A peek into postpartition Pakistan

An enlightened view on Pakistan’s transition from a tolerant to a zealous society, and excellent commentaries on cricket, are this month’s literary offerings

BY CHITRA SUDARSHAN

Azhar Abidi is a talented Pakistan-born Melbourne writer, whose second novel Twilight is set in the 1980s and is about a Mohajir family in Karachi. Although this reviewer has never been to Pakistan, I can say from the several Pakistani novels I have read, that Karachi resembles an Indian city more closely than any other. Even the Pakistani writers I admire have been from Karachi: Mohammed Hanif, Kamila Shamsie, Irfan Yusuf – and now Azhar Abidi. The city’s fairly multicultural and cosmopolitan population – including a small Hindu community, the bulk of the Mohajirs settling down in Karachi, the city’s indigenous Sufi traditions, etc seem to have contributed to a more vibrant, tolerant and liberal culture. At least that was what prevailed until General Zia veered Pakistan in a different direction and changed the country for good: we got that impression from Hanif’s Case of Exploding Mangoes (where he blamed Zia for single-handedly taking Pakistan in the direction of “multinational jihad”) and now Abidi tells us the same thing, although from a different perspective.

Abidi was born in Pakistan and came to

Melbourne in the 1990s where he completed a Masters in Business from the University of Melbourne before settling down here. His first novel Passarola Rising was published in 2006 by Viking Penguin, and was shortlisted for the Melbourne Literary Prize that year. It was set in eighteenth century Portugal around the time of the Inquisition, and was a fictionalised account of a Brazilian priest and aviation pioneer! Twilight (published under the title The House of Bilqis in the US) is his second novel, published in Australia by Text Publishing, and is a much more down-to-earth tale set in Pakistan in the 1980s at the time of General Zia. At the heart of the novel is Bilqis Ara Begum, matriarch of the Khan family, who moved to Karachi from Calcutta at the time of Partition, and about her disappointments; the decline in her family’s fortunes seems to be coeval with her country’s slide into fundamentalism. Her son Samad who is in Melbourne, decides to marry an Australian and stay there. She is convinced that her daughter-in-law had seduced him and taken him to a foreign country, turning his life into her own. Yet this disappointment pales into insignificance when compared to what she feels for her country. She resents what General Zia and his cohorts have done to the secular Pakistani State, changing the country she had chosen at Partition to a land of religious zealots. Her brother Sikandar, an army officer commissioned at Calcutta, joined the newly formed Pakistan army after Partition; but he too resigned within the year when he realised he would have to fight an ‘enemy’ who were once his comrades. He too watches almost helplessly as he bangs away at his typewriter, writing his regular column for The Dawn, and urges his family to go to a dance performance soon “before the mullahs put a ban on it”. Through Bilqis and Sikandar, Abidi is able to articulate both his love for his country as well as deep regret at the way it is headed. The author is at his best when creating ambience – as in the chapter where he describes the post-partition elite of Pakistan, although he falters a bit in the sections where he describes the maid Mumtaz and her attraction to the watchman Omar next door who is a Kashmiri jihadi. Cricket lovers – especially those who are serious about the game – particularly Indian cricket, can take cheer in the publication of another splendid book on the subject.

It was Ramachandra Guha who wrote the first serious, analytical and historical account of the game as it was played in the subcontinent, titled A Corner of a Foreign Field That he was a social historian and academic worked in his favour, and the book won him the UK Cricket Society Literary Award and Cricket Society’s Book of the Year in 2002. Another historian and academic – and a novelist to boot – has published a gem of a book on Indian cricket: it is Mukul Kesavan’s Men in White, which is a collection of essays on subjects to do with the game. It is unmistakably Indian in flavour, and partisan, yet the generosity and encyclopaedic knowledge of the cricket-loving public in India shines through. There are sections on growing up with cricket in India, on world cricket and the modern game; the Indian cricket team and its star players. These two books are a must for cricket lovers.