This is a pretty frequent refrain amongst the readers I’ve met in this country, and the complaint has been repeated so many times at this point that most people I know believe it wholeheartedly. They don’t bother giving most Pakistani authors the time of the day, and while I’ve been arguing for years that we now have multiple genres being explored, it’s books like In the Company of Strangers that really force the whole Pakistani publishing industry to take one giant step back.
This title is an amalgamation of all of the worst stereotypes of the ‘Pakistani book’. It uses the same old boring tropes, introduces characters that are caricatures at best, and engages in some of the most ridiculous clichés of book publishing within this country. I had already stumbled across the italicization of the desi word in the first paragraph of the first chapter, a personal irritant that I simply can’t get over no matter how many times I find it. And to make matters worse, the italicized word was dupatta. Dupatta. The word is literally present in every other English dictionary. I’m pretty sure we can stop italicizing it now.It didn’t get any better from there onwards. Within the very first chapter, the book had managed to thoroughly convince me that this wasn’t the place to look for good writing. The sentence construction was weak as hell, and don’t even get me started on comma usage. Honestly, working as an editor has taught me that a significant number of well-read, professionally trained people can still manage to disagree on where exactly a comma needs to be placed, but those disagreements usually occur in situations with subtle nuances. In a majority of the cases though, usually either a comma is in the right place or it is not.
Unfortunately, in this book, it usually was not.
The fruit vendors shouting out tempting prices from their carts as they scratched their armpits, cars attempted to make their way through the gathering mess.
Look at the punctuation! Look at those tenses! Atrocious. Am I accidentally reading the third, unedited draft of this novel? Random capitalization also occurred: at one point, the word gora (italicized, obviously) started with a capital letter. Why? In which unholy editing universe were these decisions being taken? All I’m saying it, my precious little editorial heart suffered. And by the time we got to the mention of the CIA barely 3 percent into the book (mention of American intelligence agencies being another important part of a ‘Pakistani book’), I was already rolling my eyes. It was like I could see every hackneyed plot point well in advance.
The voice of their Leader rang in his head again like a drumbeat. It will be painless for you, Jihadi, but the pain of those kaafirs, those non-believers, will be unimaginable. Remember, they are not humans; they do not feel. They do not love. You shall be rewarded for this noble deed, my boy, you will go to heaven. Kill those kaafirs!’
So it’s safe to say that I went in expecting every cliché under the sun to be present. I mean, the boss of the suicide-loving gang was called the ‘Leader’. That should give you some idea of the amount of time that was spent on the world building. And I already knew that I could expect weak attempts at humanizing these characters, because authors love showing how flawed their characters are, no matter how badly they fail at doing so. So combine the questionable editorial style policy with the hare-brained representation of men doing violent things for religion, and we were already off to a great start.
These were the workings of Shaitan, the Satan.
Okay then.
I think what was even more frustrating about the whole thing was that there was such possibility. Our protagonist, Mona, is a woman in her forties who has an affair with a much younger man. On the surface, this is something I can totally get behind (the age gap, not the adultery, which we’ll get to in a second). A depiction well done would have had the honour of being one of the few desi novels which break the relationship age barrier. As a society, Pakistanis are always horrified at the slightest hint of a young man being connected in a romantic manner with an older woman. This from a country which prides itself on its religious beginnings, and conveniently forgets that our prophet himself loved and revered his first wife, a woman 15 years older than him. So a story which normalized such a relationship would have been a winner for me. Instead, what we do have is the most blatant form of casual ageism I have encountered in a book.
She may have been beautiful once but age and weight had robbed her of any lingering attraction, transforming her into a shapeless bulk.
In fact, I can honestly say that the way women’s bodies are viewed in this novel is damaging at best and horrifying at worst. The only woman worth being, according to the author, is a young, nubile one, who is probably a mannequin and not a real human being, since all human beings are actually flawed in some form or another, but that is a memo that the author seems to have truly missed.
Ugly stretch marks lined the folds on loose fat around her midriff, and even in the dull glow of the lamps, he saw the cellulite on her legs. Her entire body sagged, perhaps once it had been voluptuous, everything a bit firmer, God a bit kinder, but now she reminded him of a wilted peach.
