ISLAMABAD: This year’s Islamabad Literature Festival was the venue for a very rare occasion: the launch of a book, written by a Pakistani author, about the capital itself.

Belying the perception of Islamabad as a dull and dreary town where nothing exciting ever happens, ‘City of Spies’ is a compelling title in itself. The author, Sorayya Khan, who currently lives in New York, described writing about Pakistan while living abroad as “a way to connect with the country on a personal level”.

Set in the late 1970s, the novel is narrated by Aliya Shah, the daughter of a Dutch mother and a Pakistani father (much like the author herself) growing up in the capital city. The story opens with the news of Gen Ziaul Haq’s toppling of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s government, which the author says was a critical moment in the country’s history.

“The Cold War shaped the history of a lot of regions. The history of Pakistan and the Cold War intersected in the 1970s and culminated in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan,” she said.

The city itself and its landmarks, such as the Margalla Hills, feature prominently in the book, which covers the 30-month period from summer of 1977 to Dec 1979. In a conversation with novelist Bilal Tanweer and poet Harris Khalique on Sunday, Ms Khan detailed how the book came to be called ‘City of Spies’.

“I struggled with the title for a long time. The book used to be called ‘Yellow School Bus in the Land of the Pure’, but this was rejected by my publishers because they felt it slotted the book as a young adult novel. When I was re-reading the novel after it was completed, the act of spying; servants spying on their employers and Aliya spying on her parents, stood out. Apart from the fact that Islamabad did have a lot of spies living here at the time,” she mused.

Mr Khalique said that just as the writers of a previous generation were affected by partition, writers from this generation were conditioned by the martial law of Gen Ziaul Haq.

Both he and Ms Khan reminisced about the Islamabad of yore and longed for the days when Seventh Avenue marked the boundary of the city.

“I tell my children about how Kohsar Market used to be the place to be in the 70s and how wonderfully idyllic it was back then, while sitting in a traffic jam on a dug-up road,” he joked.

“A lot has been written about Lahore and Karachi, but a novel about Islamabad is a truly fascinating concept,” Mr Khalique said.

Published in Dawn, April 27th, 2015

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