tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62766717250935613112024-02-20T07:36:30.744+05:00A Desi's Guide to Pakistani (English) FictionAnum Shaharyarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07742790825147781762noreply@blogger.comBlogger130125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276671725093561311.post-6073158271601836492023-10-26T20:21:00.002+05:002023-10-26T20:27:49.789+05:00Of Poems and Identity: Fatimah Asghar's 'If They Come for Us' is worth reading<p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZJNl6IDhAKAfORiE5jy8SebNrjD2imgOX_pf7rw8ZMKZE0iimVagzl7ZDcGgTO4u7gJnwpXlgL2mueDx4J0aBRHocKdR75i3iLlpSWKU3bUUKxO21xnMWscCDy9HNYPEsxaZfbORdCPLslQa3rIeCAueYYzEV-GyOMeYwSyJZgCPRvJ8rtFi0nZtOSD02/s1200/36477795.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="827" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZJNl6IDhAKAfORiE5jy8SebNrjD2imgOX_pf7rw8ZMKZE0iimVagzl7ZDcGgTO4u7gJnwpXlgL2mueDx4J0aBRHocKdR75i3iLlpSWKU3bUUKxO21xnMWscCDy9HNYPEsxaZfbORdCPLslQa3rIeCAueYYzEV-GyOMeYwSyJZgCPRvJ8rtFi0nZtOSD02/s320/36477795.jpg" width="221" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: inherit;">It's highly unfair of me to attempt to review poetry, because poetry is not my domain. I do not read enough of it to be able to make a proper judgement call, and most of my response to poetry is a very superficial, surface-level interaction that doesn't seem to do the art form justice, given how passionately other people feel about it.</span><p></p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">A short review will, thus, have to suffice. I liked most of the poems. I loved the book cover. I also loved the fact that important life-changing events like the<a href="https://www.dawn.com/news/1151361" target="_blank"> APS terrorist attack on school children</a>, a shocking and deeply traumatic moment in the life of Pakistanis everywhere, made an appearance here. It felt like being seen, a young artist talking about moments taken from my own life, moments that aren't far in the past but are part of my recent present.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><i style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">From the moment our babies are born<br />are we meant to lower them into the ground?<br />To dress them in white? They send flowers<br />before guns, thorns plucked from stem.<br />Every year I manage to live on this earth<br />I collect more questions than answers.</i><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">Even when the distant past hit, the feeling of being relevant carried through. I loved how partition was threaded through the entire volume, just the way it is omnipresent in our lives today. One page of text, titled 'Partition', no line breaks and no paragraphs, was probably my favourite part of the whole collection.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><i style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">you’re kashmiri until they burn your home. take your orchards. stake a different flag. until no one remembers the road that brings you back. you’re indian until they draw a border through punjab. until the british captains spit paki as they sip your chai, add so much foam you can’t taste home. you’re seraiki until your mouth fills with english. you’re pakistani until your classmates ask what that is. then you’re indian again. or some kind of spanish. you speak a language until you don’t. until you only recognize it between your auntie’s lips. your father was fluent in four languages. you’re illiterate in the tongues of your father. your grandfather wrote persian poetry on glasses. maybe. you can’t remember. you made it up. someone lied. you’re a daughter until they bury your mother. until you’re not invited to your father’s funeral. you’re a virgin until you get too drunk. you’re muslim until you’re not a virgin. you’re pakistani until they start throwing acid. you’re muslim until it’s too dangerous. you’re safe until you’re alone. you’re american until the towers fall. until there’s a border on your back.</i><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">Even though I could not relate to a significant portion of the issues that Fatimah explores, given that it talks of a very specific immigrant experience of having brown skin among white people, it still felt raw and powerful in the way only certain lived experiences can. Not only the racism, but the poems on sexuality, or on loss of homelands, on losing languages and cultures, on history and memory and all the things that tie in to the experience of leaving one piece of land behind to move to another, they all feature in one way or another.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><i style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">I whisper my country my country my country<br />& my hands stay empty.<br />what is land but land? a camp<br />but a camp? sanctuary<br />but another grave? I am an architect.<br />I permission everything<br />into something new.<br />I build & build<br />& someone takes it away.</i><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">Of course, there were some parts where I got bored and wanted it to end, but that was inevitable. As always, whatever I say about any poetry collection should be taken with a grain of salt. If some things are subjective, there is no greater proof of it than in my response to this act of story telling, which clearly moves some to tears while evoking in me no more than an appreciation of the odd sentence or paragraph here and there.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">It was good. You should read it. That's all I can say.</span></span><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;"><br /></span></span></div>Anum Shaharyarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07742790825147781762noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276671725093561311.post-81154253654444058572023-10-19T17:16:00.002+05:002023-10-19T17:27:36.882+05:00Of Blood and Boredom: Mohammed Hanif's 'Red Birds' is a yawnfest<p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5zaqUUIIyJ9dPTVxLqPb3ODdjunBegjCGqbIk5PQR4p341c9E329iAJpcOj4Gy5u7Rt4ETddC8DM1Dlbh4bK6b4dpIehexJJVt4NTqRLO1JlE0AaZOojbs5ua03eBT-notkm9BneeNk6DKBEP6GDY37IPyVkDeedPMba32299LdhvjIJFD1KjfJUI_E5i/s257/37840584.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="257" data-original-width="160" height="257" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5zaqUUIIyJ9dPTVxLqPb3ODdjunBegjCGqbIk5PQR4p341c9E329iAJpcOj4Gy5u7Rt4ETddC8DM1Dlbh4bK6b4dpIehexJJVt4NTqRLO1JlE0AaZOojbs5ua03eBT-notkm9BneeNk6DKBEP6GDY37IPyVkDeedPMba32299LdhvjIJFD1KjfJUI_E5i/s1600/37840584.jpg" width="160" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: inherit;">Most of the time when I don’t like a book, reviewing it seems like such a burden. I want to simply say "Hated it, don’t read" and be done with the whole reviewing process, but I never thought I’d be saying this about a Mohammad Hanif book. </span><p></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915; font-family: inherit;">And it’s not just because his other novel, </span><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/719387036?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; outline: 0px;">Our Lady of Alice Bhatti</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915; font-family: inherit;">, was good, but because he writes nonfiction so well. All of his stuff on NYT and BBC Urdu has always been consistently entertaining and engaging, which was why this book came as a particular shock.</span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">Make no mistake, his commentary is still on-point. When talking about war’s absurdities or the intricacies of familial love, Hanif combines humor with fact to create that wry, satirical tone that I’ve known and loved in many of his columns. In fact, the only parts of the book that I actually enjoyed were when the writing disassociated from the protagonist and entered into an observational mode, commenting on the things around them rather than on developing the character or moving the plot along.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915;">It’s a well-known fact that those under assault from outside take it out on their own. The opium eater gets kicked in the bazaar and since he can’t hit back, he comes home and kicks his kids. Big, rich nations get a bloody nose in far-off countries and start slashing the milk money for poor babies at home. You can’t bring an enemy plane down with a stone, but you can smash your neighbour’s window.</i><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">But while the sparkling insight and funny bits are all good and well in shorter articles, for a novel you still need some actual narrative arc and characters worth reading about in order to feel invested. And while Hanif’s non-fiction is what I’ve always enjoyed, it's clear that his fiction writing is just not for me. </span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915; font-family: inherit;">Which is ironic since his novels are what brought his name to my attention in the first place. But after almost falling asleep in the first quarter of the novel, and continuously checking how many pages were left once I passed the halfway mark, I knew this book and I were not meant to be. </span><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">Maybe that had something to do with the characters, who all felt entirely boring and purposeless: Ellie, an American pilot who crashes near the site he was supposed to be bombing, gets rescued by Momo, a money-obsessed teenager who dreams about rescuing his missing brother, and is accompanied by Mutt, an actual dog who is our third protagonist.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">One could argue that there are lots of hidden depths to the novel, especially in the characterization of Momo, who alternates between dreaming of various entrepreneurial schemes and being interviewed by a young researcher who has come to study The Young Muslim Mind. Momo is an interesting character entirely wasted in this book, and—once again can’t believe I’m saying this—could have been so much more with a better author.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915;">‘We used to drink wine from our enemy’s skull. Now we drink purified water from paper cups made by cutting down trees.” She looks relieved. I think I have given her a glimpse into my young, troubled Muslim mind.</i><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">In fact, there are lots of potential opportunities in this novel that are so thoroughly missed that it feels sort of disappointing. ‘Good idea, bad execution’ is not a tag I thought I would use with a Hanif novel, but here we are. Even Ellie, who could have grown from the cynical, vaguely misogynistic, mostly repulsive adult male, manages to have no proper development and learn no lessons. And while I don’t necessarily expect my characters to change in order to justify their presence in a story, I do expect at least some reason for them to exist within the narrative. Sadly enough, the only time when Ellie becomes relevant is when the author uses him as a mouth piece to indulge in the sort of outrageous, in-your-face statements that he’s known for.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915;">If I didn’t bomb some place, how would she save that place? If I didn’t rain fire from the skies, who would need her to douse that fire on the ground? Why would you need somebody to throw blankets on burning babies if there were no burning babies? If I didn’t take out homes, who would provide shelter? If I didn’t take out homes who would need shelter? If I didn’t obliterate cities, how would you get to set up refugee camps? Where would all the world’s empathy go? Who would host exhibitions in the picture galleries of Berlin, who would have fundraising balls in London? Where would all the students on their gap years go? If I stop wearing this uniform and quit my job, the world’s sympathy machine will grind to a halt. You don’t hold candlelight vigils for those dying of old age and neglect. You need fireworks to ignite human imagination.</i><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">Even the character of the mother, from whom I was expecting some three-dimensional complexity, gets reduced to her obsession with bringing her son back. I’ll admit, a significant portion of my expectation came from the fact that Alice Bhatti, the protagonist of Mohammad Hanif’s 2011 novel, was such a self-aware and interesting female character, but all of the things that made her alive and relevant seem completely missing here. </span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915; font-family: inherit;">And on a much more random note, I also couldn’t stand the fact that she was constantly called ‘Mother Dear’. It’s entirely possible that, in college classes where this novel might become required reading in the future, there might be interpretations and reasons for why this particular title was relevant, but I didn’t care for it, and it needlessly irritated me.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; font-family: inherit;">Mother Dear doesn’t need consultants in this house. She doesn’t need psychological assistance to get a grip on her life. She doesn’t need folklore or any such sad-ass lectures to get her life-work balance right. She wants her son back.</i><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915; font-family: inherit;">What also irritated me—and there is unfortunately such a long list in this novel—is the dog as a narrator. Matlab, what? Why? An animal as a main character might be cute in certain books, but my god was Mutt a pointless protagonist. Random and rambling and mostly not engaging enough, all of Mutt’s chapters were a test of my patience, except in the places where Hanif broke out of character, taking on the tone of an omnipresent narrator providing commentary from above.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; font-family: inherit;">God left this place a long time ago, and I don’t harbour any delusions about my own role on this earth but I can imagine what he must have felt like. He had had enough. I have had a bit more than that.</i><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915; font-family: inherit;">In fact, pretty much the only person whose existence Hanif has fun with is the young female researcher, Lady Flowerbody, who embodies the sort of do-gooder humanitarian who has come to save the souls of the poor, ravaged children of war. It is in her characterization that his snark truly manages to shine, showering disdain and amusement in equal measures at the very idea of people like her. Reference after reference after reference fluctuates between scorn and a healthy dose of hilarity when talking about those who travel to war-ravaged areas and attempt to ‘save’ the people over there.