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Pakistan up close

Suparna Sharma

Imagine a live screen where major political events of Pakistan are playing out — Partition, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s arrest and assassination, Zia-ul Haq’s martial law, street protests, the rise and fall of Benazir Bhutto, nuclear tests in India and Pakistan... The screen is large, its size honouring the enormity of these events. But the images are distant, its protagonists are on mute. Now imagine, in front of this screen, a diminutive world that lives, breathes and crackles. This is the world of middle-class Pakistan as seen from little Zaki Shirazi’s three-feet-off-the-ground perspective. Ali Sethi’s The Wish Maker is mostly concerned with this small world. But every once in a while, its small people pause to take note of the big people on the silent screen. But only for a bit.

For Ali, born in 1984 to Pakistan’s best-known journalist couple (Najam Sethi, editor-in-chief of Friday Times, and Jugnu Mohsin, editor and columnist), creating and colouring Zaki’s world — widowed mother Zakia, conservative but comforting Daadi, cousin and companion Samar Api, friends, servants, uncles and aunts — was easy. He knew their fears, frailties and passions. He had to just twist and shine the people he grew up with, shrink and compress others, and add a few warts. "My younger sister and I were raised in my grandmother’s house. I moved into my parents’ house when I was four... Zakia is my mother and father merged into one," he says.

Zakia is an accidental journalist-activist who grows into her politics and job after her husband Sami’s death. Zaki never meets his father, and when he seeks his mother, she’s either busy on the phone or at a protest march. In his extended family and the outside world, Zaki bears the burden of being his mother’s son and retreats from this reality by participating in Samar Api’s life and romance.

There’s lots of journalism, censorship, arrests of editors in the book. "My father was arrested a few weeks after I was born... My earliest memory is my Daadi reading the papers in the morning and saying, ‘Zia mar gaya’."

To make sense of what was happening on the giant screen and to understand Pakistan’s four As — Army, Allah, America and awaam — Ali had to sit pouring over books and newspapers as a graduate student at Harvard University, where his major was South Asian Studies. That’s also where he met Amitav Ghosh, who was teaching a creative writing course and put Ali in touch with his literary agent. "I spent a lot of time in the International Studies department, in the library, and ended up discovering, in a way, my country anew." That’s also where he discovered an old picture of his mother at a protest march in Lahore. "It was a kind of journey in reverse."

Ali started writing The Wish Maker in America, "but", he says, "what I wrote in America was a simplified version. Once I went back to Pakistan, I started working on it again... deepening the story, conceptualising situations."

While his characters and narrative found vigour in Pakistan, several of the book’s slants and techniques were born in America.

Zaki’s world is full of women. His father and grandfather are dead. His male friends and cousins appear to teach him "mastipation", smoking, to accompany him to an event, and then disappear. It’s the women, imperfect and nicked, who are always around. And his bond with life is through them.

But gender is not the only thing Ali challenges in his novel. "Pakistan’s military state," he says, "had to manufacture ideology. In order for Pakistan to be anti-India, it had to look westward, towards Arabia. But everything I recall from my experience of living and growing up in Lahore and rural Punjab, while it’s not a progressive or modern life, it’s still not an Arabian life. I was trying to come up with a picture that was not a part of the official version that’s in our history textbooks... the one that begins with Mohammad bin Qasim, goes to Aurangzeb, then to Iqbal and then directly to Partition and says, ‘Well, now we all are Arabs’. I wanted to write the ‘un-Arab’ version. I wanted to collapse the Islamic, masculine, official version a bit. I wanted to make a link with what had become underground in Pakistan. So obviously, Bollywood, American TV had to be a part of it. Obviously, Noorjahan and people like Faiz Ahmed Faiz had to be a part of it."

The Wish Maker is a gentle, sweet story whose perspective grows with Zaki. By the end, it begins to look not just at the past, but also deeper into the present. But there’s little of the big-screen intrigue. Mostly it’s Zaki and Lahore’s other babalog going about their business of school, games, Pizza Hut dinners and some stolen taboo moments.

The book’s episodic narrative soars with Ali’s delicate prose and his ability to capture and convey nuances and complexities of human relationships. The characters are real but not terribly compelling. While the main story of Zaki and Samar Api growing up doesn’t bore you, there are few scenes that stay with you. As Ali’s mother Jugnu Mohsin said, on reading the book, "The dialogues are interesting".

The big picture, culled as it is from library books and articles, lacks depth and fury. Except for Partition, politics doesn’t really impact people in The Wish Maker. People are neatly divided into camps: those who buy into the state’s propaganda and others who question it. The pro-Zia and the pro-Bhutto camp. Liberals, conservatives... Each gets a chance to cheer and whine. But none come to life.

And yet, in The Wish Maker’s mild and temperate tone, there is hope. The book subtly assures that liberal Islam — one that was knocked down on September 11, 2001, and has been under suspicion ever since — is living and struggling in Pakistan. It’s weary yet antsy. That coming from someone who refers to himself as a "kid", and is avowedly of the Shah Rukh Khan and not the Amitabh Bachchan generation, is a significant promise.

Ali says he’s not at liberty to divulge how much he received for the book. Only that the amount was in "lakhon, lakhon, lakhon". He plans to travel around India and Pakistan. Researching his next book, or, perhaps, his first documentary.