May 18, 2003

PICK up any one of her three novels and you can feel the thread of association, between the two Ks. The K of Kamila Shamsie, the young author, and the K of Karachi, the city where she was born (in 1973) and brought up.

In her very first novel titled In the City by the Sea, published by Penguin Books in 1998 and dedicated to her parents, it is apparent that the author has set her stage in Karachi. But she appears cautious, not to name places. Yet the orange, pink and purple bougainvillea hedges along high boundary walls, the mingled scent of sea-air, dust, eucalyptus and garbage and ‘riots around the city’ are all too familiar to Karachi sensibilities.

In Salt and Saffron, the ‘Dard-e-Dil’ clan is nostalgic about the past and Karachi is very much part of their past, as well as present.

“‘Look around you,’ Sameer pointed to the crowds around the sea wall. A large section of Karachi had been hit by a power failure and the beach was the best place to escape from the heat. Whole families were out, vans that should have held no more than nine people were disgorging groups of fifteen or sixteen on to the cement pavement where, in addition to the bhutawallah whom Sameer and I had come to patronize, there were cold-drink sellers and chaatwallahs and a man with a tray of sweets hanging around his neck, who chanted, ‘Cheeng-gum, Chaaklait, bubbly-gum.’”

But it is in her third novel Kartography, which is dedicated ‘For all my Karachi friends, all over the world’ that the young author decides to stand up and speak out.

“None of what was going on in Karachi made much sense to me — not since last year when that girl was killed by a speeding bus and you’d think that was a domestic tragedy. But instead of being a family tragedy it all ignited a terrible ethnic fight. The girl Muhajir, the bus driver Pathan, and somehow, somehow, that became the issue.”

On April 1, 1990, 17-year-old Raheen writes to Karim, “You wrote that when your uncle gets his weekly supply of Dawn you read through the articles detailing the dead and you go to your map and look up the places where they were killed, just as a way of taking a moment to think of them and mourn their deaths. Well, Mr Sitting-in-London, aren’t you just so humane! Those of us who still live here don’t have the luxury of being compassionate from a distance. We go on with our lives because we like the facade of maintaining a kind of sanity. When we laugh, that’s defiance.” Following the swirling speculations she writes, “I looked down the alley. How dangerous a section of town was Mehmoodabad? I couldn’t be sure. Was it one of those areas where people were regularly shot by gunmen who were never apprehended, who never left clues behind, causing people all over the city to speculate it was such-and-such group, of course, avenging yesterday’s shooting of X, while someone else argued no, no, it was done by people who want us to leap to that conclusion in order to make such-and-such look like a terrorist organization, nothing else.

“At which point, well, they are a terrorist organization and come on, every group has its militant wing, why single out? Leading to it could be anyone, it could be a personal vendetta, or rogue elements, or ethnic fighting or sectarian, or in-fighting or drug wars or shadow-government organizations or (my personal favourite) the ‘Foreign Hand’.”

She probes deeper into the causes, “Privilege erased the day-to-day struggles of ethnic politics, and however Karim might want me to feel about the matter I couldn’t pretend I was sorry that I had been born on ‘this side of Clifton Bridge’ where class bound everyone together in an enveloping, suffocating embrace, with ethnicity only a secondary or even tertiary concern. So what if I walked around with a heaviness in my heart after reading about the accelerating cycle of violence, unemployment, divisiveness in Karachi? ... So what if I thought the entire city was being pillaged by the central government, which was happy to take the large percentage of its revenue from Karachi but unwilling to put very much back? I didn’t find myself picking up a gun because of it, or losing people I loved because of it, or feeling my sanity slip away because of it.”

Placing her hand on the pulse of the city, she observes, “We all knew it would start up again — the shootings on a massive scale, the unnatural silence in the evenings, the siege mentality — but for the moment, for today, Karachi was getting back to its feet, as it had always been able to do, and that didn’t just mean getting back to work, but getting back to play: friendship, chai, cricket on the street, conversation.”

Taking the reader back into time, she recalls, “You couldn’t escape from my mother’s voice when she wanted it to hold you in place. It reached out to me — honey over gravel — and pulled me into the past, into 1970, to a Karachi before drugs, before guns, before civil war, before the economy ran on foreign aid, before religion was wielded as the most powerful of political tools. A Karachi in which people stayed. Many of them recently returned from university abroad as though it were the most natural thing in the world to come back, to return home, no reason not to.”

Moving forward into 1995, she relates, “Rocket launchers and gunfire in Boat Basin. How often we’d stopped in that part of town over the years, after school and after parties, scrounging through one another’s purses and wallets for money to spend on meals at Chips and Mr Burger and Flamingo Chaat. How could the violence reach somewhere so familiar? The next day the newspaper gave us the story.”

Then there are discussions in elite drawing rooms, “Haalaat bohat kharab hain, they would say, again and again, as if English could not encompass just how bad the situation was; and could this city — my city, this ugly, polluted, overpopulated, heart breaking place — retain its spirit after all this battering? And finally, inevitably, someone would say: it’s like 1971.”

She asks questions, “‘Is that true?’ I asked Ami”.

Having taken the reader through an intriguing trail of love and betrayals she concludes, “But there are certain parallels. History is never obliging enough to replay itself in all details. Not personal history, not political history. But we can learn how to rise above the mistakes of the past, and that we haven’t done. As a country we haven’t. Not in the slightest.”

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