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; font-family: inherit;">First they bomb us from the skies, then they work hard to cure our stress.</i><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #1e1915; font-family: inherit;">Now if only Hanif could have concentrated on </span><span style="color: #1e1915;">channeling</span><span style="color: #1e1915; font-family: inherit;"> his sarcasm, we could have been saved from the frankly disastrous ending. And this won’t even be a spoiler, because to spoil an ending you have to be able to understand what actually happened. Because ghosts? And magical realism? And what the what now? I want to be able to understand what happened at the end, not to have to guess. And I get that allegory and metaphors and allusions to things can make for great literature, but it’s usually a hit or miss, and this time it’s a definite miss for me.</span></span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; font-family: inherit;">Red birds are real. The reason we don’t see them is because we don’t want to. Because if we see them, we’ll remember. When someone dies in a raid or a shooting or when someone’s throat is slit, their last drop of blood transforms into a tiny red bird and flies away.</i><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915; font-family: inherit;">I guess the only redeemable thing about this novel is the fact that Mohammad Hanif is still as intensely quotable as always. In shorter bursts he writes well, and in certain paragraphs the authority he has over the language really shows through. Overall though, I just didn’t care for the plot, or the characters, or even about the fact that it had been written by such an esteemed writer. As a recommendation, I’d say I personally didn’t care for it, but everyone is welcome to give it a go.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; font-family: inherit;">You got killed, now you are gonna stay killed. It doesn’t matter whether you died bravely or left this world shitting in your pants. White or brown, dead is dead.</i><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; font-family: "Proxima Nova", Montserrat, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px;" /></div><div><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; font-family: inherit;"><br /></i></div>Anum Shaharyarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07742790825147781762noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276671725093561311.post-79996164066166506592023-10-12T18:30:00.000+05:002023-10-12T18:30:00.023+05:00Of Cliches and Complications: Awais Khan's 'In the Company of Strangers' barely passes muster<p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3-1PYnZqfDRRouaLgfZsJ5Bb96zfuOPwhyphenhyphenFlTN4MDjtuoQhOpAgD6msJgCq4nanKQWR-QTLBEC2VnS-GY3Qfd-Lo86WONZcQrIslrnjJdRVnboth-IGEpQTptox_48ot8vkpuf40TF-nOf9VuKr6uN1xyhXmvfC_ZWO_7b2o5nIRmtfB5oUSkUzwcjaBz/s2551/44072869.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2551" data-original-width="1630" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3-1PYnZqfDRRouaLgfZsJ5Bb96zfuOPwhyphenhyphenFlTN4MDjtuoQhOpAgD6msJgCq4nanKQWR-QTLBEC2VnS-GY3Qfd-Lo86WONZcQrIslrnjJdRVnboth-IGEpQTptox_48ot8vkpuf40TF-nOf9VuKr6uN1xyhXmvfC_ZWO_7b2o5nIRmtfB5oUSkUzwcjaBz/s320/44072869.jpg" width="204" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: inherit;">Back when I started reading Pakistani fiction, I also fell victim to that oft-repeated perception held by a majority of the Pakistani population about every Pakistani book published ever: that all stories originating from this country are only about drugs, corruption, religion, or politics. </span><p></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: inherit;">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.</span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">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. </span><b style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">Dupatta.</b><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;"> The word is literally present in every other English dictionary. I’m pretty sure we can stop italicizing it now.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">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. </span></span><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">Unfortunately, in this book, it usually was not.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><i style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">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.</i><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">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.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><i style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">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!’</i><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">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.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><i style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">These were the workings of</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;"> Shaitan, </span><i style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">the Satan.</i><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">Okay then.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">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, </span><a href="https://www.fairobserver.com/region/middle_east_north_africa/remarkable-things-about-khadija-wife-of-prophet-muhammad-30278/" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: white; color: #00635d;">a woman 15 years older than him</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">. 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.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><i style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">She may have been beautiful once but age and weight had robbed her of any lingering attraction, transforming her into a shapeless bulk.</i><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">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.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><i style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">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.</i><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">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.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><i style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">A series of fine lines crinkled around her eyes when she smiled. He still found her irresistible.</i><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">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.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><i style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">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><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">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.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><i style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">“I’ve been groped three times tonight. I think it might be a record.”<br />“You look beautiful, Mona.”</i><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">Telling a woman she looks beautiful when she tells you she has been groped is </span><b style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">not</b><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;"> 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.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><i style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">“You don’t need to flatter me to be my friend. I’m not one of those women.”</i><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">Oh, one of </span><b style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">those women</b><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">. 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 </span><a href="https://thedesiwritingguide.blogspot.com/2021/06/of-enjoyment-and-ennui-mira-sethis-are.html" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: white; color: #00635d;">already find adultery hard to digest</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">, 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.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><i style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">She recognized it as love, and her heart sank and rose.</i><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">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.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><i style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">“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.”</i><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /></span><b style="color: #181818;">(Spoiler Alert)</b><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;"> </span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">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 </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">other people’s gruesome murder</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">. 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.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><i style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">“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?”</i><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">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. </span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">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.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><i style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">He now realized that he had tried to possess her and own her thoughts. In his own perverse way he had loved her.</i><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">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.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><i style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">“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.<br />“You have a funny way of showing it, Bilal.”</i><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">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. </span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">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.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><i style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">“You called your mother, and didn’t even bother to check on me? What kind of a person are you?”</i><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">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 </span><a href="https://thedesiwritingguide.blogspot.com/2018/04/of-drugs-and-death-mohsin-hamids-moth.html" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: white; color: #00635d;">Mohsin Hamid’s Moth Smoke</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">. 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.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><i style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">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><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">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.</span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;"><br /></span></span></div>Anum Shaharyarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07742790825147781762noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276671725093561311.post-27651701419018457952023-10-06T00:16:00.004+05:002023-10-06T00:16:40.388+05:00Of Science and Bigotry: Zarrar Said's 'Pureland' has good intentions but sucks at absolutely everything else<p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpiNpLvmNnzpRqayPitue76Go1rzoxbABkseohyphenhyphenBUVrUcIRsggKSGsSgMXg4n_9l8UyFfieYFyHgfpXDVgSbX4VMLMfWtEyueHezHj1PWTKv9Lm08rnxFSn85PRX0RD2xjzSKlV8Td7ofNOBmjV13ZFTP7BXZxlas24qMApJclu2ncPD5JEGzZy_Aug9GV/s1384/52556665.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1384" data-original-width="974" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpiNpLvmNnzpRqayPitue76Go1rzoxbABkseohyphenhyphenBUVrUcIRsggKSGsSgMXg4n_9l8UyFfieYFyHgfpXDVgSbX4VMLMfWtEyueHezHj1PWTKv9Lm08rnxFSn85PRX0RD2xjzSKlV8Td7ofNOBmjV13ZFTP7BXZxlas24qMApJclu2ncPD5JEGzZy_Aug9GV/s320/52556665.jpg" width="225" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: inherit;">I really wanted to like Pureland. I <span style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; font-weight: 600;">really, really, really</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;"> wanted to like Pureland. The chances of it being boring seemed so low, given that it’s based on the life of one of Pakistan’s most controversial figures, but I guess even the best subject matter can't save a story from atrocious writing.</span></span><p></p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">And what horrible writing there was, my god. It wasn’t even the sort of bad that feels like it was written by an amateur who never received any feedback, but rather like the words of an author who knows the language but tries to get ahead of himself. I guess I should have realized what I was heading into when I saw the ‘magical realism’ tag, but given that I’ve read some not-so-atrocious books of this genre in the past (Hamid’s </span><a href="https://thedesiwritingguide.blogspot.com/2018/03/of-secret-doors-and-other-lives-mohsin.html" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px;">Exit West</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;"> comes to mind), I was prepared to get over my long-standing disdain for the sort of wackiness that one can meet in books within this genre. </span></span><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">Unfortunately,</span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915; font-family: inherit;"> my disdain was extremely valid in this case. While Salman Rushdie might have created brilliance in Midnight’s Children, it is shocking to me that anyone could ever insinuate that this book is Pakistan’s equivalent to the sort of narrative talent that you see in Rushdie’s work.