheer, in his mid-forties, “wants his work to suggest psychological insight through heightened naturalism.” Throughout the novella, Zaheer comes across children, imaginarily, who have lived through conflict-ridden environments or fallen victim to terrorism.
With Zaheer’s philosophy of art rooted in Courbet’s work, he recalls ‘Stone Breakers,’ which “revealed the brutal conditions endured by the working class.” Zaheer felt the need to “take up the world’s suffering children as my subjects and paint a smile of hope on their faces.” While Zaheer tries to paint smiles on children’s faces on his canvas, he keeps trying to make a young girl on his canvas smile through brush strokes, but to no avail.
Throughout the novella, Zaheer experiences these imaginary episodes – one with Aylan Kurdi, the three-year-old who drowned in the Mediterranean, trying to escape death and aiming to live – only to drown at sea. The chilling photo that the world witnessed in red and blue at the shore was a question mark for the world’s leaders on their failure to provide safe spaces.
While the author stitches political commentary with emotional depth, readers feel the brutality of the circumstances of the youngest. Throughout the novella, the reader is taken through various experiences of the children of this world, making a statement that global power structures do not serve the weak, regardless of how loud the justice movements in various shades may be.
Rabbani, a recipient of the Nishan-e-Imtiaz, a politician and author, dedicated his novella, The Smile Snatchers, to the children of Gaza.
The Smile Snatchers reads as both a mourning and a wake-up call. It pushes us to confront why, despite all our talk about human rights, children are still the ones carrying the weight of conflict. For anyone looking for a look at what childhood looks like under pressure, Rabbani’s book gives plenty to sit with—both in what it shows and in the questions it leaves behind.
While the world has failed the children, adults must do better – to return some, if not all, the smiles that have been snatched.
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