“You think I didn’t
feel bad for that old man that day? Of course I did. We all have daughters,
sisters and wives. But we stay quiet because we don’t want what happened to his
daughter to happen to our loved ones.”
This book makes it clear from the get go that there is no good or bad in this world.
Certainly not in Karachi, where the majority of this book is set. In terms of
outlining the gray areas of a city’s moral code, Omar Shahid Hamid’s debut
novel is in a class of its own. This book is not only an eye-opening, in-your-face account of what the police force is really like, it’s also honest, angry and
vulnerable, if a book can be said to be all those things.
To be fair, the blurb is very misleading. Jon Friedland, the
kidnapped American whose life everyone is trying to save, doesn’t actually even
feature in the book at all until page 330. He is a ploy to get the
grinds of the plot moving, to help our multiple characters interact and converse
and show their darker sides. His sole importance lies in his nationality as an
American and in the fact that he’s been kidnapped. Omar Shahid uses the
random American character Jon to show us how all the movers and shakers in
Karachi react to the situation: various men
characters use the situation to manipulate, lie and destroy one another,
revealing along the way the flawed political and social set up of a sprawling
metropolitan like Karachi. This author
knows this city, and he knows the police, and it shows.
“Whether it was the
Inspector General who wanted to hush things up after his spoilt son shot
someone at a party, the city police chief who wanted him to pick up the bill for
his wife’s shopping excursions to Dubai or the industrialist who had been
caught with an underage girl. All of these matters had been handled with
discretion and, over the years, these services had made him indispensable to
those in power.”
Summary:
On the surface this
seems like a thriller. American journalist Jon Friedland, kidnapped from
one of Karachi’s more posh areas, is going to be dealt with a very public
execution on Christmas Day unless the combined intelligence of Pakistan’s best
and brightest can recover him alive. But the question is not only will they save the poor kidnapped American
from the clutches of the evil menacing Jihadis and set the world back on track?
The mystery does exist, of course. The book races through five days of harried
conversations which revolve around bringing the American back, but saying that that is all the book is about
is to say that terrorism is the only problem plaguing Pakistan. It may be a
big part of the story, but it’s not what the story is about.
This book is about
the law, and specifically those who enforce it. How they work, what they
do, why they do what they do. When one cold morning, Constantine D’Souza, Superintendent
of the Karachi Prisons, is called upon to allow an Army man to visit a
prisoner, he finds himself dragged deeper and deeper into the mystery of the
kidnapped journalist. The prisoner, Akbar Khan, is an ex-police officer
thrown into prison for killing a prominent political personality. He seemingly
now holds the information that everyone, including the police, the government
and the agencies so desperately need to free the American journalist for their
own personal reasons.
The book flits between the past and the present, introducing
us to characters and then taking us back to when they first rose to prominence,
or went into the shadows. As Constantine spends his present-day time being
called here and there to answer questions by the increasingly agitated
higher-ups, the past helps us trace his previous friendship with Akbar, their
days on the force working together, and how events led to Akbar’s incarceration
and Constantine’s position on the Prison team.
This book is written
about Karachi for those who know the city. There is liberal, almost
excessive use of swearing, a lot of haramkhor
and saalay interspersed with the odd
bastard and bloody thrown in for good measure. There are even Urdu words and
phrases used generously during conversations, with the routine arre, thana, kya karoon and badmash right alongside the slang word
for currencies (peti, khokha). This
book is true to its roots, and has a degree of legitimacy in dealing with its
characters. It peels at the layers of the Karachi involved in running a
country, in maintaining law and order and exerting authority over a city of
millions.
The characters:
The Main Character:
Constantine D’Souza is both content and frustrated, both
calm and angry. Through the flashbacks in the book, we meet a man who is quietly disgusted with those around him, but also
sometimes with himself, with his inability to do anything – such as when an
old man comes begging for help from the police to save the life of his young
daughter, who has been dragged into a local political station to be repeatedly
raped by the party workers.
“So it was
inconvenient to have the old man beg for his daughter’s life, was it?
What about
our job as police officers?”
Constantine is an odd
mixture of naivety and street-wise toughness. I didn’t feel anything for
him, even during the few moments when his life was in danger/he was about to
lose a job/his daughter was threatened, but it’s impossible to not be
fascinated by the way he manages to both honourable but at the same time hard,
stout, robust. He is regularly praised by all other characters for being a
decent, trustworthy fellow, and by all
indications he is the hero of the story, but he also very casually and
callously takes part in another man’s torture. So is he the hero then? Is this man
to be admired?