</span><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">And insinuate such a thing multiple reviewers have done, for reasons that beggar belief. The only explanation that I can possibly consider about why this book deserves to be complimented is the one that is clearly obvious: this book is about ahmadis. And not only about ahmadis, but possibly the most famous ahmadi Pakistan has created.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">But before we continue, it’s important to take a small detour at this point to venture out of the world of book reviewing and into a short but bloody history lesson. I’ll be the first to admit that my knowledge of ahmadis has mostly been a case of second-hand, vaguely-gotten knowledge. That’s because if you’re part of the religious majority in Pakistan, you have the type of ridiculous privilege that protects you from even knowing about the micro-aggressions that minorities face in the country, much less having to ever consider the possibility of your life being in actual danger because of your religious beliefs. And Ahmadis (followers of a 19th century subcontinental movement who believe in the teachings of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad) have been routinely treated with a vicious, unrelenting streak of cruelty in Pakistan. This is because a lot of Muslims don’t consider ahmadis as proper Muslims, branding them as either kafir or heretic. And this animosity spills over into almost </span><a href="https://www.dawn.com/news/1261622" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px;">all aspects of life in Pakistan</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">It is present in our speech, which uses the pejorative term Qadiani to refer to ahmadis (the term originates from Qadian, the town in northern India where the founder of the movement was born). ‘Qadiani’ is primarily used in Pakistan, and is even used in </span><a href="http://www.fmu.gov.pk/docs/laws/Pakistan%20Penal%20Code.pdf" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px;">official country documentation</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">. In fact, our country has gone so far as to declare the entire sect as Non-Muslims in a 1974 constitutional amendment that still exists to this date and age. A decade after that amendment, further laws which barred the entire community from calling their place of worship ‘mosques’ or propagating their faith came into being. This sort of </span><a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-pakistan-religion/pakistans-ahmadi-community-releases-damning-persecution-report-idUSKBN1HZ06R" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px;">nation-wide animosity</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;"> has frequently resulted in actions as damaging as limiting someone’s opportunity to do something to outright murder.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">The most recent case of this was in 2018 when the newly-elected government, led by popular political party PTI, decided to </span><a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-pakistan-politics-idUSKCN1LN0UT" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px;">withdraw the name of a prominent economist</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;"> from its nascent Economic Advisory Council. Atif Mian, a Princeton University professor who also happens to be an ahmadi, was initially chosen to be a part of the 18-member panel responsible for advising the PM on economic policies. But growing pressure from several religious parties eventually led to the government asking Mian to step down from that position. And even though there was concern raised about the growing involvement of Islamist parties in the country’s politics, a significant number of religious conservatives welcomed the decision, in a move that is both troubling and indicative of where we stand.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">In retrospect though, where we now stand could have been predicted a few decades ago given the despicable way we’ve treated the only Nobel Laureate born in Pakistan. Abdus Salam, on whom this story claims to be loosely based, was born in a poor village but had a genius brain. Even though he departed from his country in protest after the parliamentary bill declaring ahmadis as non-muslims in 1974, his love for his country seems to be a widely believed fact at this point. But even though the man won a Nobel prize in Physics, and did remarkable things in the field of science, Pakistan continues to have a complicated relationship with this remarkable man, seemingly purely because of his religious beliefs.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915;">I’d informed you that leaving for this new world was what I needed, what my dreams asked of me. But nothing about this place makes me believe I’ve done the right thing. I miss the village, the Khan House, our father, and I miss you.</i><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">The author claims that this story is loosely based on Salam’s life: his protagonist is a young boy from a small village in central Punjab who amazes everyone in the world of science with his genius and who eventually wins the Nobel Prize while living abroad. Factually, most of the bare bones of this story do seem to follow the trajectory of Salam’s life, especially since the author stated that he’d taken advantage of the research for a documentary that was being shot about Salam. “I piggy-backed off the research friends of mine did related to a documentary on the life of Abdus Salam. But I realised the story was so fascinating that it would make much more sense to write it as a fictitious novel,” the author </span><a href="https://tribune.com.pk/story/1920903/4-story-nobel-laureate-pakistan/" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px;">Said told</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;"> The Express Tribune. This documentary that he mentioned (and there can’t possibly be two of the same) has </span><a href="http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20191014-abdus-salam-the-muslim-science-genius-forgotten-by-history" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px;">recently been released</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">, and I’ve heard nothing but rave reviews about it. For this book, unfortunately, I can’t say the same.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915;">These wistful distances between Salim and his homeland began to swell. The fondness of his for Pureland, the one we spoke about so much, took on a magical aspect. It wasn’t just a homeland any more-it symbolized happiness, a sense of belonging.</i><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">I definitely give the author points for talking about a religious minority which others have literally been killed for talking about. But I can’t give him points for absolutely anything else, given the absolutely appalling lack of linguistic flair, the way the plot seems to meander about senselessly, or even the lack of emotion the characters manage to elicit. I cared for nothing and no one in the tale, least of all for Laila, a woman our hero Salim Agha leaves behind in Pureland (a very obvious reference to Pakistan) and whom he seems to feel is his life’s mission to win back. </span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">In fact, random side characters such as Salim Agha’s sex-expert brother managed to be more interesting than our protagonist and his desire to win back Laila, or his progress in the world of science. Even the set-up of the book (that of the assassin narrating Salim’s story to a suited-booted version of the reader) feels highly reminiscent of what Mohsin Hamid did in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, but to lesser effect.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915;">I see you’re a bit overdressed for this place. Please, take off your jacket, loosen that tie, it gets quite warm in here. I would put away that pen and notebook too; you won’t need them. Just listen.</i><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">Probably the saddest thing about the whole endeavor is that it had </span><span style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; font-weight: 600;">such possibility</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">. A fictionalized account of Abdus Salam’s life, with threads of magical realism, sounds like it could either have been a masterpiece, or a complete disaster. Unfortunately, in the case of Pureland, it was definitely the latter. Not funny, badly written, and completely lacking in characters worth rooting for, this book only gets one measly point for pure, unadulterated grit at having come into being. And no points for nothing else.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; font-weight: 600;">Not recommended.</span></span><br /></div></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; font-weight: 600;"><br /></span></span></div>Anum Shaharyarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07742790825147781762noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276671725093561311.post-46330873638082689322023-08-28T21:51:00.002+05:002023-08-28T22:02:59.658+05:00Of Possession and Potential: Mehak Khan's 'Jinns' was exciting until it wasn't<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white;"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEih0O_1xxcHtpmiSbz5x5NOxjqU-zedUmjXFFJaOifoCIPSycvtkZf5U5LX8lZGap2G1SCX_qnbveac2tZ2E9N0bjPdvZEktdE1KSDeN0gbdbPsta0iXLllPyGJQrAiXsz_ujl2M1mSrfC5skEXZDlfKbIYRR_Qxtzui5bWPM_l1LUYAIhkgbYzfsBpBw-R/s1351/Untitled.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="585" data-original-width="1351" height="139" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEih0O_1xxcHtpmiSbz5x5NOxjqU-zedUmjXFFJaOifoCIPSycvtkZf5U5LX8lZGap2G1SCX_qnbveac2tZ2E9N0bjPdvZEktdE1KSDeN0gbdbPsta0iXLllPyGJQrAiXsz_ujl2M1mSrfC5skEXZDlfKbIYRR_Qxtzui5bWPM_l1LUYAIhkgbYzfsBpBw-R/s320/Untitled.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Cover Art - Winter 2022 Issue</span></i></b></td></tr></tbody></table>I started out this story feeling
really excited, because the first few sentences told me immediately that if
nothing else, at least the writing carried promise. This happens sometimes,
when it’s possible to tell within a few lines whether the author can carry the
weight of a tale or not. Identifying competence in the written word, especially
in Pakistani fiction, is always a moment of excitement, because here is an
author worth following. And it helped that the story was based on a really
cool concept. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="background: white;">“The rules are quite clear,” wo whispers. “Woman falls
asleep under tree, jinn can enter. And the path is clear—through the woman’s
long hair. You seem to be woman, yet your hair…”</span><o:p></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white;">A girl sitting under a tree
and a jinn trying to occupy her body are tales literally every single female I
know heard growing up. Little girls encouraged to come inside immediately once
the Maghreb azaan was audible, women told not to open their tightly-bound braids when they’re
outside at night, or not sit under trees, or not venture into shaded,
branch-covered areas: all these rules and regulations stemmed from the same belief
that the feminine body somehow acted as a greater siren for the wandering jinn,
who would take the opportunity to hop, skim, and jump into the nearest female
vessel as soon as the sun set. I hadn’t seen this particular myth reflected in
literature yet, which is why the premise felt so new and interesting, and I
wanted to see where it would go. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="background: white;">“Dude are you a fuckboy or a jinn? What kind of trip
am I on? And are you going to possess me and throw me in a river or something?”<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white;">Unfortunately, I wasn’t too
impressed. The setting felt fantastical enough, and the premise carried potential,
but the execution was so boring. There was no suspense, no give and take, no
plot building worth tracking. What we did have was a mostly irritating, essentially
pointless conversation with dropped hints about characters in our protagonist’s
past that didn't amount to anything, and multiple usages of the words ‘dude’ and
‘man’ that made me roll my eyes. I think what I wanted was some old school
magic, a nefarious deal struck or ill intentions revealed and thwarted. The
sort of stories that draw you in and leave you feeling satisfied at the turn
around. Instead, what I got was pomp and conceit in the form of Kant and
Nietzche.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="background: white; border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">“Oh no, only you, the true Kantian subject
capable of ethical decision-making, able to hold the aesthetic of the sublime
douchebag atop your ego-ideal mountain, can have thoughts. Far be it for me to
have interiority, because </span></i><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit;"><span style="background: white; border: none windowtext 1.0pt; font-family: "inherit",serif; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;">Nietzsche </span></span></span><i><span style="background: white; border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0in; padding: 0in;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit;">said GOD IS DEAD—”</span></span><span style="background: white;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white;">I honestly believe that out
of the multiple Pakistani authors I have read, the only one who manages to get
away with making their stories weird and inexplicable is Usman T Malik, and
even he took his sweet time honing his craft before he perfected it. This was a
short story that seemed to carry a probability of greatness, but mostly
squandered it on meaningless rhapsodizing and a plotline that could have been
much more streamlined than it was. And honestly, it wouldn’t be a Tasavvur
story without at least one example of messed-up editing, so here we had one random
word written in the past tense while the rest of the story was firmly in the present. </span><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="background: white;">“Well?” wo spoke.<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white;">At this point, I’ve just
embraced it. Weakly edited stories with spelling mistakes, punctuation errors,
faults in tenses and combined adjectives, and other such problems are mostly