You could argue that that the withering effects of ageing are meant to indicate to the gentle reader who the antagonists of the story are, since an unfortunate but very commonly used writing trick is to equate evilness with ugliness, and for sure the author believes that all signs of ageing are ugly as hell. Except that even our heroine Mona, who is only 41, is shown as being beautiful despite her age. It’s like the world has played her a cruel hand by allowing her age to be visible on her body, and the young man she falls for, Ali, is honestly doing her a favor by paying any attention to her.
A series of fine lines crinkled around her eyes when she smiled. He still found her irresistible.
So, to summarize: ageing is a crime. Being too thin or too fat is also a crime, according to this book, based on the casual body shaming that summarily popped up, mostly to identify the bad people, as usual. In fact, for a book that seemed to want to focus so dedicatedly to the idea of women being friends and women looking out for each other, it sure spent a lot of time trying to criticize the way almost all of the female characters looked.
Shahida was shrouded in a purple banarsi sari, the bones in her thin body standing out beneath the richly tapered fabric. She looked like a starved vulture.
I think the problem over here is that the author simply has no idea what women think like or feel. I believe he had the best of intentions, and wanted to honestly depict a strong, complex female character as one of the protagonists of his tale, one who tries to balance a failing marriage with society’s expectations, and one who finds peace in love. The problem, of course, is that the author failed miserably at this goal.
“I’ve been groped three times tonight. I think it might be a record.”
“You look beautiful, Mona.”
Telling a woman she looks beautiful when she tells you she has been groped is not the proper response. Is that something other people need to be told? Will we need to be writing this down in manuals and spreading it around? I would have thought common decency would help characters navigate these treacherous conversational waters, but unfortunately both Ali and Mona are mouth pieces for an author who has a very complicated version of female empowerment in his head, and seems determined to uphold the kind of feminism he wants to believe in.
“You don’t need to flatter me to be my friend. I’m not one of those women.”
Oh, one of those women. I should have known to stop reading right at about this moment, because any character who claims to be better by separating herself from this imagined horde of insecure, simpering women is a character not worth rooting for. But I kept reading, idiot that I am, growing more and more frustrated with each passing moment with the progression of the plot. Mona and Ali’s affair, shown as a counterpoint to Mona’s horrible relationship with her husband, developed in such a slapdash, I’ve-met-you-twice-but-love-you manner that it threw me off completely. It just didn’t have the kind of spark to justify its presence. I already find adultery hard to digest, and found it harder to bear because the very premise of the affair was just so weak. If we had spent a longer period of time with Mira and her frustration, or with Ali and his slow, steady decline into what is clearly a morally questionable relationship, maybe I could have been convinced. As it is, the fact that they meet only a handful of superficial times before they are convinced that they are in love bothered me to no end.
She recognized it as love, and her heart sank and rose.
Personally, I treat love, and specifically romantic love, as a privilege, but also as something I have worked hard for. For me, all other approximations of caring in a romantic manner count as shades of infatuation or lust, because love is something more resilient, bigger than roses or anniversary presents, a product of the time and effort I have spent into knowing my husband, inside and out. I don’t take that kind of thing lightly and have always believed that being in love should have a strong foundation in time spent, histories known, personalities understood. Any story where characters barely know each other but are willing to do all kinds of far-fetched things for each other in the name of love is bound to end with me huffing in disbelief. And it didn’t help that Ali got involved in horrible things that Mona never questioned.
“Have I ever questioned you about your involvement in that horrible incident? No, I did not. I never even brought up that topic because I know you. And I trust you.”
(Spoiler Alert) This isn’t a healthy, supportive relationship. This is blindness at its best. Loving someone doesn’t mean not questioning them about their possible involvement in other people’s gruesome murder. Love doesn’t mean never bringing up the fact that the person you’re with seems to have been involved in an assassination. At best, our heroine goes from one horribly abusive relationship to another equally messed up one.
“I know I shouldn’t have raised my hand against you, but you just… you force me. You can be so implacable at times. I mean, why dress so provocatively?”
