Mustafa Dönmez’s Turkish novel Hintli Hanende—rendered here as The Indian Singer, although the book has been published only in Turkish and has not yet been translated into English—tells the story of a young vocalist in seventeenth-century Istanbul who confronts death after being diagnosed with tuberculosis. Told that he has only two years to live, Masood initially searches for a cure but gradually begins to question the meaning of his life. When he is entrusted with a mission—to set Yunus Emre’s poems to music—the relationship among art, love, and death is transformed. The novel reveals how the knowledge of death can change a person and reminds us that truly living is not simply a matter of longevity.
Mustafa Dönmez’s novel Hintli Hanende (The Indian Singer), published by Süreyya Publishing, begins in seventeenth-century Istanbul and reaches toward humanity’s oldest question: What does a person do with his life when he truly knows that he is going to die?
In some novels, death is the ending. In The Indian Singer, it is where the story begins.
The novel’s protagonist, Masood, is the son of a merchant who came to Istanbul from India and settled there. Born and raised in the city, Masood’s beautiful voice draws him into the world of music at an early age. He becomes a student of Hafız Post, learns to play the ney, and studies composition. In time, he becomes one of Istanbul’s most sought-after singers, performing everywhere from the imperial court to the mansions along the Bosphorus.
He is in his early twenties. He has money, fame, a woman he loves, loyal friends—and, more importantly, a life ahead of him that seems as though it will never end.
Then, one night, he begins coughing in the middle of a song. The music falls silent. And another sound rises in Masood’s life: death.
The coughing grows worse. There is blood on his handkerchief. Finally, the physicians give their diagnosis: tuberculosis. The disease is already advanced. The chief physician tells Masood that he has no more than two years to live.
The novel’s real story begins here, because what Mustafa Dönmez is ultimately describing is not tuberculosis.
It is the story of a man who has learned that he is going to die.
We Know That Death Exists, but We Do Not Believe in Our Own
We all know that we are going to die. For most of us, however, this knowledge remains theoretical. We pass cemeteries, attend funerals, and lose people we love, but before long, the daily current of life covers over the knowledge of death once again.
Death is always there, yet somehow it always remains at a distance.
Heidegger observed that we distance ourselves from our own mortality by reducing it to the commonplace idea that “everyone dies someday.” Death becomes something that happens to other people—something we, too, will encounter at some undefined point in the future. Yet when a person truly grasps the inevitability of his own death, life itself begins to look different. This is precisely what Heidegger means by “being-toward-death” (Sein-zum-Tode): death is not merely an event that will occur at the end of life, but one of the most fundamental truths shaping how we live today.
This is what happens to Masood. Death suddenly ceases to be distant and takes a seat directly before him. The moment the doctor says, “two years at most,” the issue is no longer that he will die someday.
It is that he knows how little time he has left. And once time becomes limited, the meaning of everything in the world begins to change.
Masood points out the houses in the neighborhood to his mother. His childhood friend lives in one, his father’s friend in another, and across the street lives Zeynep, the woman he loves. Then he turns to his mother and asks: How can I leave all of this? Where will I go after leaving behind everyone I love?
Perhaps this is the novel’s most human insight. Masood is not so much afraid of death as he is afraid of leaving life.
Istanbul Lives While Masood Thinks of Dying
One of the novel’s greatest strengths is its portrayal of Istanbul. The seventeenth-century city is not merely a setting; it is almost a second protagonist. There are the entertainments of Beyoğlu, the sound of Qur’anic recitation in Eyüp and Fatih, public spectacles in Sultanahmet and Beyazıt, the commerce of Eminönü and the Grand Bazaar, and the coffeehouses, taverns, mosques, and inns.
Entirely different lives flow alongside one another in the same city. And it is here that a powerful contrast emerges: while Istanbul continues to live in all its vitality, Masood is contemplating his death.
People open their shops. They fall in love. They quarrel. They earn money, sing songs, eat meals, and make plans. Masood, meanwhile, knows that all of this will soon come to an end for him. The world has not changed. What has changed is the way Masood sees it.
First He Seeks a Cure, Then Meaning
Masood’s initial response is the one nearly all of us would have. He wants to live. He wants to recover. He wants someone to find a cure. Yet as the novel unfolds, an intriguing transformation takes place.
At first, Masood asks, “How can I get well?” Then his question becomes, “What should I do with the life I have left?”
This, in my view, is where The Indian Singer is most powerful. We often confront the meaning of life only when faced with the possibility of losing it.