His complexity also
lies in his conservatism. While he himself admits that he’s the son of an
Anglican priest and feels uncomfortable when exposed to billboards showing the
bared skin of women, he has had an affair, has slept on and off with women and
is intimately acquainted with Karachi’s red light area by virtue of being
posted in the police station nearby. This, coupled with his Christian identity,
makes him more 3-dimensional than all the other characters in the book. His
role as a Christian, which helps him be the intermediary in situations of
Sunni-Shia conflict, also put him in trouble in regions where being a Christian
could be life-threatening. Casually being called George Bush ka chamcha are all part and parcel of being a Christian
in Karachi, and Constantine, whose name is repeatedly bastardized to Consendine
by the majority of the characters, is very aware of how his religious identity
affects those around him.
“This job enables me to survive in this city.
It means no one will be rude to my wife and daughters, that my family will not
have to pay extortion to the UF thugs or the police. It means I can get an
electricity meter and phone line much quicker than an ordinary person.”
Constantine is realistic and understands his place in the
world. He is neither aiming too high nor desperate to climb any
ladders. In the case of the American journalist, Constantine does what he can
when he can, all the while trying to protect Akbar, keep those in charge happy
and save his own skin. And it is in his desire to walk a straight path that his
personality gives us the strongest comparison between him and his closest
friend, Akbar Khan.
The Second protagonist:
“You can’t live your
life always scared of the fact that someone is going to take a shit on you from
above.”
Akbar Khan is the
book’s main attraction: a smart talking, no-holds-barred police officer who
has been thrown in jail for something which he was set up for. It is Akbar that
everyone comes racing to when they can’t find any trace of the American
journalist, although Akbar lives in a A-class prison cell by himself, not
talking to anyone else except for the tableeghis who routinely visit his cell
for religious purposes.
(SPOILER ALERT: On a side note, while everyone goes around being awestruck
at Akbar’s access to information that no one else knows, it takes them till
page 148 to connect the dots about who might be supplying Akbar with
information. And even then it’s only Constantine who grows suspicious of the
tableeghis. Really? Come on! They might as well have held a placard saying ‘Look
here, idiots! We’re Akbar’s only connection to the outside world. We are the
source!”)
Akbar is another contradiction, a police officer who
routinely hangs out with thugs, small time criminals and underworld gangsters
while killing, arresting and torturing various hooligans throughout the course
of the book. He picks and chooses the
sins he doesn’t approve of, and is ruthless in hunting down the crimes he
doesn’t endorse. All this, of course, with a sense of humour and a
couldn’t-care-less attitude that seemingly disappears in jail, but comes back
with time.
“Jail is the magic
diet. Try it, and you’ll lose that belly of yours.”
If Constantine is the voice of this book, Akbar is the brains.
It is his story we are really interested
in, his meteoric rise to prominence, his fall from grace, his power even
during incarceration. And as the book progresses, it is Akbar’s character that
reveals more about the police and the underworld than Constantine’s own
observations.
“He realized he had
finally seen the chink in Akbar’s armour. It was that he had too much faith in
the people he held dear. In an imperfect world, in a profession that taught one
very early on to become an arch realist, Akbar, by some crazy quirk of fate,
had remained an optimist.”
The other players in
the game:
Don:
Let us not talk about the very originally named Don from
this book. Let us instead replace the word Don by the name of the actual,
real-life Pakistani politician Altaf Hussain, and instead of the words United
Front use the name of the locally based political party MQM. Good? Is everyone
in? Ok then.
“Things changed when the
United Front MQM came onto the scene and brought a new brand of
goodna politics. Their leader, the Don, Altaf Hussain, had started out as a student activist at the university. He created the system of
the UF’s wards and ward bosses. The wards were crews of young men who were
supposed to create a party structure at the very basic neighbourhood level. But
in reality they created a parallel government where they had the power of
taxation, dispute resolution, punishment, even life and death, over the
citizens of the city.”
There we go. All you need to know about Karachi’s political
system, so succinctly explained. The author has gone out of his way to talk
about Altaf Hussain create a fictional character who will be a true
representative of the gangster life. Is Altaf Hussain not living in UK though?
No worries, that’s explained too.
“The Don’s word was
absolute law in the city. The party he created had evolved into much more than
a simple political movement. It had an international network that mixed crime
and politics and... The Don himself sat at the apex of it, monitoring
everything from his modest suburban New York London town house,
holding the city in a vice grip.”
Omar Shahid Hamid is ruthless in his parallels and doesn’t
leave anything to the imagination. Anyone living in Karachi will be intimately
familiar with the workings of the political set up of the United Front and its
imaginatively named leader.
“The Don granted his
blessings and favours like a medieval potentate, in return for absolute and
unquestioning loyalty. Every command of his was obeyed, on pain of death.”
Anyone living in Karachi understands what a strike call is. A
sudden, urgent announcement on television, a few loitering boys on the streets
holding guns and containers full of gasoline, and the streets will empty in
minutes. Shutters will drop, markets will shut down, vendors and shoppers will
disappear in the wind. Panicked parents will call their children; people will
rush home from their offices. It is a
kind of brutal, perverse power play, the ability of one small group to wreck
such havoc on the lives of the people of such a huge city.
