June 16, 2002

So much confidence did her publishers have in Thalassa Ali’s debut novel, A singular hostage that they persuaded her into making it the first of a trilogy. She is living with a publisher’s deadline for the sequel, so avid readers who seized upon the novel, set in British India with the Raj at its Victorian peak, can be certain of more to come. But who is Thalassa Ali?

Though she is far from a stranger here, we can be forgiven for asking, for her novel was only released this February in London. A New Englander herself, she first came to Pakistan when she fell in love with and married a Pakistani. But her husband died of a sudden heart attack when their marriage was just ten years old, leaving her with a young daughter and son to cherish. She braved it out here alone initially, but eventually went back to Boston.

“Really it was not that easy then in Pakistan to be a woman stepping into male preserves. For I wanted to keep Bobby’s business concerns going, be self-reliant. Bobby’s family was wonderfully supportive, so were friends. But it was the speculative undercurrent I could sense in people who hadn’t known us that well or were just being introduced to me that made it rather off-putting trying to resume any kind of normal social life. I was young then, you understand.” One more than understands, for Thalassa’s fragile blonde beauty is still quite breathtaking.

“The most tiresome were the people I had to deal with in the course of business. The ‘true’ gentlemen were kind and helpful to the point of being maddening! I was emotionally stricken by Bobby’s death but I certainly didn’t feel mortally and irrevocably handicapped for being merely female! They very kindly, but also rather patronizingly, humoured me, indulging what they clearly thought a foolish whim on my part to manage for myself.

“And the other sort of business contacts or officials I met! You know the sort whose eyes light up and burn right through you? It’s no longer bizarre for a ‘lady’ to be doing something other than social work. Our daughter Sofie has no problems working here at all. But way back then I decided it would be wiser to make a base for myself in America. It was hard leaving Bobby’s family and our home. Bobby died in April 1972 and I didn’t go back to America until November 1974. It was terribly important for me that our children, Sofie and Toby, keep the link with their father’s country and family alive. And we have.”

This is heart-warmingly apparent. Thalassa’s agent placed handling the novel in South Asia with agents and publishers in India, for that is where the market lies. But Thalassa’s personal bonds with Pakistan are so strong that she made her own kind of pilgrimage back this April to share the joy of authorship with friends and family here.

Meeting her then, one sensed immediately that though the major launch of the edition for the United States lay ahead, the comparatively low-key, almost sedate gathering at Karachi’s British Council on April 4, where Muneeza Shamsie read excerpts; and a more informal assemblage of friends the following day at the Sindh Club for readings from the book by Rehana Saigol and Kaleem Omar, have, for her, a singular meaning.

Thalassa did not become a Muslim when she married, but many years after her husband’s death. Her spiritual journey had a mystic guide and she dedicates her novel to her mentor: Sayed Akhlaque Hussain Tauhidi. He died some years ago, but his elegant widow, Rashida, came to the Sindh Club reading. Karachiites know Rashida (nee Akhoond), the epitome of the progressive thinking woman, and her unexpectedly mystically inclined government servant husband, Akhlaque. Thalassa’s tribute to him in her dedication is an emblem.

She is not secretive about her Sufic quest but she honours the esoteric mysteries. Her own faith and the illumination that came to her are not made into the stuff of drawing-room conversation. To a certain extent they can be inferred from the novel, which also reflects the discipline of a Western academic tradition.

The book could easily have been just another glamorization of period and place for the setting is of a maharaja’s harem and Lord Auckland’s camp at Firozpur, with a little bit of arcane enchantment for good measure. But it never degenerates into the stuff of the Indian rope-trick when treating the paranormal, and the punctiliousness of a scholar’s daughter is evident in the respect for historical details and exactitude in setting and reference.

Thalassa’s own context is very much ‘Ivy League’. Her father was a distinguished academic, ‘I grew up imbibing museum contents and the air of historical sites and excavations.’ Both her parents were archaeologists. Her British mother’s love of digging was manifest in a passion for gardening as well! She became famous as a TV personality, sharing her horticultural expertize in a long-running programme.

Thalassa was a student at Radcliffe, barely twenty, when she met Asghar Ali: Bobby. ‘Fate’, or perhaps something much deeper, ordained they meet at a party neither was supposed to be at but each was taken to, separately, by insistent friends. Bobby had come to Boston for that single evening to catch up on a particularly dear friend from his own days at MIT. He was at the end of a business trip to the States and booked to fly back home the next day to Ayub Khan’s Pakistan of the nineteen-sixties.

Was it the delightfully trite cliche of love at first sight? Undoubtedly for Bobby. But he was much too ethically conscious a human being to attempt to sweep a vulnerable young woman off her feet, though he did postpone his return flight!

Her mother (and one suspects the asperity that bites pungently through Thalassa’s prose must come from her) thought it ‘explicable only in terms of the total state of irrationality which characterizes being in love’ that her daughter could think of abandoning her own richly promising life to effect a trans-cultural jump into the unknown. After pleading their case before her parents, Bobby flew back home to broach things with his own. The transatlantic consensus was that Thalassa come out and visit: a little bit of see and be seen.

Here Thalassa encountered the charm and also the discomfort of the exotically unfamiliar. “But from the very first I was overcome by the warmth and welcome Pakistan radiated. For everyone, from everyone. There was a certain quality of light and air, a unique atmosphere.” It is a woman speaking who has grown up looking at the Dutch masters and later touched a mystic vein.

But Thalassa, both as she was then and is now, also has the brisk down-to-earth reactions of an emancipated American woman. The circumscription of a woman’s sphere angers her, and she rails against any dismissive or exploitative categorization of the helpless ignorant woman. She is presently working on behalf of the Afghanistan Women’s Council in the United States, and it makes for a serendipitous convergence with her own view of Islam and a woman’s role and rights.

In hindsight it seems an arresting coincidence that, though she began to develop her novel almost a decade ago, she chose the setting of Auckland’s First Afghan war and used her rebellious Victorian heroine’s burgeoning feministic social conscience as a prism. Even before one realises Thalassa is a ‘follower of the path’ one notices the role coincidence has played in her life, juxtaposing people, events and situations, almost determining a direction for her. She feels it most strongly apparent in the chain that culminated in her finding her mentor, though she is circumspect about elaborating upon it.

“I never thought of converting for social conformity simply because I was marrying Bobby.” Her mother-in-law told Thalassa how she had respected that reaction. Possibly she recognized the wellspring of true inner spiritual commitment that was to come later. Thalassa and Bobby led the carefree life typical of the young upper-class, urbanized couple. A world where most things could be taken for granted, until fate robbed her of the partner whose love infused what otherwise seems too facile with meaning.

Strands of mysticism and cross-cultural love and marriage run through A singular hostage, but the book is not a transposition of Thalassa’s tragically disrupted life out here. Nor did she turn immediately to writing as therapy or an alternate career. She went back to America to become a stockbroker and even embarked upon another marriage. It didn’t last. “I wasn’t consciously looking for another relationship like the one Bobby and I shared. But I never found another that worked, let alone approached that meaning.”

The writer in her emerged when Thalassa enrolled in a creative writing class during a relatively idle summer in 1993. She proved to be one of the star students who get to be printed at the end of the course. That got her started. But her book was many years in gestation, worked and reworked, and she had the traditional quota of rejects along the way. Those failures too one could say helped fashion the positive success she now enjoys. Like Thalassa’s own personal journey and quest, A singular hostage’s story is yet unfolding. May the experience continue in joyous illumination!

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