On that note, Mona’s relationship with her husband, Bilal, is so dysfunctional that I spent a majority of the reading time just plain horrified. Honestly, it can’t be described in any way other than batshit insane. I feel like the author here was aiming for flawed and complex, and instead stumbled into ‘save this woman from this abuse’ territory.
The fruit vendors shouting out tempting prices from their carts as they scratched their armpits, cars attempted to make their way through the gathering mess.
Look at the punctuation! Look at those tenses! Atrocious. Am I accidentally reading the third, unedited draft of this novel? Random capitalization also occurred: at one point, the word gora (italicized, obviously) started with a capital letter. Why? In which unholy editing universe were these decisions being taken? All I’m saying it, my precious little editorial heart suffered. And by the time we got to the mention of the CIA barely 3 percent into the book (mention of American intelligence agencies being another important part of a ‘Pakistani book’), I was already rolling my eyes. It was like I could see every hackneyed plot point well in advance.
The voice of their Leader rang in his head again like a drumbeat. It will be painless for you, Jihadi, but the pain of those kaafirs, those non-believers, will be unimaginable. Remember, they are not humans; they do not feel. They do not love. You shall be rewarded for this noble deed, my boy, you will go to heaven. Kill those kaafirs!’
So it’s safe to say that I went in expecting every cliché under the sun to be present. I mean, the boss of the suicide-loving gang was called the ‘Leader’. That should give you some idea of the amount of time that was spent on the world building. And I already knew that I could expect weak attempts at humanizing these characters, because authors love showing how flawed their characters are, no matter how badly they fail at doing so. So combine the questionable editorial style policy with the hare-brained representation of men doing violent things for religion, and we were already off to a great start.
These were the workings of Shaitan, the Satan.
Okay then.
I think what was even more frustrating about the whole thing was that there was such possibility. Our protagonist, Mona, is a woman in her forties who has an affair with a much younger man. On the surface, this is something I can totally get behind (the age gap, not the adultery, which we’ll get to in a second). A depiction well done would have had the honour of being one of the few desi novels which break the relationship age barrier. As a society, Pakistanis are always horrified at the slightest hint of a young man being connected in a romantic manner with an older woman. This from a country which prides itself on its religious beginnings, and conveniently forgets that our prophet himself loved and revered his first wife, a woman 15 years older than him. So a story which normalized such a relationship would have been a winner for me. Instead, what we do have is the most blatant form of casual ageism I have encountered in a book.
She may have been beautiful once but age and weight had robbed her of any lingering attraction, transforming her into a shapeless bulk.
In fact, I can honestly say that the way women’s bodies are viewed in this novel is damaging at best and horrifying at worst. The only woman worth being, according to the author, is a young, nubile one, who is probably a mannequin and not a real human being, since all human beings are actually flawed in some form or another, but that is a memo that the author seems to have truly missed.
Ugly stretch marks lined the folds on loose fat around her midriff, and even in the dull glow of the lamps, he saw the cellulite on her legs. Her entire body sagged, perhaps once it had been voluptuous, everything a bit firmer, God a bit kinder, but now she reminded him of a wilted peach.
You could argue that that the withering effects of ageing are meant to indicate to the gentle reader who the antagonists of the story are, since an unfortunate but very commonly used writing trick is to equate evilness with ugliness, and for sure the author believes that all signs of ageing are ugly as hell. Except that even our heroine Mona, who is only 41, is shown as being beautiful despite her age. It’s like the world has played her a cruel hand by allowing her age to be visible on her body, and the young man she falls for, Ali, is honestly doing her a favor by paying any attention to her.
A series of fine lines crinkled around her eyes when she smiled. He still found her irresistible.
So, to summarize: ageing is a crime. Being too thin or too fat is also a crime, according to this book, based on the casual body shaming that summarily popped up, mostly to identify the bad people, as usual. In fact, for a book that seemed to want to focus so dedicatedly to the idea of women being friends and women looking out for each other, it sure spent a lot of time trying to criticize the way almost all of the female characters looked.
Shahida was shrouded in a purple banarsi sari, the bones in her thin body standing out beneath the richly tapered fabric. She looked like a starved vulture.