At first, Masood grieves over his own impending death. In time, however, he begins to notice the suffering of others. He decides to spend his money on the treatment of poor patients. Working with the physicians at the Fatih Bimarhanesi, he searches for ways to provide free medical care to those who cannot afford it.
His illness has not gone away. But Masood has begun to change. Perhaps this is the first true healing.
In Konya, the Remedy He Seeks Changes
Masood’s journey to Konya marks the novel’s turning point. He goes there seeking a cure for his body. In the circle of Sheikh Murat Çelebi, however, he discovers something else: a purpose in life. One sentence the sheikh teaches him becomes a key to the entire novel: “The self is lower than all else; one’s duty is higher than all else.”
In other words, the individual self stands beneath everything, while the duty entrusted to a person stands above everything. Masood is given a long-preserved collection of Yunus Emre’s poems. His task is to set Yunus’s verses to music and teach them to the public in mosques.
Masood immediately reminds the sheikh of his illness: My life will be short. My voice has deteriorated. I may die soon.
The sheikh’s reply distills the novel’s central idea: none of these things is more important than the duty itself.
Masood thus moves from cure to calling. He stops focusing on how long his life will last and begins focusing on what he will do with it.
The Singer Sings Again—but Now for Someone Else
Masood sings at the beginning of the novel. He sings at the end as well. But there is an enormous difference between the two Masoods.
The first Masood sings for applause. He earns money, gains fame, and entertains people. The second sets the poems of Yunus Emre to music. He refuses to accept payment for his work. He is wary even of becoming famous, fearing that fame might corrupt his intentions.
The art is the same. The voice is the same. The man is the same. But his intention has changed. To me, this is Mustafa Dönmez’s most important statement about art: what ultimately determines the value of a work is why it was created.
The Voice of Yunus Emre
As the novel progresses, Yunus Emre becomes an almost invisible protagonist. Masood opens the book to the first poem: “I Need You, Only You.”
From that moment on, music is no longer merely music. It becomes the language of Masood’s journey away from his attachment to the world and toward another kind of love.
The narrator compares Yunus’s poems to a bird with two wings: one is meaning, the other harmony. As Masood reads them, he begins to feel like a different person.
At the beginning of the novel, his love is directed toward Zeynep. Later, that love becomes far more expansive. It follows the familiar path of Sufism: from the metaphorical to the Real, from selfhood to self-surrender, from possession to submission.
The Two Years Become 120
Then comes the novel’s most beautiful irony. Masood was given two years to live. Yet when the calendar reaches 1772, he is 120 years old. He has buried almost everyone he once believed would outlive him.
His mother. His wife. His five children. His seventeen grandchildren.
The young man who once contemplated his own grave is still alive a century later. Yet the true miracle, I think, is not that Masood lives so long. It is that, during the days when he believed he had only two years left, he learned how to live.
The number of years a person survives and whether that person has truly lived are not the same thing. The meaning of Masood’s life is healed before his body is.
Fame, Too, Has a Lifespan
The ending is especially beautiful. At the age of 120, Masood is still pursuing the duty entrusted to him. He sets out to carry a new hymn to the people. His horse throws him, and the old man lies helpless on the ground. No one comes. He dies there.
The next day, villagers find his body. This is the man who was once a celebrated singer—the artist heard by the sultan and the highest officials of the state, a name known throughout Istanbul.
Yet the man who finds him says, “I think I’ve heard the name Masood somewhere before.”
He cannot remember who Masood was. Perhaps this is the perfect summary of fame: a name once known by everyone eventually becomes a faint echo in someone’s memory.
A few villagers bury Masood in an almost anonymous cemetery. But the inscription he had chosen for his gravestone is carved there: “It is easy to do business with the generous, for they expect no profit from the transaction.”
The novel ends there. Its question does not.
What Are We Waiting For?
The Indian Singer can be read as a historical novel, a Sufi novel, or a vivid portrait of seventeenth-century Istanbul.
Beneath all of these layers, however, lies a much simpler and more unsettling question: If we truly knew that we were going to die, would we continue to live exactly as we do today?
When Masood learns that he has two years left, he changes his life. The only difference between him and us is that no doctor has given us a date. In terms of the final verdict, however, there is no difference at all.
He knew that he would die. So do we. He was told that he had two years. We simply have not been told how much time remains.
Perhaps this is the finest quality of The Indian Singer: it does not frighten the reader with death. It shows us death in order to remind us of life.
