Let’s just say that the point never came, and while I’m still convinced that people can be talented across multiple fields, maybe Sethi is not the author I should have tried to base my argument on. It’s not that it’s a bad book. Horribly awful tales, I’ve always believed, have their own ways of entertaining. When I was reading H. M. Naqvi’s Home Boy, I spent so much of my time ranting about it to my best friend, but at least I was engaged. A really bad book can be entertaining in its own way, simply by providing you with something to talk about. But it’d be impossible for me to talk about this book a few weeks from now, given how utterly forgettable it was.
Told from the point of view of a young boy coming back to Pakistan to attend a cousin’s wedding, the story seems to want to be about big, important things. Happiness, selfhood, a character forced to confront their own lives, these are the concepts the blurb mentions, but the execution fails to rise to the challenge pretty much from the start to the finish. Nothing much of consequence happens at any point in the story, and even when it does, it never feels alarming enough to make us invested in the characters and their well being. This, I believe, might be the flaw that ruined my interest, because in a tale focused solely on its people and their trials, not caring about a single one of them is tantamount to yawning through the entire thing.
“And Zaki doesn’t even have a father,” Samar Api said.
“Isn’t it amazing,” said Tara Tanvir after she had heard the stories, “how we all come from broken homes?”
This is quite sad because, honestly, there was a lot of potential. I could have cared about a lot of these characters: the domineering grandmother, the politically-inclined mother, and the household maid formed a female-oriented household rounded off by the cousin, Samar Api, brought to live with them from the village. Zaki, our protagonist, grows up under the wings of all these women, and on the surface this sounds like a wonderful tale. How might a boy growing up with so many women grow up differently? I should have loved this story, but literally not a single one of their tales managed to make me care about the outcomes of their problems.
“What have we done?” cried the mother-in-law. “To earn this shame? What have we done?”
She heard it for some minutes and then she shouted, “I will do what I want! I will decide! Not you! Not your son! I will decide!”
This idea of complex adults, parent figures with their own lives and desires, was covered so well by Kamila Shamsie in Broken Verses. I’d be the first one to admit that back when I began reading Pakistani books, I didn’t want to be a purely Kamila Shamsie fan. I wanted to give other Pakistani authors a chance, simply because Shamsie is the most famous name within this particular circle of writers, and I was convinced that there were other authors out there who just hadn’t been given a chance.
But the more books I read, the more I see how those other authors are unable to rise to Shamsie’s level. You can claim that she had an easier entry into the publishing world: Shamsie is rich, she’s privileged, she’s got connections. But she’s also, unlike our author here, really very good at writing her stories. And Sethi, with this book, is proof that you can have all the privileges in the world and still manage to produce mediocre texts.
My mother said he was a feudal.
“What’s feudal?”
“Feudalism,” she said, “is one of the oldest systems in the world. It’s when a small group of people own a lot of land and make other people work on that land but eat up all the revenues.”
Sethi wanted to do a lot of good things, I can at least give him that. The book attempts to talk about issues which clearly matter to him, and on a lot of those particular topics I’m on his side. But is it enough for an author to have good intentions? If it was his particular stance on certain things that I was interested in, I could have simply read an interview. In a narrative, I want to be sucked into the lives of the people whose lives I’m reading about. It could be fantasy, or horror, or even a simple slice of life tale. Do I care about what’s happening? As long as that holds true, I can keep reading. But with Zaki’s tale, I never really started caring, even when the text seemed interesting or held my attention for the shortest period of time.
“There are three A’s for Pakistan,” he said. “Army, Allah, America.”
“And avaam!” she cried indignantly.
“And avaam,” he conceded, humbled by her insistence on having it included, “and avaam.”
Even when Sethi leaned fully into the Pakistani experience, leading into conversations that sound as familiar to me as background dialogue at a family dinner, I still managed to remain uninvested. This was particularly problematic because it is the inherent desi-ness of Pakistani books that endears me to them. The more an author brings to life the nuances of having lived and grown up in Pakistan, the more I enjoy a book, for very obvious reasons. But even though Sethi ticked all the right boxes when it came to naming all the brands I grew up using and mentioning the places I knew the names of, the moments where I jumped with joy at the things I recognized still weren’t powerful enough to engage me with the entire narrative overall.
We went first to Jalal Sons: she went into the stark white aisles inside and selected the insect-repelling Flit dispensers, the small white phenyl balls that were placed above the drains of bathrooms and came in plastic packets, a stack of Capri soaps, three small jars of Dentonic dental powder and three tubes of Medicam toothpaste; she dropped the items into the shopping cart and went into Feminine Care, selected Bio Amla shampoo and Kala Kola hair tonic, a tin of Touch Me talcum powder, a small blue bottle of Nivea face cream for Daadi and a tub of the cheaper Tibet Snow fairness cream for herself.
I’ve been reading Pakistani literature for years now, buoyed by my own realization during my university years of my total dependence upon North American novels to satisfy my reading urges, and to be fair a lot of the desi novels I’ve read have scratched that elusive itch: a reflection of people like me in the stories I was reading. It was only after I started reading local authors that I realized it was possible that the things I knew could be counted as cultural currency, and Sethi managed to provide that as well. But even with the presence of such a regional connection, and even with the text that sometimes provided something worth highlighting, in the end I wasn’t truly satisfied. It’s not enough for a book to just be from Pakistan, and to talk about Pakistani things. The characters must be strong enough to stand on their own, and here, unfortunately, they didn’t.
“Well. It’s hard to say what’s true sometimes. One person might have one way of looking at things. And another person might have another way. You can hold your own beliefs as long as they allow other people to live their lives. You can’t tell me that your beliefs are better than mine. I wouldn’t like that. And neither would you, if you put yourself in my position.”
