How good is this book It’s so good you don’t want to look at it. It’s so good it’s scary. I have been to Pakistan once. For 40 days in 2004 to cover a cricket series. In those days, they would write the towns you could visit on the visa by hand, and (thank God) since relations were on a high, also add that the holder of the visa needn’t report to the local police station every evening for verification. Unleashed, I went all over Pakistan. To Pindi, Lahore (of course), Multan, Peshawar and Karachi and beyond. Shekhar Bhatia, who was my editor at the time, asked me to do a piece on the lines of “10 things about Pakistan...” First, I kicked myself for not coming up with the idea myself. And then, I set about reporting and writing the piece. It was laid out as a full page in the Hindustan Times, with a grand central visual: a typical painted Pakistani truck. Granta’s Pakistan cover is reminiscent of that page. (But that’s about where the similarity ends.) Kind friends pasted that page at my desk. A series of occupants who followed me, let it be. In the newsroom, they say: “It’s still there. Man what a piece!” Anybody who reads the Granta collection of Pakistani writing at my former workplace, however, will promptly tear that thing down. It belongs in the dustbin. The cover for Granta volume 112 was painted by Islam Gull, an actual truck artist from a village near Karachi. It’s as authentic and as spectacular as what’s inside. I won’t give the whole book away. But here are a few samples of the scary good in it. In Uzma Aslam Khan’s, Ice, Mating, a story about cold love, there is a line that challenges forgetting. “I registered Farhana’s absence with dull panic, the fingers of one hand switching off an alarm while the other reached for a dream.” Take that. Kamila Shamsie’s Pop Idols, is deep and direct journalism that takes you to the heart of the soullessness of the Zia years and the dreadful consequences of his rule. Her takedown of Ali Azmat (the frontman of the “Sufi” rock band Junoon) is stunning and simple. Azmat’s new avatar is that of cheerleader, says Shamsie. He is now the public relations man for a chap called Zaid Hamid, a delusional fellow who has visions of a “United States of Islam” with Pakistan at its core. Hamid says, “We have good news for India: we will break you and make you the size of Sri Lanka”. And the voice that we heard on Sayonee harmonises in the background. Sometimes comes out front, giving illiterate, Sarah Palinesque interviews on Pakistan television. And you wonder, “What the hell happened ” For me, though, the standout piece is Mohsin Hamid’s A Beheading. Yes, it evokes the gruesome memories of Daniel Pearl’s murder. But it is much more than that. Every line in the two-and-a-half pages (yes, that’s all) has the power to stop a war (or start one). The protagonist is dumped in the trunk of a car and taken away to be slaughtered. He says: “I don’t want to die, but I don’t mind dying. I just don’t want to be tortured. I don’t want anyone to crush my balls with a pair of pliers and put his cigarette out in my eye. I don’t want this car ride to end. I’m getting used to it now”. And then, his mouth full of blood, he thinks: “Maybe I can just mumble to myself and they’ll think I’m religious...” “I don’t want to be that goat. The one we bought for Big Eid...” “If I’ve made a mistake, just tell me. Tell me what to write. I’ll never write again. I’ll never write again if you don’t want me to...” A long time ago, I read another volume of Granta that had something as good as this. It was a piece on El Salvador, called The Colonel, by the poet Caorlyn Forche. The Colonel in question was talking while displaying a bunch of ears that had been chopped off the heads of those who opposed the regime. Some of the ears, said Forche, were listening to the conversation, some of the ears were pressed to the ground. If I have a criticism at all about this book, then it is that the writers seem to all come from the upper class in Pakistan, often living abroad (I’d be happy to be corrected on this one). In my view, Pakistan is a two-tier country: Upper and lower. The multitudes (including all the minorities) that populate the lower tier, perhaps, write different things in another language. I know from experience that they sit differently. When you ask the Christain bootlegger (cum janitor) to take a seat, he doesn’t take the chair offered. He goes down on his haunches. As if he were sitting down to do his business on an Indian-style commode. Not the ideal posture for writing, I’d say. Nevertheless, to Indians writing in English, I’ll say this about Granta volume 112: Read it and weep.
Avirook Sen is the author of Looking for America and a columnist for Pakistan’s Express Tribune