the norm for all pieces published in this South Asian anthology of writing. Who knows, maybe it’s one of their requirements.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white;">Given that this is the last Tasavvur
story I’m reviewing for now, having already read plenty of others over the past
few months, I’ve decided to make my peace with it. Overall, we had access to stories
that sometimes lead nowhere and sometimes carried the tinge of promise. Science
fiction and fantasy and the supernatural, all carried equal weight in this
online grouping of texts, and while some were good and some were bad, I just
really, really wish they would hire a better editor. </span><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p> </p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://tasavvurnama.com/jinns/" target="_blank">Jinns</a> by Mehak Khan </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">was published in Issue 001 (Winter 2022) of </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">Tasavvur, an</span><span style="font-family: verdana;"> online portal for South Asian writing. The remaining reviews for other Tasavvur stories by Pakistani authors can be found <a href="https://thedesiwritingguide.blogspot.com/search?q=tasavvur" target="_blank">here</a>.</span> </p>Anum Shaharyarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07742790825147781762noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276671725093561311.post-56835732457273506122023-08-22T03:48:00.001+05:002023-08-22T03:48:32.248+05:00Of Space and Slavery: Khizer Abbas's 'Ignition' presents an entertaining premise but doesn't really deliver<p><i><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjf6IayFc8FWxl7WsPqfRbUGKY3ekZIX1cL8_Oze_qPCPDB2Ua7vkWMmrsNctH6CZHpY5H_70wwz0LxI7Jgei0nfH97kV2HfUI3gKzvgkYf0yrAdGKr0hQe_qLm1FeJ9vCQlcTyW61C_3GRvO5myFwufubD8GNN-_hTsEhA8fiF7-n9QjB29iWEDpxDCUqB/s1351/Untitled.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="585" data-original-width="1351" height="139" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjf6IayFc8FWxl7WsPqfRbUGKY3ekZIX1cL8_Oze_qPCPDB2Ua7vkWMmrsNctH6CZHpY5H_70wwz0LxI7Jgei0nfH97kV2HfUI3gKzvgkYf0yrAdGKr0hQe_qLm1FeJ9vCQlcTyW61C_3GRvO5myFwufubD8GNN-_hTsEhA8fiF7-n9QjB29iWEDpxDCUqB/s320/Untitled.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Cover Art - Winter 2022 Issue</span></i></b></td></tr></tbody></table>I hurtle out of orbit, and burst into flames as soon
as I hit the atmosphere. Cruelly, I am ripped from slumber.</span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">One of the very interesting
things about science fiction is that there’s a certain suspension of disbelief
required in order to enjoy the story. Of course a lot of other genres already
ask this of us. Fantasy asks us to believe in magic, supernatural asks us to
believe in ghouls and ghosts, and even those with a closer connection to
reality like mystery can really push the boundaries of what’s plausible and
what’s not.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This story plays fast and
loose with the idea, with a pretty entertaining premise that I can’t mention
solely because it would be too big a spoiler to share. But that particular
entertaining bit comes near the very end, which meant I was quite bored at the
beginning, with the massive info-dumping and the lack of connection we feel
with our protagonist, Hadi. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">We had reached the station’s population capacity three
generations ago, and since then we had exceeded it a few times over.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Hadi lives on Station
Epimetheus, which encircles the moon and exists as a sort of subjugated mass of
humans controlled by another station a little further away in space named
Ananke. The lore goes that a mutiny led to Station Epimetheus being forced to
exist on the dark side of the moon by those on Ananke, and now all those living
on Epimetheus crunch numbers and clear debris from the space and mostly live a
life of servitude and depression. Hadi is one of the masses, with no family and
apparently very few friends, who likes clearing debris in the middle of the
vast expanse of space because it gives him freedom from the overpopulated
station and its inhabitants. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Honestly speaking, I have <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">no</i> idea what the author was trying to imply
by giving the stations these names. A quick google search told me that these
are references to Greek gods, Ananke as a personification of inevitability and
compulsion and Epimetheus representing hindsight. <span style="color: #202124;">The
names were too specific to be random, but I was so sleepy and honestly so bored
at the beginning that I just couldn’t be bothered to provide this story with
the analysis the author clearly hoped a reader would indulge in. That boredom was
further exacerbated by the hero’s apparent death, mentioned right at the
beginning. <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Screaming till the fire burns away the air in my
lungs, I die never knowing if it was worth it.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Dead in the first paragraph
is really not the right way to make anyone care about a story, unless the hero
comes back from death, in which case this would be zombies in space, which
could be a more interesting spin. Unfortunately, over here it was less
resuscitated corpses and more an error in editing. Since the hero ((skip the paragraph
to skip the spoiler) doesn’t actually die, a better sentence would have been ‘I
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">prepare to</i> die’, but of course at
this point I have just embraced the fact that all the writers on this
particular online compilation of stories are working with a complete paucity of
actual editorial insight, so we will have to make do with the sub-par writing
that we have.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">On its own, the story does
get interesting enough eventually, with a mysterious light in the darkness, a
competent female mechanic, and authority figures who completely deny
everything, leading our hero to be suspicious, as he rightly should be. Being
subjugated, and fighting against that subjugation is a story I can always get
behind, especially if our hero is alone in his struggles. Even though the
ending really does push the boundaries of what I’m willing to believe can
actually happen, it was still a pretty decent ending.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">“Maybe… Maybe they’ve
been lying to us about a lot of stuff, Ayesha. They’ve got us doing all their
work for them, and in exchange they send us what supplies they can spare, and
we’ve always just assumed that it’s the only way for either station to
function.”<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I think the author had the
bare bones idea of a good story, and never really managed to fulfill its
potential. Maybe if there was space to add more characters, or make us care
more about Hadi. Maybe if there were more words to add depth to the
circumstances, or a greater sense of involvement in each twist and turn. On the
surface, I’m a fan of the idea of desi science fiction, purely because it’s so
rare for me to read familiar names in fantastical settings, and this story
tries its hardest to produce an interesting twist. Even forgiving the really
weird spacing between paragraphs and lack of understanding of tenses in some
scenes, the unpolished writing and the awkward phrasing in some places, there
is still a little entertainment, so while I wouldn’t jump up and down to
recommend this story, maybe this is an author to keep an eye on.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://tasavvurnama.com/ignition/" target="_blank">Ignition</a> by Khizer Abbas </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">was published in Issue 001 (Winter 2022) of </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">Tasavvur, an</span><span style="font-family: verdana;"> online portal for South Asian writing. The remaining reviews for other Tasavvur stories by Pakistani authors can be found <a href="https://thedesiwritingguide.blogspot.com/search?q=tasavvur" target="_blank">here</a>.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></p>Anum Shaharyarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07742790825147781762noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276671725093561311.post-54469952193756937632023-06-22T21:22:00.001+05:002023-07-19T21:07:05.766+05:00Of Mothers and Magic: Nur Nasreen Ibrahim's 'Picture of a Dying World' was a complicated, entertaining mess<p><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPL0fUI8JZY6tsYgMafSYjF8F9sUhOlAK_dKseJsRoSAT3892woBS6co-RL0nl1K9BWBmlP0QrAmtMA6xLUv65i0Hs80LkDx8Pq8wprBmAK-3cnUseT-x0pnrJqM0C7lKDdcC9EC7oumF-UKI0-OSVZlmXTqytAJvlBUVWPbfArJ61PAJ6rDHXofYkrqoW/s300/Winter%202023.png" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="185" data-original-width="300" height="185" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPL0fUI8JZY6tsYgMafSYjF8F9sUhOlAK_dKseJsRoSAT3892woBS6co-RL0nl1K9BWBmlP0QrAmtMA6xLUv65i0Hs80LkDx8Pq8wprBmAK-3cnUseT-x0pnrJqM0C7lKDdcC9EC7oumF-UKI0-OSVZlmXTqytAJvlBUVWPbfArJ61PAJ6rDHXofYkrqoW/s1600/Winter%202023.png" width="300" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>Cover Art - Winter 2023</b></span></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I’m not sure whether it’s
this particular group of short stories that are making no sense, or if my
reading comprehension has taken a serious hit in recent days, but this is the
third story published in this online collection of South Asian writing that
refused to make much sense to me. I read and read and kept reading even when
things got confusing, up until we came to a point where I realized I had
absolutely no idea what was actually happening.</span></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The morning a tree appeared outside my window, I received
a phone call informing me my mother was dying.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">We start this short story by
being introduced to a heroine who is living far away from her parents, and
happier for it, for all intents and purposes. Stories of children living away
from their parents have been hitting me a lot more recently, given my own move
miles away from my own family, and so I always read such tales with a wary sort
of dread, aware that the smallest moment of empathy is capable of tipping me
over into the maudlin and the teary-eyed. But this story doesn’t connect with
the emotions so much as with the freaky, bringing about a dead mother, lost
children, and magically appearing machinery, as if the land itself is growing
vehicles from the earth.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I refused to listen to them then, even after I heard
from Mashal amma how the land was revolting against its own nature. <o:p></o:p></span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Truth be told, I’m sure this
story has a lot of potential for analysis. It carries with it that idea of
multiple meanings, layers hidden behind another, but I’ll be honest and admit
that when I was reading it I was looking for some simple, pure entertainment
and not for an exercise in mental gymnastics. So much of our reading experience
is dictated not by the tale itself, but our own moods at the moment, our
desires for complexity or a fluffy, mindless diversion, even the time of the
day in which we are sitting down with the book. When commuting I prefer
fanfiction, and while waiting for the tea to boil I read articles. The thickest
books are saved for those hours before sleeping when I know I won’t be
interrupted and can really sink into the story. Carrying on in that vein, I can
tell that I didn’t read this story in the mindset where I was ready for it, and
that really soured my whole experience of it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But the queen of the night opening its eyes in the
morning, the moving trees, the tractor quietly appearing overnight, the
shifting water, I could not explain.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">There were definitely
elements that I wish had been fleshed out more. The complicated relationship
between the parents, the idea of the mother speaking from beyond her grave,
even the elements of abuse and sexual assault that were part of the story could
have done with a bit more elaboration. I know that a lot of stories and authors
tend to leave things implied between the lines, hoping the reader will see
things that are only hinted it, and sometimes this can be a fun exercise, the
finding and unwinding of clues left clearly in the text to figure out what the
author left unstated. But like I said, I was in the mood for the in-my-face facts,
the neatly tied up story with all the endings explained and all the clues
unearthed in a proper manner. Thus the sort of implicit, disguised narrative
that ran parallel to our story remained pretty elusive to me, which reduced my
enjoyment of the whole thing. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I explained away the late nights and the early
mornings where women materialized from my father’s study, covering their heads,
muttering about being asked to help him with something, wiping away tears,
adjusting their shalwar, hiding the bruises on their cheeks.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">What kept me reading, even
after things stopped making sense, was that there was some good writing. The
bare bones of a command over the language is definitely visible here, in
multiple sentences that spoke of eloquence in their simplicity. Maybe with another
subject matter in the author’s hands, and a clearer, more engaged mind from me,
I could read a story by this author in the future and actually enjoy it. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I wanted this rotating new world to spin faster, this
river to submerge us, these dying trees to take over, and my father to die with
his farm.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">There were obviously a few
editing errors, misplaced commas, colons missing from places where they should
be, and a lack of hyphens from places where two words were presented as one.
I’ve now come to terms with the fact that the editors and authors working for
and writing for this online collection of literary pieces are engaged in some
sort of prank war with each other, where the editors keep messing up and the
authors keep looking in the other direction, pretending at nonchalance.