I think the problem over here is that the author simply has no idea what women think like or feel. I believe he had the best of intentions, and wanted to honestly depict a strong, complex female character as one of the protagonists of his tale, one who tries to balance a failing marriage with society’s expectations, and one who finds peace in love. The problem, of course, is that the author failed miserably at this goal.
“I’ve been groped three times tonight. I think it might be a record.”
“You look beautiful, Mona.”
Telling a woman she looks beautiful when she tells you she has been groped is not the proper response. Is that something other people need to be told? Will we need to be writing this down in manuals and spreading it around? I would have thought common decency would help characters navigate these treacherous conversational waters, but unfortunately both Ali and Mona are mouth pieces for an author who has a very complicated version of female empowerment in his head, and seems determined to uphold the kind of feminism he wants to believe in.
“You don’t need to flatter me to be my friend. I’m not one of those women.”
Oh, one of those women. I should have known to stop reading right at about this moment, because any character who claims to be better by separating herself from this imagined horde of insecure, simpering women is a character not worth rooting for. But I kept reading, idiot that I am, growing more and more frustrated with each passing moment with the progression of the plot. Mona and Ali’s affair, shown as a counterpoint to Mona’s horrible relationship with her husband, developed in such a slapdash, I’ve-met-you-twice-but-love-you manner that it threw me off completely. It just didn’t have the kind of spark to justify its presence. I already find adultery hard to digest, and found it harder to bear because the very premise of the affair was just so weak. If we had spent a longer period of time with Mira and her frustration, or with Ali and his slow, steady decline into what is clearly a morally questionable relationship, maybe I could have been convinced. As it is, the fact that they meet only a handful of superficial times before they are convinced that they are in love bothered me to no end.
She recognized it as love, and her heart sank and rose.
Personally, I treat love, and specifically romantic love, as a privilege, but also as something I have worked hard for. For me, all other approximations of caring in a romantic manner count as shades of infatuation or lust, because love is something more resilient, bigger than roses or anniversary presents, a product of the time and effort I have spent into knowing my husband, inside and out. I don’t take that kind of thing lightly and have always believed that being in love should have a strong foundation in time spent, histories known, personalities understood. Any story where characters barely know each other but are willing to do all kinds of far-fetched things for each other in the name of love is bound to end with me huffing in disbelief. And it didn’t help that Ali got involved in horrible things that Mona never questioned.
“Have I ever questioned you about your involvement in that horrible incident? No, I did not. I never even brought up that topic because I know you. And I trust you.”
(Spoiler Alert) This isn’t a healthy, supportive relationship. This is blindness at its best. Loving someone doesn’t mean not questioning them about their possible involvement in other people’s gruesome murder. Love doesn’t mean never bringing up the fact that the person you’re with seems to have been involved in an assassination. At best, our heroine goes from one horribly abusive relationship to another equally messed up one.
“I know I shouldn’t have raised my hand against you, but you just… you force me. You can be so implacable at times. I mean, why dress so provocatively?”
On that note, Mona’s relationship with her husband, Bilal, is so dysfunctional that I spent a majority of the reading time just plain horrified. Honestly, it can’t be described in any way other than batshit insane. I feel like the author here was aiming for flawed and complex, and instead stumbled into ‘save this woman from this abuse’ territory.
This isn’t two individuals simply not meant for each other or at odds because of indifference; this is a man who uses his fists to make his points, and a woman who drinks and cheats with abandon. I’ve said before that adultery is the kind of flaw I find hard to forgive, and this novel lacks the nuance to convince me otherwise. I get that Mona’s husband is a sadistic asshole, but she definitely has the kind of agency which will allow her to walk away. Her mother-in-law, another cookie cutter stereotypical character, manages to exhibit what might be the sole moment of actual three-dimensional complexity within a character when she tells her son that if his wife wants to leave him, she will help her. So we know that Mona has the means to walk away, and yet she stays with Bilal, with the novel taking the truly bizarre turn of trying to paint Bilal as some tortured soul, unable to understand why his wife won’t just blindly listen to his every demand.
He now realized that he had tried to possess her and own her thoughts. In his own perverse way he had loved her.
No, no, and no. Bilal is a megalomaniac in every sense of the word, and there is no justifying his cruelty, and frankly speaking the book does itself a huge disservice by trying to portray him as a conflicted figure who deserves sympathy. Truly the only moments where I actually liked the book was when Mona exhibited the rare moments of sanity in the face of her abusive husband and tried to fight back.
