DADDY'S BOY
Shandana Minhas
Fourth Estate
219 pages; Rs 499 (Hardcover)
During Easter last month, an alleged Taliban suicide bomber hit the main entrance of Gulshan-e-Iqbal Park in Lahore, killing at least 75 people and injuring 340. It was a grim reminder of the fragile nature of the neighbouring nation, which has often been accused of abetting and assisting terror organisations, and getting its fingers burnt in the process. The Lahore bombing was the latest in a series of terror attacks that have blighted Pakistan in recent years, and the city that bears the most scars is Karachi. The bustling metropolis, which allegedly served as the launch pad for jihadis who attacked Mumbai in 2008, is the primary setting of Shandana Minhas' second novel.
It is perhaps impossible to be a writer in Pakistan and not negotiate the constant threat of fatal violence. Bilal Tanweer's The Scatter Here is Too Great (2013), true to its name, scatters the narrative through multiple narrators, like debris after an all-too-common blast in Karachi. The structure of Ms Minhas' novel is less experimental - and more linear - but crime and blasts are common in it, too. Towards the end of the novel, when the protagonist Asfandyar Ikram returns to the city on a vengeful mission, he encounters the Taliban attack at the Jinnah International Airport on 8 June 2014.
Crimes are only too frequent in this city, considered by many to be one of the most dangerous places in the world. The novel begins - and ends - with facsimile-like productions of crime stories from Pakistan Standard, a fictional newspaper. The prologue provides a report of attacks on campaigns of political parties during the general election in 2013 - which were the first civilian transfer of power in its 67-year history since Independence in 1947. How common such events are in Karachi, killing and injuring people, is made evident by the very first sentence of the novel: "It was that rarest of Karachi deaths. Expected."
The death with which the novel begins is that of Anis Nabi, a former Navy officer. His death may have been expected by some, but is completely unexpected by his son, Asfandyar. In fact, Asfandyar does not even know of his father's existence till he is told of the news by his mother and asked to go to Karachi for the funeral. He arrives, expecting to be met at the airport by his father's friends but has to take a taxi on his own to Anis' flat. There he meets Iftikhar, Shaukat and Gulzar, the three friends, old, cynical drunkards, revelling in their shared conversations and macho posturing, teasing the helpless Asfandyar, whom they immediately realise to be a nervous young man, too impressed by the mother under whose shadow he has grown up.
Asfandyar's adventures in Karachi lead him into the penumbra between the straightforward life he has led so far and the underbelly of criminality. It begins with him getting drunk with the old gaffers, his father's friends, who tell him it is one of Anis Nabi's last wishes; stealing his body from his funeral and smuggling it across the strife-afflicted city to the sea, where they bury him in the water; and finally, cheating on his fiance Lalarukh with Alina, the seductive daughter of Shaukat. After a night of furious love-making, Asfandyar wakes up in his father's empty flat, to find Alina gone, leaving behind her blood-stained shirt. Soon, Iftikar and Gulzar arrive to tell him that in a drunken stupor, he had attacked her. They also reveal the real reason - a violent one - why his parents separated, and why his mother had kept his father a secret from him.
Asfandyar is racked with guilt - not only at having committed a violent act, of which he has no memory, but also at having become the "daddy's boy" of the title, at having fulfilled the fears of his mother.
In The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (1946), anthropologist Ruth Benedict analysed how cultures could be divided broadly into those governed by "shame" and those by "guilt". While feudal societies such as the Samurais lived - and died - by the strict code of honour, which if violated could only result in death and vengeance, modern Pakistan, which retains vestiges of a feudal culture and the code of honour, but with generous dollop of the Islamic concept of sin and virtue.
Not surprisingly, the final chapters of the book are fuelled by a quest for vengeance - for betrayal and dishonour. The discovery that Asfandyar makes about Alina, which almost drives him mad, is not new to literature. One can find in Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, or Ritwik Ghatak's Subarnarekha, or Satyajit Ray's Jana Aranya.
The ending of the novel, however, is uniquely Pakistani, or even Karachi-ite. It ends with a death, a violent one. (I will not reveal more.) But in an era of genocides and mass murders, the death must necessarily be anonymous, reduced to a three-line news item in a newspaper. That's perhaps the tragedy of our times.
