The good, the great and the scary

If I have a criticism about Granta Pakistan, it is that the writers seem to all come from the upper-class in Pakistan.

I have been to Pakistan once. For 40 days in 2004 to cover a cricket series. This allowed me to travel the country. By which I mean, not be confined to Lahore’s ‘Defence’.

Shekhar Bhatia, who was my editor at the time, asked me to do a piece on the lines of ’10 things about Pakistan...’.  It was laid out as a full page in the Hindustan Times, with a grand central visual: a typical painted Pakistani truck. Granta Pakistan’s (vol 112) cover is reminiscent of that page, a beautiful cliche painted by Islam Gull, an actual ‘truck artist’. (But that’s about where the similarity ends.)

Kind friends at the Hindustan Times, 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 say it belongs in the dustbin.

That the voices of new Pakistani writers were being heard across the world, I got a sense of some time ago. In a piece in the New Yorker — a profile of Richard Holbrooke, US special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan — I came across Daniyal Mueenuddin’s name. Holbrooke was recommending Mueenuddin’s book of short stories, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, to his interviewer.

Here are a few samples of the scary good writing 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 records the consequences of a nation that lost its soul to the Zia years. Her takedown of Ali Azmat (the frontman of the ‘Sufi’ rock band Junoon) is stunning and simple. Azmat’s new avatar is that of a 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. 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 page prose poem, is as sharp and serrated as a fine halal knife.

The protagonist is dumped in the trunk of a car and taken away to be slaughtered. He wants to pray through a mouth full of blood: “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...”

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 Carolyn 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 volume, then it is that the writers seem to all come from the upper-class in Pakistan, often living abroad.

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 as he plies you with Keenu Vodka, 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.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 22^nd, 2010.