Personally, if I ever wrote a story which was put up for the world to see, I’d
go back and re-check it a million times to make sure there were no errors in
it, but I guess this is what they mean when they say we are all strangers to
each other. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Red flowers dotting the sumbal tree that had crept in
from my father’s farm in Punjab, flashed like a warning.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Overall, a good enough tale,
if a little complicated in its intended meaning. I enjoyed it even when I was
lost in it, which is a high enough praise when you feel no connection to the
characters whatsoever. This author goes on my list of authors to follow for
future works. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">“You children think that by leaving you can forget all
your responsibilities. You aren’t better than us because you left.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://tasavvurnama.com/picture-of-a-dying-world/" target="_blank">Picture of a Dying World</a> by Nur Nasreen Ibrahim </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">was published in Issue 005 (Winter 2023) of </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">Tasavvur, an</span><span style="font-family: verdana;"> online portal for South Asian writing. The remaining reviews for other Tasavvur stories by Pakistani authors can be found <a href="https://thedesiwritingguide.blogspot.com/search?q=tasavvur" target="_blank">here</a>.</span></p>Anum Shaharyarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07742790825147781762noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276671725093561311.post-10567686642546182812023-06-19T19:05:00.003+05:002023-06-19T19:39:33.876+05:00Of Grief and Gluttony: Marium Taufeeq's 'The Sadness Eater' is good, fun storytelling<p><i><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcoliIinhnwv1h8v0LP-Kg5M_0ATrWZSj31uhuKmEMcGRBXt8nBSEE51I5RLssRUKvCImPyDc2mU6roxwxMUE7YAPkTPHdmGFKcb2PkT3u4Ark6sAPTSwK4NnJZIPE7SSzzYaOy1IGCvv_Sefq9ETCnkiCD4VhFPecsZhKVs80rtfHXIFOJUGMG7e1Byda/s2560/Bring-Your-Own-Spoon-scaled.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="2560" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcoliIinhnwv1h8v0LP-Kg5M_0ATrWZSj31uhuKmEMcGRBXt8nBSEE51I5RLssRUKvCImPyDc2mU6roxwxMUE7YAPkTPHdmGFKcb2PkT3u4Ark6sAPTSwK4NnJZIPE7SSzzYaOy1IGCvv_Sefq9ETCnkiCD4VhFPecsZhKVs80rtfHXIFOJUGMG7e1Byda/s320/Bring-Your-Own-Spoon-scaled.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>Cover art - Spring 2022 issue</b></span></td></tr></tbody></table>There was once a girl who could eat people’s sadness
away.</span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Now <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">this</i> was a good story. What fun, the world building, the theatrics,
the idea of someone being able to physically ingest the
feeling of sadness. There was a fair bit of leaning into the magical realism
genre, which is really, honestly not my thing, but this story might well be the
exception to that particular rule. Because while it involved magic pretty
heavily, it also kept alive a human element to the story, a characterization
that kept me involved. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">They would tell her their stories. And she would stoop
over their sadnesses, kiss them, cry with them, bundle them into her arms and
press them against her cheek.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Then she would eat them all.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The story goes that there is
once a girl who can eat sadness, and people come from far and wide to give her
their grief so she can take that burden from them. But all that changes when a
king comes and commands the girl to eat his sorrow. When she refuses, he
captures her and forces her to live in a tower in his kingdom, where she’s
treated as a novelty figure, paraded out for the service and entertainment of
the citizens, her powers put on display like some kind of paltry magic trick
for the masses. And the girl suffers through the debasement and the humiliation
until one day she can’t take it anymore, and she vomits all the sadness out. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The pool of vomit stared back at her. And it grew—as
if bidden to, by some strange kind of magic, into a Thing with several dripping
appendages and two sets of saucer like eyes.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The idea of a creature made
from vomit, even magical grief vomit, is pretty gruesome, but you have to admit
that the author’s imagination is really taking us on a wild journey here. I was
completely engrossed, even with all the weirdness and the twists and turns this
story was taking. We go from vomit monsters to magical trees to river and sky
spirits and on and on, and I enjoyed all of it very much, even when it stopped
making sense, even when it was clear that the author was just creating things
up out of nowhere. There’s no doubt that there were some parts that were
pretentious and overdone, and some that could have done better with a more
restrained writing style, but at the end of the day I was entertained, so I
give it full marks just for that. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I sit on a bench by the platform, and think about
things that are tyrannical, and things that are lovely, and things that are sad
and joyous or both.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I think the only flaw I could
identify in the writing was the sudden, jarring presence of the narrator shoved
into the tale itself, with the use of a first person point of view where a
third person story-teller would have sufficed. I genuinely think this story
would have been best served by having an invisible, omniscient narrator. The
usage of ‘I’ and ‘you’ ruined what was a perfectly good story, because all it
meant was that the reader would suddenly be addressed in sentences that should
have stayed purely expository. By using conversational phrases such as ‘by the
way’, there was a sudden shift from the formality of the storytelling to a
rather more informal, casual tone that ruined the elegance of the writing
itself. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The King’s bald head began to sweat beneath his
headdress, which was encrusted, by the way, in jewels the names of which no one
had ever heard, and layered over with gauze and silk and so many different
things that it appeared as misshapen a mass as his kingly highness.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">There was also, of course,
one random break right in the middle of the story where a sentence stopped in
the middle and jumped to the next line for no apparent reason. You can’t even
excuse it as artistic license or a creative decision taken because there was no
actual reason for that break to occur. The only explanation is that someone is
bad at editing, or someone is even worse at layouts. At this point, having read
<a href="https://thedesiwritingguide.blogspot.com/2023/06/of-mughals-and-myths-fatima-taqvis.html" target="_blank">multiple</a> <a href="https://thedesiwritingguide.blogspot.com/2023/06/of-speaking-and-sorrow-nazuk-iftikhar.html" target="_blank">other</a> <a href="https://thedesiwritingguide.blogspot.com/2023/06/of-vengeance-and-very-bad-editing.html" target="_blank">stories</a> on this online platform for South Asian writing,
I’ve come to embrace the fact that all these authors are being heavily shortchanged
by editors and layout designers who clearly have some vendetta against every
poor soul who has the misfortune to have their works published here. That can
possible be the only justification for why these poor authors and their works
are being treated in so cavalier a manner, and why random stops occur where they really shouldn't. </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">The girl curled up
inside the Sadness Thing’s stomach, which was warm and gurgled gently. She tied
its tongue tightly around her waist, pressed her head snug into the Sadness</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Thing’s innerbelly.
The walls inside were lined with years of silk, and months of mourning. She
touched them gently. She kissed them goodnight.<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Overall, this was good, fun
storytelling, even if a lot of it was vague. I really think this author could
do great things if given proper guidance. This is the
barebones of what you call a fun idea, and the possibility definitely exists
for more brilliance. This goes on the ‘Recommended’ list.</span><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://tasavvurnama.com/the-sadness-eater/" target="_blank">The Sadness Eater</a> by Marium Taufeeq </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">was published in Issue 002 (Spring 2022) of </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">Tasavvur, an</span><span style="font-family: verdana;"> online portal for South Asian writing. The remaining reviews for other Tasavvur stories by Pakistani authors can be found <a href="https://thedesiwritingguide.blogspot.com/search?q=tasavvur" target="_blank">here</a>.</span></span></p>Anum Shaharyarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07742790825147781762noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276671725093561311.post-81146830192151317612023-06-16T19:18:00.001+05:002023-06-16T19:18:52.286+05:00Of Cyborgs and Close-minded Societies: Hamza Sarfraz's 'Being a Putla' tries to introduce something cool but ultimately fails<p><i><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQ4xfaPsji4oQ45MMX696ekJmQ9wlmgM-y8yAiDcPnaRdGmxKES9D9u-KPnuiroRNFpEsQuIIcOmqYBxMNt8RDEYLR09El4AOZKN47qK2qnsySbfZ3CbqjKZShmU12CuCqeWos3ba-Xp_aFEI8lvk0s247_JoXfcoP_IXkGiPCJWJrVeVKASheLWemFw/s2560/Issue-003-hi-res-Cover-by-Ruwangi-w-Logomark-scaled.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="2560" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQ4xfaPsji4oQ45MMX696ekJmQ9wlmgM-y8yAiDcPnaRdGmxKES9D9u-KPnuiroRNFpEsQuIIcOmqYBxMNt8RDEYLR09El4AOZKN47qK2qnsySbfZ3CbqjKZShmU12CuCqeWos3ba-Xp_aFEI8lvk0s247_JoXfcoP_IXkGiPCJWJrVeVKASheLWemFw/s320/Issue-003-hi-res-Cover-by-Ruwangi-w-Logomark-scaled.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b style="font-family: "Authentic Sans", sans-serif; font-size: x-small; font-style: italic; text-align: start;">Cover Art – Summer 2022 Issue</b></td></tr></tbody></table>Having technology embedded in your body doesn’t make
you less of a human, and yet, at the same time, it doesn’t make your more than
a human either. You remain as you always are. A flawed being, restricted by the
bounds of the society you live in. </span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I think the nicest thing I
could say about this story is that I wish someone else had written it. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">By which I mean to say that
it’s a good story, a great one even. It’s got lots of interesting things going
on: a future in which humans become cyborgs to treat medical problems, the
slurs and dehumanization that comes with such a reality, and the guy who has
gone through the procedure tasked with convincing other patients that it’s
worth the hassle. I’m not sure how much of this is regurgitated sci-fi from existing
books, given that my exposure to the genre is so limited, but it felt
interesting enough to read. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">For five years now, I have been assigned the tiring
and ultimately annoying job of convincing hopeless patients that getting
cybernetic implants on their bodies is their only solution.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Adan Jaleel is our young
protagonist, a person who has a full cybernetic body after a tragic accident at
a young age. He is routinely called in to the hospital where more patients come
in for the treatment, standing in as an example of a successful surgery, and
someone who can attest to the fact that life doesn’t change after such a
change. Of course, all his reassurances are completely false, as proven by his
own lived experience, where he faces insults, covert glances, and the strong,
undeniable feeling that he just doesn’t quite fit in like the other humans do. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I couldn’t but help feel bad when my entire existence
was misidentified, and due to what? The ignorance of people who do not
understand science? The casual disregard for humans like me who had no option
but to make this choice for their bodies?<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Adan had the possibility of
being a very complex, very fascinating character. I can’t actually remember
whether I’ve read a story from the point of view of the cyborg before (see
earlier sentence about my limited interest in science fiction), and the whole
concept of being less of a human because you have machine parts keeping you
alive seems to be rife with potential. Unfortunately, the writing in the story,
well. It’s kind of boring.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="background: white;">He had called me a Putla. Ouch.</span></i><span style="background: white;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Surely it’s weird that a
narrative, even one which includes a first person perspective, hass ‘Ouch’ or ‘Ugh’ as one
complete sentence right in the middle of sentences of longer length. I know that it’s an
artistic choice to write this way, but reading is also a subjective experience,
which means one can decide to like it or not, and to me it just felt weird and gimmicky. But it’s not even the randomly interspersed interjections that
were the real problem. It was just that the writing was simply not polished
enough to be published. Maybe an editor’s sharp eye could have whipped it into
shape a little more, except clearly the editor over here wasn’t even checking
for formatting or correct comma usage, much less taking the time to work on
developmental edits. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I would have to convince another person that I
was not a Putla’and neither would they be if they agreed to go through this
procedure.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">An extra space after that fourth word, completely
visible and highly frustrating to the editorial eye, as well as an
apostrophe where there should be a comma. What kind of mistakes are these? How
is no one spotting them? That first quote at the top had a 'your' where there should have been a 'you'. As we go on in the story, we’ll more find misspelled words, commas where they shouldn’t be, and the right punctuation marks missing from places where for all
intents and purposes they should be present. I’ve been complaining about the
bad editing in stories printed in this online catalogue of South Asian writing <a href="https://thedesiwritingguide.blogspot.com/2023/06/of-speaking-and-sorrow-nazuk-iftikhar.html" target="_blank">for</a> <a href="https://thedesiwritingguide.blogspot.com/2023/06/of-vengeance-and-very-bad-editing.html" target="_blank">a</a> <a href="https://thedesiwritingguide.blogspot.com/2023/06/of-mughals-and-myths-fatima-taqvis.html" target="_blank">while</a>, and this story
is just one amongst the many that have managed to disappoint me in how
unprofessional they are, how unready to be presented to the reader. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I clenched my fingers again, and it was then I
realized that in the silence that had followed, my hands had made the whirring
sound that disturbs people so much. Ugh. <o:p></o:p></span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Set in Lahore in 2060, the
rest of the world building was super ambiguous and utterly disappointing. The
story could have been set absolutely anywhere, within any vague moment of time
in the future, which meant that the location of Lahore and the year 2060 didn’t
actually have any effect on the story itself. But I was prepared to forgive
that if the characters or the writing would just blow me away, and while the
bare bones of the idea itself felt compelling and worth creating a narrative
around, ultimately both the plot and the writing itself felt amateurish and not
fully utilized. So while I can appreciate what the story was trying to do, and
I am intrigued by the idea itself, I’d say the execution left something to be
desired. </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Overall, i</span></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;">n the list of science fiction written by desi authors, I think one
can give this a solid miss.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://tasavvurnama.com/being-a-putla/" target="_blank">Being a Putla</a> by Hamza Sarfraz </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">was published in Issue 003 (Summer 2022) of </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">Tasavvur, an</span><span style="font-family: verdana;"> online portal for South Asian writing. The remaining reviews for other Tasavvur stories by Pakistani authors can be found <a href="https://thedesiwritingguide.blogspot.com/search?q=tasavvur" target="_blank">here</a>.</span></p>Anum Shaharyarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07742790825147781762noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276671725093561311.post-12557012578287601942023-06-13T07:25:00.003+05:002023-06-13T07:28:18.781+05:00Of Mughals and Myths: Fatima Taqvi's 'The Third Feather' blends history and fantasy together in cool but confusing ways<p><i><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></span></i></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-pcH-mZaUWzbGBkRfx-1LjzVrum5OTX4aoKC-Ci1mqUILA9-i3aS1iFiHLVdzZa8CzOQ2VVdzxwyrqLAz-PgJJE1Y97C0txE4F_z_5OIanBuCy-S38VuCfX_noXghTERWp5hwUDWk-6YQQ8FCSy9bdmW1krX6NNK3jx6L7l9_Atw3fIlUaG4bYdRCaw/s1351/Untitled.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="585" data-original-width="1351" height="139" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-pcH-mZaUWzbGBkRfx-1LjzVrum5OTX4aoKC-Ci1mqUILA9-i3aS1iFiHLVdzZa8CzOQ2VVdzxwyrqLAz-PgJJE1Y97C0txE4F_z_5OIanBuCy-S38VuCfX_noXghTERWp5hwUDWk-6YQQ8FCSy9bdmW1krX6NNK3jx6L7l9_Atw3fIlUaG4bYdRCaw/s320/Untitled.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b style="font-family: "Authentic Sans", sans-serif; font-size: x-small; font-style: italic; text-align: start;">Cover Art – Winter 2022 Issue</b></td></tr></tbody></table><i><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It wasn’t long before Jiji burned the first feather.</span></span></i><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Sometimes I read a story and I simply have no idea what it
means or what the ending is or what it wants to say. This is one of those
stories. Granted, it started off simple enough, but then it veered into a
direction that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I think</i> I understood?