“It was far more impressive to be able to shut
down a city of 16 million on the strength of a long-distance phone call.”
This book talks to everyone living in Karachi the way we
talk to our best friends. It condemns and calls out and describes and explains
our lives, and then in the end, it cautions. It anticipates. It hopes.
“The Don has caused so
much pain to so many people in this city, you think their prayers don’t reach
God?”
Nawaz Chandio:
Nawaz Chandio is another example of the same casual blurring of lines between fiction and reality. In most books there is this thing called
an all persons fictitious disclaimer, which goes something like: All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons,
living or dead, is purely coincidental. I
think someone forgot to tell Omar Shahid Hamid about this particular clause. But anyway.
Take Pakistan’s current Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, who
was in exile in Saudi Arabia from 1999 tilll 2007. Whose brother, Shahbaz
Sharif, was the leader of the opposition in the Punjab Assembly in 1993 in the
house when Manzoor Wattoo was the Chief Minister of Punjab. Shahbaz Sharif, who then became the Chief
Minister of Punjab himself in February 1997 after his election to the Punjab
Assembly for the third time in the 1997 elections.
“This Nawaz Chandio fellow, for instance. The
brother of the opposition leader Yousuf Chandio. He’s been in exile for many
years, but we know he’s been in contact with anti-state forces. His brother
aspires to become the next CM, but he’s got some dubious friends in the
underworld.”
I just can’t even.
There’s a lot to be said for an analogy, and then for outright caricatures. In
this case, the lines which separate what’s real and what’s fictional are wavy,
hazy and lazily drawn. Nawaz sharif Chandio isn’t exactly a very
respectable, upstanding pillar of society, and Omar Shahid Hamid takes such
abject pleasure in pitilessly destroying Chandio’s character that it really
brings a new meaning to the phrase ‘playing out the fantasies’.
The Agencies
Pakistan’s Agencies are a dramatic lot: regularly criticized
and praised in equal measures. The ISI, FIA, CID and the other bewildering
array of intelligence personnel involved in saving or controlling the millions
of citizens living in Pakistan live in shadowy places. And given the high
levels of superstition, ignorance and jingoism that are so prevalent in our
society, there are more rumours than one can handle.
“The agencies are
never under any party or government. They are above the government. They decide
who gets to rule and who doesn’t.”
No one can argue with
the fact that a lot of shit goes down in Pakistan every day: Bombs and
kidnappings and bribery and discrimination and ethnic strife and you get the
point. And with every other problem, someone or the other will point towards
corruption in one agency or the other. And yet, the world goes on.
“The opposition parties will rant and rave for
a while about how the government is using the Agencies to intimidate its
enemies, but then they will all shut up and change their tune when they realize
that they are about to form the next government...As for the rest, well, the
chattering classes in this country will always chatter, but never really do
anything. Deep down, they are quite happy to keep us around because the
alternative is quite unpalatable for them.”
The jihadis
“The truth is,
Consendine, I’m scared. How do you intimidate someone who is willing to give
his life up for God? How do you fight that? It’s like setting yourself up for
failure.”
Ah, The jihadis. How does one begin talking about them? In
this book they are the main antagonists, the people who have kidnapped the
American and so set everything into motion. But in the real world, the jihadis
occupy a larger, more ambiguous territory. For some they are the saviours,
doing the Lord’s work, fighting the good fight. For others, they are the vile
enemies, representative of all the horrible parts of Islam. And in the middle
ground are those who try to condemn the bad and embrace the good, those who
straddle a middle path between following the religion and living in this
world.
“These jihadis were
different. They scared him. Their faith was frightening... A man with no hope
was a man with no fear. You couldn’t reason with them.”
There really is nothing I can say about these jihadis that
those with more informed arguments and more dependable data haven’t already
said. Those who join them, those who condemn them, those who discuss them, they
all need to embrace one fact that this book takes to heart: that these Jihadis
are human, and so they are vulnerable and can be manipulated, just as equally
as they can be destructive and vicious.
The recommendation
“The nature of power,
and of those who wielded it, did not change, whether it was a village or a
cosmopolitan city like Karachi. Those who wielded power always wanted things
done their way.”
All the characters, the setting and the situation in this
book attest to one thing: that corruption
and virtue can exist side by side. This book is bitingly candid in its
assessment of its own city, and doesn’t hide behind pretences.
Recommended for
everyone who is a desi at heart, or who has lived in Pakistan at one time
or another. It might break your heart, you might need to take breaks to ingest
what you’re reading, but it’s like watching an accident in slow motion: you are
repulsed, but you can’t look away.