“I might be a bastard most of the time, but I love you very much. You are the mother of my children. The love of my life.
“You have a funny way of showing it, Bilal.”
All in all, a very disturbing relationship, made worse by the fact that none of the other connections this couple have with other characters seem to provide any sort of balance away from this toxicity. Ali is already a damaging character, and Mona’s female friendships are mostly superficial and grating. Even Meera, an old friend that Mona re-connects with after a long time and who is supposedly the catalyst of the love affair, mostly flicks in and out of the story at opportune moments, never truly establishing a strong enough presence for us to care about or root for.
He now realized that he had tried to possess her and own her thoughts. In his own perverse way he had loved her.
No, no, and no. Bilal is a megalomaniac in every sense of the word, and there is no justifying his cruelty, and frankly speaking the book does itself a huge disservice by trying to portray him as a conflicted figure who deserves sympathy. Truly the only moments where I actually liked the book was when Mona exhibited the rare moments of sanity in the face of her abusive husband and tried to fight back.
“I might be a bastard most of the time, but I love you very much. You are the mother of my children. The love of my life.
“You have a funny way of showing it, Bilal.”
All in all, a very disturbing relationship, made worse by the fact that none of the other connections this couple have with other characters seem to provide any sort of balance away from this toxicity. Ali is already a damaging character, and Mona’s female friendships are mostly superficial and grating. Even Meera, an old friend that Mona re-connects with after a long time and who is supposedly the catalyst of the love affair, mostly flicks in and out of the story at opportune moments, never truly establishing a strong enough presence for us to care about or root for.
In fact, it would be safe to say that the women in this book mostly don’t like each other, and faithfully follow along the scripted lines set down by most Pakistani dramas, which are famous for being stereotypical and repetitive in their cruelty, both physical and otherwise, to women. The majority of dramas focus on saas-bahu enmity: I already knew, when Mona complained to her husband about her mother-in-law within the first introductory scene, that this book would follow the same path, and it didn’t disappoint.
“You called your mother, and didn’t even bother to check on me? What kind of a person are you?”
Honestly, if we were expecting some sort of genre defiance from this book, we’d be looking at the wrong place. All of the usual clichés about Lahore and the obsession of its populace with brand names pops up. It wouldn’t be unfair to say that this book is the weaker, uglier version of Mohsin Hamid’s Moth Smoke. Hamid’s work also featured an elitist Lahore, a boozy setting, and convoluted, adulterous relationships, but at least it had good writing and fairly interesting characters for us to rely on. This book doesn’t even have the decency to provide us with better sentence construction.
Each shawl cost a whooping one million rupees, much more expensive than the average Chanel or Louis Vuitton stole. Even in her despondent state, Mona felt a prick of desire for them.
I only gave this book an extra star because I have read Pakistani literature that’s so much worse that in comparison this passes muster. But being better than the worst is really not some achievement worth aiming for, so I’m praying that the next book I read by this author provides a greater degree of enjoyment, or even basic sense. Here’s to hoping.
“You called your mother, and didn’t even bother to check on me? What kind of a person are you?”
Honestly, if we were expecting some sort of genre defiance from this book, we’d be looking at the wrong place. All of the usual clichés about Lahore and the obsession of its populace with brand names pops up. It wouldn’t be unfair to say that this book is the weaker, uglier version of Mohsin Hamid’s Moth Smoke. Hamid’s work also featured an elitist Lahore, a boozy setting, and convoluted, adulterous relationships, but at least it had good writing and fairly interesting characters for us to rely on. This book doesn’t even have the decency to provide us with better sentence construction.
Each shawl cost a whooping one million rupees, much more expensive than the average Chanel or Louis Vuitton stole. Even in her despondent state, Mona felt a prick of desire for them.
I only gave this book an extra star because I have read Pakistani literature that’s so much worse that in comparison this passes muster. But being better than the worst is really not some achievement worth aiming for, so I’m praying that the next book I read by this author provides a greater degree of enjoyment, or even basic sense. Here’s to hoping.