A little? Somewhat?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">No. Not really.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The starting was clear enough. A woman has magical feathers.
She burns the feathers to get wishes. All of this is introduced to us in a
really cool setting: that of the early sixteenth century subcontinent, with our
heroine and her husband on the run along with Emperor Humayun, who is fleeing
after his military defeat at the hands of Sher Shah Suri. I loved the fact that
Amerkot Fort (which I always read at Umerkot in most history lessons) figured
so prominently right at the beginning, to give us a sense of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">where</i> we were, and the question of<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> when</i> exactly in history we were
standing was also answered pretty quickly, with Humayun’s arrival at the courts
of Rana Prasad Singh Sodha, asking for refuge. Any student of history, or
anyone who can do a quick Google search, will be able to locate this moment in
our past as 1542, knowing it as the place where Humayun’s wife Hamida Bano
Begum gave birth to the young Mughal Emperor Akbar.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The author does introduce all these people, these famous
Mughal characters entering the story around our heroine, who grows up on a farm
and is meant for a boring, mundane life until war arrives and her father, in
his desperation to save his daughter, marries her off to a warrior. As part of
Sher Shah Suri’s army, her husband is part of the group of soldiers who are
meant to kill Humayun, but instead he saves the Emperor’s life, and is thus on
the run with the royal entourage, hoping for the Emperor’s favour once he
eventually succeeds. And to help her husband achieve this goal, Jiji has found
a solution. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Three golden feathers given from a mythical bird, in
exchange for a life saved.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background: white;">“You saved one of us, expecting nothing in return, not
knowing who we are. So when you wake, take three of my feathers. And any time
you need help, you must burn one feather and make a wish. And I will make it
so.”</span><o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This blending of fantasy and historical fiction was well
done, and something I really enjoyed in the story, even if some of it was too
weird for me to stomach. The Simurgh as a mythical creature is one I’ve
encountered in other stories as well, and I’ve always wished they would be a
more visible part of the narrative. Even here, I wished it had been given a
greater amount of visible, so to speak, especially since the moments in which
it does come, the author goes a bit overboard trying to describe it as being a
creature of myth and shadows, and blurs the line between fiction and magical
realism. To be fair, magic realism and fantasy are mostly related genres,
cousins at best, but I prefer the difference be starkly visible, and so was a
bit disgruntled when things became a bit too wishy-washy to be believable. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It is like a veil has been removed, a line has been
crossed, between what needs to be believed to keep life running, and the awful,
terrible reality that is its backbone. And the result was the stuff of
nightmares.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">However, it helps that we don’t stay in that realm of the vague
and the wonderous for long. The story’s main focus is on the birth of Jiji’s
son at the same time as that of Akbar, the next Mughal Emperor, and Jiji’s
status as Akbar’s main milk-mother. The boys growing up together, Jiji’s
closeness with Akbar’s mother, the resentment of the other milk mothers, and
her husband’s ambitions for bigger and better things form the main part of the
story.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">“Sorceress,” Jiji hears someone hiss. She snaps her
head up immediately but cannot tell which of the resentful faces around her has
uttered the accusation.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">On its own, the story is an interesting one, and something I’d
recommend to a friend. It’s got intrigue and political machinations, it’s got
complex characters with conflicting intentions and there seems to be an attempt
to move the plot from point A to point B. I didn’t much care what happened to
the characters, which one could count as a flaw in the storytelling, but I was
sufficiently entertained, which is sometimes all one can ask for. The only
visible flaw was that horrible, unbelievably amateurish editing. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background: white;">Akbar takes his leave. He embraces Jiji and they
sobbed, consoling each other.</span><o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">There were numerous tense issues that seemed to repeatedly
occur, in a manner that makes me wonder whether the author, editor, or publisher
have actually understood what the present, past, and future tense are meant to
imply. It can’t be that hard, surely, to write a whole story in a language, and
print it, and publish it, and not know that when one begins a sentence in a
particular tense, one ends it the same way (unless we’re indulging in a
particularly complicated brand of artistic flair and creative license, I
assume). Beyond this problem, there was an obvious double space issue that
should have been checked. Commas snuck in places where they shouldn’t be. Even
the word ‘who’ was used when it should have been replaced by ‘whom’, and while
I’m usually very forgiving of this particular error in common conversations,
given most people’s obvious and understandable confusion regarding this
particular literary rule, surely published stories can be subjected to a
greater degree of scrutiny. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But after reading a fair few of this published crap, maybe
not.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Honestly, most of this story felt like I was reading
something by Usman <span style="background: white;">Tanveer Malik, which is a
compliment because while Malik’s stories have the same weird and confusing
vibe, they also manage to entertain. The only difference was that his works
always have a veneer of polish to them that was missing here, but that could
possibly be nurtured, given time and effort and, of course, a better editor. The setting was a great idea, the using of Mughal characters was even more so, and there was definite potential here, if only it had been cultivated with a bit more grace. On
the whole, good stuff, but probably not the author’s best work. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">A bird does not give milk. Surely not even one with
paws and a cat body. Yet this one did. And after she imbibed her milk, she
threw up. And then she drank some more, heard her father’s flute playing, and
her mother, whom she had never known, telling her a story. A story about a
cosmic creature, flying against a sky that is not of this earth, but from an
eternally silent blackness. Tasked with the tending of a tree from which
budding worlds emerge. </span><o:p></o:p></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://tasavvurnama.com/the-third-feather/" target="_blank">The Third Feather</a> by Fatima Taqvi </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">was published in Issue 001 (Winter 2022) of </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">Tasavvur, an</span><span style="font-family: verdana;"> online portal for South Asian writing. The remaining reviews for other Tasavvur stories by Pakistani authors can be found <a href="https://thedesiwritingguide.blogspot.com/search?q=tasavvur" target="_blank">here</a>.</span></p>Anum Shaharyarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07742790825147781762noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276671725093561311.post-63898170840635846982023-06-08T19:05:00.001+05:002023-06-08T19:05:39.871+05:00Of Vengeance and Very Bad Editing: Murtaza Mohsin's 'Thus Gone' deserved a better proofreader<p><i><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitYGQJw5ADt96HJlf9fxf7MvWCv5Ob_NxQsT3v8xtr3PanAdwhoNivs6dFy6gfwmmX8ddzRhnnPcFuzAV29ik-XeC3UxOj2MnFzIuhrf30oaxskNdRb8Ll9EWSVcTxNCuUtQhY4A0czgqKQ-GkqPDQem4CUWqYwRRq1SCGbOBV2JPdubHjAk-z8bk2Hg/s2560/Issue-003-hi-res-Cover-by-Ruwangi-w-Logomark-scaled.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="2560" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitYGQJw5ADt96HJlf9fxf7MvWCv5Ob_NxQsT3v8xtr3PanAdwhoNivs6dFy6gfwmmX8ddzRhnnPcFuzAV29ik-XeC3UxOj2MnFzIuhrf30oaxskNdRb8Ll9EWSVcTxNCuUtQhY4A0czgqKQ-GkqPDQem4CUWqYwRRq1SCGbOBV2JPdubHjAk-z8bk2Hg/s320/Issue-003-hi-res-Cover-by-Ruwangi-w-Logomark-scaled.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Authentic Sans", sans-serif; text-align: start;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>Cover Art – Summer 2022 Issue</b></span></span></td></tr></tbody></table>This is where it begins, where he discovers the
meaning of life. </span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It probably didn’t help that
I began rolling my eyes within a few lines of this story. It also didn’t help
that I promptly managed to forget each and every detail within the two days between
when I read it and when I finally sat down to review it. If that doesn’t say
something about how unremarkable it was, then I don’t know how else to explain it.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Written from the point of
view of a killer watching his prey through a rifle’s scope, the story had all
the possibility of intrigue and action, but it sadly didn’t deliver on pretty
much any of its promises. I’m not a huge fan of science fiction, which means I
haven’t read a lot of it and am not as jaded as other readers when it comes to
the tropes of the genre, but even <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">I</b>
felt let down at how poor the world building was, how lacking the exposition
and how weak the entire premise. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I’ve torn my being to shreds, crossing gorges of time
and space, to hunt this midnight moment down.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It wasn’t even just that I
felt no investment in the character’s purpose or the story’s arc, it was also
that the writing was poetic and flowery in all the wrong ways. I’m usually the
first to staunchly defend purple prose even if a plot is weak, because there
can be something so appealing about pretty writing and extravagant sentences,
but over here most of the dramatics made me yawn, or want to skip ahead to the
next scene of consequence. Sadly, there were honestly not many worth counting. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Guilt is a useless weight and it’s time to free myself,
perhaps to join my Sara. I will annihilate myself with my own weapon just as
she was.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background: white;">The problem with short
stories, I’ve repeatedly said, is that they have such a short amount of words
in which the author needs to create a connection with a reader. Which means
that it takes a very expert touch to allow us to feel the grief or regret that
a character might feel, to connect with it and thus feel interested in the
outcome of the actions they take as a result of that particular emotion. In
this case, our main character is clearly motivated by emotions I didn’t much
care for, and so felt almost zero investment in what was going to happen next.
