KARACHI, June 24: There is a direct link between the current climate of manifest lawlessness in Pakistan and the turmoil that has reigned for nearly three decades in neighbouring Afghanistan. This was one of the primary reasons that compelled author and film-maker Feryal Ali Gauhar to pen her second novel, No Space For Further Burials, which was launched at a bookstore here on Sunday.

The novel is based in the Afghanistan of 2002, a year after the Taliban fell to the advancing American forces and their allies in the Northern Alliance. It takes place inside a mental asylum where a captured American soldier, who happens to be the book’s central character, is thrown to fend for himself with the other inmates.

Launched at Liberty Books, the event consisted of a session where the author read out excerpts from the book, which was followed by a brief question and answer session.

Gauhar brought alive the characters of the book by reading out the excerpts in emotional tones with touches of theatricality.

When asked why she chose Afghanistan as the setting for the novel, the author commented that it could have been anywhere – Iraq, Sarajevo, Rwanda – but she chose Afghanistan in particular because “it was too close” and “We (Pakistanis) bear particular responsibility for it.”

She said that the weaponisation of Pakistani society and the current examples of lawlessness had a direct correlation with what she claimed was Pakistani interference in Afghanistan’s affairs, right from the 1979 Soviet invasion onwards.

When asked how she punctuated her prose with such rich details, Gauhar replied that she had firsthand knowledge as she had visited Afghanistan several times and had also worked with the Afghani women’s rights group Rawa, or the Revolutionary Association for the Women of Afghanistan, adding that all the events narrated in the book were rooted in reality.

Feryal Gauhar rounded off the Q&A session by linking the recent May 12 violence in Karachi with the events described in her book.

“This book is a metaphor for the madness of war,” she said, adding that an example of the prevalent insanity in society was the fact that as corpses were being carried off in Karachi on May 12, people danced to the beat of the official drum at a sarkari jalsa in Islamabad.

The launch ended with the author signing copies of No Space For Further Burials.