Basically, I guess what I’m trying to say is that there are some parts in the book that are worth reading. Few and far between, but they exist, if only because they provide something to talk about, such as the mention of queerness. In an Ali Sethi book, given his public declaration of a relationship with a man and given that this book is supposed to be semi-autobiographical, maybe I should have expected our protagonist’s confusion over his sexuality, but it was still a surprise to me because talking about sexuality in Pakistan is a dangerous thing, given the country’s complex relationship with anyone on the lgbtq+ spectrum.
To make matters more complicated, Sethi seems to be unable to decide exactly how much he wants to reveal, alluding and implying but never really discussing any of the complicated emotions that can occur while living as a person who isn’t straight in a country like Pakistan. The one scant scene in the narrative that might have shown our protagonist’s inner turmoil was barely touched upon in one vaguely phrased paragraph and then never mentioned again. It seems Ali Sethi took the precept of Show, Don’t Tell a little too seriously, keeping strictly to the motions of our hero’s actions and losing the chance to explore the richer inner workings of his fraught young mind.
On the other hand, the sort of rich person lifestyle that one can find in so many of our Pakistani books, replete with drinking, drugs, and partying, makes its customary appearance in quite a lot of frank detail. As someone who grew up in a very middle class family where drinking or drugs was never a possibility, to me it’s very strange to be reading about a lifestyle so very different from my own. I can’t tell if my own version of a desi life is the product of a very sheltered upbringing, or if the constant prevalence of alcohol and casual sexuality in local books is caused by most English-language Pakistani authors belonging to a particularly rich strata of desi society.
“Over here,” he said hopelessly, “everything goes on underground. Everyone does everything.” He meant the people in the society pages, from whose world he was excluded. He went on to list their vices in a burning whisper: “Partiessharties, coke-shoke, anything and everything, E bhenchod, speed and heroin.”
“Orgies,” said Moosa with a smile of depravity, a guilty smile that suggested complicity of intent if not in the act itself. “Swapping partners. There’s a club in Karachi where you swap your car keys first.” He laughed mordantly, as if at a hard but distant memory of the thing. “And gays. So many gays.”
Still, and I’ve said this before: just because an author doesn’t reveal a part of the country that you never experienced yourself is no reason to disparage a narrative. Pakistan is a country of wildly different cultures and experiences, and the point of reading desi literature is to be exposed to all of it, but that literature has to be, at the end of the day, worth reading, and the fact that I was ready for the story to finish before I had reached the hundredth page says something about my reading experience. It didn’t help that the author, who must not be from Karachi, made an absolutely ridiculous claim about the city where I was born and bred. As a rule, I don’t much care for the ‘Which city is better’ argument that so many Lahoris and Karachiites like to engage in, but reading someone disparaging the city of my birth when I was already bored with the narrative only served to make me more irritated.
He said, “Are there any monuments?”
She tried to think of monuments. There were none. It came to her that Karachi had no history.
What? WHAT?! Of course, there was no going back after this, but even before we reached this point of no return, my notes were littered with angry editorial notes. The random italicization. The word ‘beta’ being italicized but not ‘sawaiyya’, ‘matar pulao’ being italicized but not ‘eid mubarak’. The obsession with conjunctions. The inability to use a comma to separate items in a list. By the time I read the hundredth ‘and’ separating multiple somethings, I was about ready to tear my own hair out.
She found the painter, and he said she could use the phone in his bedroom and pointed her to it; she went in and didn’t switch on the light and sat down on the bed, which was hard, and dialed the code and then the number and waited.
In conclusion, I guess I’m going to go back to the question I started this entire review with: as a debut novel, how was this rambling, pointless story allowed to be published? At first I worried that I was judging this book too harshly because it shows such a different lifestyle from what I know, but I know myself enough to know that I don’t expect Pakistani novels to represent all of Pakistan. I don’t even expect them to represent the Pakistan I know. What I do expect any story, desi or otherwise, to have is at least the bare bones of something that will keep me engaged. That could be through a good story, or a smart analysis, or even just really good writing. Unfortunately, Sethi’s work fails on almost all fronts, being categorically boring, uninspired, and with no creativity in sight. Even by the halfway mark one can tell that this is a pointless, meandering sort of tale which doesn’t go anywhere or have any conflict worth getting invested in.
Ali Sethi should definitely stick to music: Pasoori was a huge global hit, wrangling a Coachella invitation for Sethi from its overwhelming success, I’ve blasted Tinak Dhin enough times on our car speakers to be able to sing it word for word, and Ranjish Hi Sahih is a personal favorite of mine, but this book was unremarkable enough to be shelved in the ‘never-again’ portion of my personal library. All I can say is I’m glad I borrowed it from the library and didn’t spend any of my hard-earned money on it.
As a last note, here’s a piece of news related to this book that absolutely made me crack up: The Wish Maker was long-listed for the 2011 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, ultimately losing to the aforementioned H. M. Naqvi's, Home Boy, a book which I’ve already mentioned was so atrocious that it kept me entertained with my own ranting for days. Now if only The Wish Maker had had the decency to be as terrible as Home Boy, I would at least have been entertained. As it was, all I had to accompany me during my reading experience was pure, unadulterated ennui, which is the biggest crime of all. Absolutely unforgiveable. Not recommended.
As a last note, here’s a piece of news related to this book that absolutely made me crack up: The Wish Maker was long-listed for the 2011 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, ultimately losing to the aforementioned H. M. Naqvi's, Home Boy, a book which I’ve already mentioned was so atrocious that it kept me entertained with my own ranting for days. Now if only The Wish Maker had had the decency to be as terrible as Home Boy, I would at least have been entertained. As it was, all I had to accompany me during my reading experience was pure, unadulterated ennui, which is the biggest crime of all. Absolutely unforgiveable. Not recommended.