And of course, none of that was helped at all by the godawful editing of the
story itself. </span><span style="background: white; color: black; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I tilt my head uncomfortably, my wife is right as
usual.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">That’s two sentences. There
should be a full stop there. A semi-colon, if we must, but a comma is just
egregious to an uncomfortable degree. I’m okay with spelling mistakes and
grammatical issues in texts if they happen once or twice. As an editor
myself, I know that no matter how many times you check any written material,
there is bound to be a mistake. I’ve seen books go through five, ten, fifteen
rounds of edits by multiple people, myself included, and still end up with a
question mark where there should have been a colon. Still, a short story is not
only a shorter piece of text to edit, there are some mistakes that are just too
obvious to be missed.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I’ve taken so many drugs, stimulators, inhibitors and
emplacers all my life (cCan’t remember much of Radeshi Port) but even I never
dared touch the one called Buddha’s Smile.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">My jaw dropped at that extra
‘c’ in this sentence. Even a cursory copy and paste into Microsoft Word would
give you a squiggly red line telling you that this was, in fact, a wrongly
typed word. I’m not sure how such sub-par editing happened to occur, and am
honestly even more disappointed for the author, who surely doesn’t deserve
having his text treated so carelessly. There was even a random indent of 0.5
inches for one single paragraph smack dab in the middle of the story, and then strictly
left alignment for the rest. Who in the name of all that is holy is responsible
for this formatting? <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Honestly, this wasn’t one of
Tasavvur’s best picks. The story was okay, the editing was worse, and even the
surprise twist at the end wasn’t enough to retain my interest. I’m now going to
have to find some good science fiction to cleanse my palate, and hope that the
next desi story I read tries at least a little bit harder to keep me hooked. </span></span><span style="background: white; color: black; font-family: "Arial",sans-serif; font-size: 15.0pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://tasavvurnama.com/rain-in-the-potholes/" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #340b9c; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">Thus Gone</a> by Murtaza Mohsin </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">was published in Issue 003 (Summer 2022) of </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">Tasavvur, an</span><span style="font-family: verdana;"> online portal for South Asian writing. The remaining reviews for other Tasavvur stories by Pakistani authors can be found <a href="https://thedesiwritingguide.blogspot.com/search?q=tasavvur" target="_blank">here</a>. </span></p>Anum Shaharyarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07742790825147781762noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276671725093561311.post-88002767856744426012023-06-06T00:37:00.005+05:002023-06-08T19:06:46.507+05:00Of Speaking and Sorrow: Nazuk Iftikhar Rao's 'Word Rations' has a good plot but poor execution<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i><span style="background: white;"><span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEha3oot8uoNtGZ4eC0dp-gce1bPcM2-kvgOHZ8Mk3Olu4ktU8xy1eAQspgeOWpq8OwSKHIKM3BXG-1Y9e_QdPRLGqU9CruZSi_6dGriFUn8FxNJ0hlPBmu-u_cItqQLxeibRzMqIhzwMcBdh4OXaUSJt5z0zhgdfKupJiSwXa7GQ-TwrfV9h3wPt6gSIQ/s300/Winter%202023.png" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="185" data-original-width="300" height="197" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEha3oot8uoNtGZ4eC0dp-gce1bPcM2-kvgOHZ8Mk3Olu4ktU8xy1eAQspgeOWpq8OwSKHIKM3BXG-1Y9e_QdPRLGqU9CruZSi_6dGriFUn8FxNJ0hlPBmu-u_cItqQLxeibRzMqIhzwMcBdh4OXaUSJt5z0zhgdfKupJiSwXa7GQ-TwrfV9h3wPt6gSIQ/w320-h197/Winter%202023.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>Cover Art - Winter 2023 Issue</b></span></td></tr></tbody></table></div>Words, even before they were restricted, were hard to
access for me.</span></span></i></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i><span style="background: white;"><span><br /></span></span></i><span style="background: white;"><span>I really liked the idea of
this story, even if I didn’t much care for the execution. The idea of being
able to use only a certain number of words for a certain time period might not
be the most original in terms of plot, but the possibilities of treatment are
endless. And as someone who is overly-verbose both in her speaking as well as
in her writing, I like having all the words at my disposal, preferably in
multiple languages. So while there were certain parts of this story that I felt
myself get pulled in to, ultimately it didn’t truly deliver, didn’t pull me in
as much as I wanted it to.</span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background: white;"><span><br /></span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="background: white;"><span>I have learned to manage my rations allotted to me
quite reasonably now. I learned how to add meaning in my silences and pauses
around you, I learned to pace them sparingly throughout the time we were
together.</span></span></i></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="background: white;"><span><br /></span></span></i><span style="background: white;"><span>What makes it harder to get
pulled in is that so much of the plot is left unclear. Our heroine is living in
a world where words are restricted, and there’s someone she loves with whom she
spends time in between… doing what exactly? What happened before and after? Why
did the word restrictions happen? Where’s the rest of her family? What’s
happening in the wider world out there? I’m usually one of those people who
like to focus a lot on characterization and very little on world-building, but
there has to be at least <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">a little</i> of
it to give some weight to the story. Over here, it mostly felt like the writer
had a good idea for what they wanted the characters to go through, and spent
all of zero seconds thinking the concept out before starting with the story.</span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background: white;"><span><br /></span></span><span style="background: white;"><span>Mostly what that means is
that the story meanders through past and present in a way that doesn’t make
much sense, and leaves us feeling a distinct lack of investment in what
happens. I wanted to care, even when we found out that the person the heroine
loves has a dead brother, killed because he was a poet. I wanted to feel the
feelings the story was trying to evoke in me, but most of me was too busy
trying to understand why writing was a problem. Were written words also banned?
How was the heroine reading newspapers? Was I not getting the story properly?
Was there something I had missed? The dead poet made for an interesting side
note, but it was such a small, mostly untouched side note that all I felt was
disappointment at the missed opportunity to create a wonderful narrative.</span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background: white;"><span><br /></span></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="background: white;"><span>He was a poet. Poets should have words. But they said
he was disrespecting their religion. And he had to die.</span></span></i></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="background: white;"><span><br /></span></span></i><span style="background: white;"><span>I similarly loved the idea of
music and singing that briefly made a cameo in the plot before once again getting whisked away into the ether of disjointed storytelling. There is a
History of Sound Museum, and the heroine listens to Iqbal Bano, but beyond
these vague recollections, there isn’t much, or enough, weight given to the
idea of singing and how word restrictions could affect them. For years people
have been playing music and listening to it, dedicating lives and careers and
huge sums of money to the words that accompany symphonies of sound. So this
particular plot point, rife with potential, made me interested, only for my
excitement to fizzle out soon afterwards.</span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background: white;"><span><br /> </span></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="background: white;"><span>I remember the tune briefly, hummed by my
grandparents, years before the rations, years before they burned music
cassettes in piled heaps because the reigning General saw a dream about an
unknown song that would cause a revolution which might disrupt his government,
years before his government was removed by another General and a song was
played at the former Dictator’s arrest, years before the rations and counters.</span></span></i></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="background: white;"><span><br /></span></span></i><span style="background: white;"><span>Most of the story started and
ended in that same, mostly pointless way, with the bare bones of a brilliant
idea not taken at all to its full capacity. I started off invested, and then
got progressively more and more bored, not connecting with anything or anyone,
and not particularly caring, even when horrible stuff happened to our heroine,
or to other people in the story, random strangers who came and went without
creating much of an effect on the narrative.</span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background: white;"><span><br /> </span></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="background: white;"><span>The other day, the old man Rizwan, who sold flowers at
the old cemetery near my house was taken away for calling out his wife’s name
repeatedly at her grave.</span></span></i></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="background: white;"><span><br /></span></span></i><span style="background: white;"><span>All in all, a story that had
promise but didn’t live up to it, made worse by the random tense changes
throughout the telling of it. For some unfathomable reason, the author seemed
unable to decide in which tense the story should be told, which meant that past
and present sometimes collided within the same sentence. This could maybe be
treated as a sort of creative flair, an artistic freedom granted to
experimental works of prose, but over here it mostly felt like grammatically
incorrect, and made me itch to drag a red pen across huge swathes of the
writing. Commas felt misplaced, and sentences didn’t stop where they should
have. These were the sort of issues that a clearer editorial gaze could have
easily cut out, which made the whole reading process doubly frustrating.</span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background: white;"><span><br /></span></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="background: white;"><span>I glance at the photo she has in the corner behind
her, under the windowsill by the counter, the light outside is turning dark
blue, we are entering the blue hour again.</span></span></i></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="background: white;"><span><br /></span></span></i><span style="background: white;"><span>As an editor, I know that I
am more fussy about these issues than other readers would be, and so sometimes
I try to not let it get to me, but the problem with problems of tense in a
narrative is that my brain glitches on them, so that I’m left wondering where I
am supposed to be in the story. Have we suddenly shifted to a past tense? Is
the character recalling a memory? Where in time are we supposed to be stationed
at that particular scene in the story? There’s a reason why publishers make
such a big deal about these things, and that’s because so much of what’s
written down has to be carefully checked a million times before it reaches the
eye of the readers, who are quicker to spot mistakes than most people realize.</span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background: white;"><span><br /> </span></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="background: white;"><span>Peas, potatoes, carrots and spring onions, I repeated
the same gestures for these vegetables and purchase them.</span></span></i></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="background: white;"><span><br /></span></span></i><span>Overall, a good idea, but it left much to be desired. I
think I would love to read a full-length novel about this concept of a sparse
quantity of words allowed to be used by a totalitarian government, and oddly
enough I’m sure it must exist out there somewhere. So even if I was fully bored
by the ending, I suppose the fact that it opened my eyes to new, interesting types of science fiction plots is something valid that came out of this reading
experience.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span><br /></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="background: white;"><span>The rations have given me time to pause, if nothing
else.</span></span></i></span></div>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></i></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="background-color: white;"><a href="https://tasavvurnama.com/rain-in-the-potholes/" style="background: transparent; color: #340b9c; text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">Word Rations</a> by Nazuk Iftikhar Rao </span><span style="background-color: white;">was published in Issue 005 (Winter 2023) of </span><span style="background-color: white;">Tasavvur, an</span><span style="background-color: white;"> online portal for South Asian writing. The remaining reviews for other Tasavvur stories by Pakistani authors can be found <a href="https://thedesiwritingguide.blogspot.com/search?q=tasavvur" target="_blank">here</a>. </span></span></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: georgia; font-size: 14px;"><br /></span></p>Anum Shaharyarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07742790825147781762noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276671725093561311.post-12779553252217130352023-06-01T21:37:00.006+05:002023-06-08T19:06:56.277+05:00Of Patience and Pain: Marium Asif's 'Rain in the Potholes' is what all short stories should be like<p><i><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></span></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfE0fjaMZihCbaChObn0QvMWvbgmeXfM1WrJEgVg-EZDY5s9A5-xyr5tBJvKyzK28nRWQCqTZ_cWwghAcTrJ_sVviFxiO7QZMMlgjshbrk1cMx4dUvkAiPXkvlb18G2sGy1KIwCQJsKAxP00k1DslQTjjCaka9FEkIZu7i0FFpmqONdYzjJFSBVhyxrA/s300/Fall%202022.png" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="188" data-original-width="300" height="251" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfE0fjaMZihCbaChObn0QvMWvbgmeXfM1WrJEgVg-EZDY5s9A5-xyr5tBJvKyzK28nRWQCqTZ_cWwghAcTrJ_sVviFxiO7QZMMlgjshbrk1cMx4dUvkAiPXkvlb18G2sGy1KIwCQJsKAxP00k1DslQTjjCaka9FEkIZu7i0FFpmqONdYzjJFSBVhyxrA/w400-h251/Fall%202022.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span face=""Authentic Sans", sans-serif" style="background-color: white; font-size: x-small; text-align: start;"><b>Cover Art – Fall 2022 Issue</b></span></td></tr></tbody></table></span></i></div><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">There are seventy seven pipes under the town called
