IN the past few months, author Bina Shah has responded to criticism that was not equipped to write Slum Child because she didn’t travel in public transport with “I’ve been in a rickshaw!” Prior to that, she griped in various newspapers about how only Pakistan’s male authors had made the literary headlines of late, making it a literary boys club of sorts.

After reading Slum Child, it seems that the reason Shah has not achieved the kind of literary success that her peers have is because of her writing.

The novel begins with the character Laila, a Christian child living in one of the slums of Karachi, where at the age of nine, she has faced and seen all — a dying sister, heroin addicts, a stepfather, sexual harassment, religious divides and then the divide between the rich and the poor, and her coming of age.

Slum Child is far too ambitious — in attempting to encompass everything from human rights to the economy, the author fails to leave us with a lasting impression of even one of the issues that the characters face.

Then there is the writing. While Shah manages to prevent the reader from losing interest (which might be because she throws so many thoughts at them that they get confused) the metaphors she uses simply confound one. An example:

“The blood frightened me. It wasn’t dark like my menstrual blood, which, six months after it had first begun, was still brown and patchy, like the stripes of a malnourished tiger…”

“The stripes of a malnourished tiger” is perhaps the oddest and most repulsive description one has ever heard of menstrual blood. While creativity is to be appreciated, perhaps Slum Child would have benefited more if the same creativity had been utilised in the plot rather than random thoughts that leave one groaning.

While the narrative attempts to touch on far too many topics, one that Shah does justice to is the description of the death of Laila’s sister, a turning point in the life of the protagonist and her family. Jumana’s slow death from tuberculosis reminds readers of just how many children like the fictional character meet death at the hands of a non-existent healthcare system or a “spiritual” healer.

Among the more interesting characters is Haroon the Makrani, and all memories of Rushdie’s Haroun aside, one wishes his life had been explored in more detail. In Slum Child’s cast of characters, Haroon is by far one of the redeeming factors of the novel — at least initially.

The prose is flat, and at times one begins to wish that Shah had chosen a more convincing age for her character. At age nine, Laila is one of the most grown up characters you are likely to have ever come across. The voice of the child is lost and it feels as if a far older person is using Laila as a vessel for their thoughts. Shah uses Laila to express the background of the blasphemy law and describe the differences between the elite and the poor of Pakistan. The social commentary could have been better articulated and woven into the narrative.

The climax of the novel has an interesting twist, although it is extremely unbelievable, even for fiction. By the end of the novel, it seems Shah herself is tired. The novel comes to its conclusion so suddenly (although not a moment too soon for the reader) that one wonders if Shah had been instructed to keep her book at less than 300 pages. It is, to quote a dialogue from a Bollywood film, “Everything gets better in the end. Happyz Endingz.” All the loose ends are rapidly tied up and so neatly that it lends an air of incredulity to the conclusion.

With a net cast so wide, and with no real narrative to back it up with, Shah’s effort at trying to write a definitive novel describing what a young Christian girl faces in the slums of the metropolis gets lost among the one-

liners and the attempt to cram everything about Pakistan in little less than 300 pages.

The reviewer works as a freelance journalist

Slum ChildBy Bina Shah(NOVEL)Tranquebar Press, IndiaISBN 9380658315288pp. Rs595