Jairaz. Of these, only fifty two can be accessed- the rest have caved in or
been blocked.</span></i><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I knew from the first sentence that I would love this short
story, and I did! Sometimes, very rarely, this also happens. Sometimes I’m barely a few words in
and I get that frisson of excitement that tells me that this particular tale is going to be
entertaining, well written, and most importantly, properly edited. A lot of
times that excitement fizzles out a few sentences in, and my reaction is
always stronger, more disappointed, and thus more likely to be sharply critical
compared to starting out with mininum expectations.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This time though, I wasn’t let down. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">“Ye Dozakh ka naya
rasta hoga.” Kaz used to say.<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">“Dozakh itni asani se
nahin milti.” Nina would reply.<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The setting, that of a post-apocalyptic world where a couple
takes up residence in the underground sewerage system, isn’t really the most
original. But authors don’t necessarily get points for originality. After all,
almost all fiction is recycled, bits of stories already told before cobbled
together in new ways. What matters is how you treat it, how you use it to craft
a whole new narrative with completely different characters, and the story the
author tells here is an excellent one. Nina and Kaz live alone, with Kaz
periodically climbing up to the surface to find food and sustenance, and while
he’s not the best at navigating the dark, pothole-filled interiors of their
residence, Nina is much better at it, and guides him through the dark until he
can come and go with ease.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Nina was hesitant to let him go, forcing him to
unravel a ball of yarn along the way, one end of it attached to the pillars of
their home, so that if he ever got lost Nina would find him again.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Kaz’s stumbling through the dark, his frequent injuries, his
almost-falls down deep, dark holes takes up a portion of the beginning of the
story, but then the plot becomes about Nina’s desire to have company when Kaz
leaves her alone. So Kaz starts bringing home young, stray orphans, and at this point I
thought this was about to turn into a lovely, emotional little story about
family bonding, until the child vanishes one day, and Nina is left bereft. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kaz could do nothing
but hold her when she was in this state, constantly repeating that </i>Whist
must have gone to look for his other family<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">,
and </i>yes of course he loved you<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">, and </i>you
know, he probably took the yarn to remember you<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">.<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I’ve always been wary of short stories that base their
character’s actions on strong, complex feelings like regret or grief which
require nuance and time to cultivate in a reader. By virtue of the limited word
count, I find that the shorter storytelling format doesn’t really always manage
to make us connect with a character’s anguish over missed opportunities or dead
lovers or any other emotionally-charged past. This author is proof that it can
be well done, even within a certain length and with limited exposition, because
I found myself very hooked to the story of the missing children, which Kaz kept
bringing back to their little house and then returning from his trips to find
Nina alone and grieving. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">When Hari, Jaya, Unni,
Hyun, Kia and Zara all decided to leave as well, Kaz stopped leaving Nina alone
in the Circle, worried that her grief would bury her whole.<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Saying any more would be tantamount to ruining the
experience of reading this treat, but I can admit that the mystery of the
missing children and the ending is so very well done that I was immediately
sending the link to my friends as soon as I was done. “Read this!” I said. “But
don’t skip ahead!” It’s rare for me to get this excited about Pakistani
fiction, which can be sometimes good and sometimes hilariously bad, but very
rarely exciting, different, or worthy of being shared with glee. But in this case it was just so much fun to follow the paths the author had set down, so
heartbreaking and unexpected, just so well done. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Honestly, this is it. This is good fiction at its best, and
I’m so glad this author is writing. I hope they continue, and write full-length
novels, and give us great stuff to look forward to in the future. I’m glad for
ventures like Tasavvurnama which allow writers like this to be discovered, and
which give us the opportunity to find them and read them. My fingers are
crossed for more excellent stuff like this in the future.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">These potholes were
deep and the drop was high, and the one time Nina had peered inside, she could
see nothing but darkness, hear nothing but her own breathing, and smell nothing
but her own fear.</span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></i></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span><a href="https://tasavvurnama.com/rain-in-the-potholes/" target="_blank">Rain in the Potholes</a> by Marium Asim was published in Issue 004 (Fall 2022) of </span><span>Tasavvur, an</span><span> online portal for South Asian writing. The remaining reviews for other Tasavvur stories by Pakistani authors can be found <a href="https://thedesiwritingguide.blogspot.com/search?q=tasavvur" target="_blank">here</a>.</span></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; font-family: georgia; font-size: 14px;"><br /></span></div>Anum Shaharyarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07742790825147781762noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276671725093561311.post-5330506419429022862023-05-23T00:45:00.004+05:002023-05-23T01:50:52.534+05:00Of Dystopia and Depictions: Farah Naz Rishi's 'I Hope You Get This Message' did almost everything right<p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915;"></i></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGK7vSkPevQO5x8qXZ2n5scl9-5f8o98PQwEsBVVANneSBoWQ34qJaC5DUSjc1wMsrqF1G_uHj1nYyt1g0Wepdkcsro4Fz_179H0FzbWAVZ3l5uIrbr16roGt-CxixAb8NHhUx1tJqle64O7snbeMm3ktvzBrG7fm6SYKpfR5pZFfCOHvHarVPADX6HA/s1360/43699608.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1360" data-original-width="900" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGK7vSkPevQO5x8qXZ2n5scl9-5f8o98PQwEsBVVANneSBoWQ34qJaC5DUSjc1wMsrqF1G_uHj1nYyt1g0Wepdkcsro4Fz_179H0FzbWAVZ3l5uIrbr16roGt-CxixAb8NHhUx1tJqle64O7snbeMm3ktvzBrG7fm6SYKpfR5pZFfCOHvHarVPADX6HA/s320/43699608.jpg" width="212" /></a></i></span></div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915;">“Half the time, I have no idea what I’m doing. Life does feel small in the grand scheme of things, and sometimes it feels like I don’t have control over anything.”</i></span><p></p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">Sometimes you read a book and everything is just great, the characters are diverse and have complex internal lives, the relationships are complicated and worth rooting for, the plot moves along nicely, and yet you just… don’t care.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">For me, this was that book.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">It was so weird to be so bored with a story that I should, by all accounts, have really liked. The writing was strong, there was a great female friendship, and my favourite trope of all time—protagonists from different settings coming together at the end—was a significantly important part of the narrative. And yet I felt like I was slogging through it all. I read almost three other books and a huge chunk of fan fiction before I could force myself to finish this. And forcing myself really was the only way I could have gotten through this, because I kept wanting to stop reading.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">Not that it’s the most perfect book ever. The premise itself is pretty weak: an alien species has decided to blow the earth up within a week, and somehow managed to communicate this to NASA, which sends the whole world into a tail spin. Interspersed within the separate tales of three teenagers are scenes from a trial going on at the supposed planet, where a bunch of aliens argue back and forth about whether the earth should be blown up or not.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915;">Seven billion lives were at the mercy of some distant planet, a speck they could hardly see with even the best telescopes. What did they want, really? They said Earth was going up for judgement: But what kind of judgement? What more could they want? The whole thing felt unfair. And why send a message of warning if humans could do nothing to change the outcome?</i><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">Even though all the scenes in the extraterrestrial setting felt repetitive and gimmicky, the whole ‘the world is ending’ aspect of the story was actually pretty well done in terms of its overall impact on the earth. Things started falling apart almost immediately, with riots breaking out, mass hysteria rising up, and families all torn asunder. That sense of urgency is repeated almost constantly throughout the novel, even though we mostly look at it from the perspective of three teenagers and the very specific ways that this news affects their lives. This type of storytelling, where the implications of such a large-scale event are portrayed through the very personalized narratives of singular characters, has always been a personal favourite of mine. Another reason why I should have loved this book, and weirdly did not like it at all. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that I spent pretty much a huge chunk of the time reading this book just thinking, ‘But you usually </span><span style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; font-weight: 600;">like</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;"> stuff like this. Why are you so bored?’ Even the fact that a few smart sentences popped up here and there did not manage to assuage the tediousness I constantly felt.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915;">“Honey, I’ve lived long enough to know that begging your oppressors to spare you never works. You either fight back, or remind the ones you love there’s something still worth fighting for.”</i><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">In fact, there were more reasons for me to like this book than others who have attempted the same thing, and that was because of the Muslim representation! Adeem, one of the three teenagers, is a Muslim, and as a reader, it’s exhilarating for me to see a Muslim character as a protagonist in a novel which doesn’t specifically focus on his religion as a selling point for the story. The world is coming to an end, and things are falling apart, and one of the three people telling us this story happens to be Muslim. It’s as simple as that, and that kind of subtle representation feels more valid than books specifically written with Muslim characters, because those can feel too performative or too focused on making a point. Adeem is simply a young boy who, confronted with the idea that the world is ending, decides to go find his runaway sister, and he also happens to be Muslim. I love that casualness, and yet. The flip side of this was that Adeem was, unfortunately, pretty much a Muslim in name only. Oh, what I would give to read a Muslimrep book which actually featured practicing Muslims. Muslims who pray and fast and read the Quran and yet still manage to have complex, defined lives without being defined by their religion. And I get that there are people all over the world who are Muslims and yet don’t actually follow any of the religious practices prescribed so strenuously, practices that I follow so fully myself, but creating a character as Muslim and not allowing them to actually follow any of the practices of the religion feels like such a cop-out. I am still waiting for that one novel, smart and well-written and entertaining, where one character just happens to casually get up to go pray or needs a break to open their fast, but for now, since that is such a pipe dream, I guess we’ll have to make do with what we have, which is a young adult novel that brings attention to islamophobia in the midst of a possible alien invasion.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915;">He’d last been listening to a report of the sudden increase in violence—specifically, violence targeting Muslim communities. Three prominent West Coast mosques had burned down, the target of fanatical arsonist who believe that the end of days was here—and that Muslims had brought it.</i><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">What was even more interesting was the fact that not only was Adeem Muslim, a huge part of his narrative also focused on homosexuality. With seven days left until the world ends, in his part of the narrative Adeem sets off to find Leyla, his older, beloved sister who ran away from home after coming out to her parents. From the perspective of a story about a sibling’s coming out and the ensuing dramatic aftermath, the author handles stuff really well. Adeem is left confused and regretful, wishing he had done things differently and angry at his sister for not contacting him even once. I know that there are a significant number of stories out there where the character worries about coming out, only to find out that their loved ones are much more open to the idea than they had thought. But there are also a lot more stories about coming out to only be rejected, banished, or assaulted. All those possibilities are versions I have read, but I’ll be the first to admit that this was the first time I was reading one where the parents of a Muslim family aren’t immediately vengeful and sadistic.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915;">Adeem had blamed himself, too. Not for saying the wrong thing, but for saying nothing. No that’s okay, Leyla. No we love you anyway. He’d been in shock. He’d been angry she hadn’t told him before. He’d made it about him. Maybe that was why she’d run away—so her life would finally belong to her.</i><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">In fact, I can easily admit that this book put me in a very confusing position, where the open-mindedness of the parents felt too surreal to be believable. The truth is that Pakistan, where I grew up, is not a country that is kind to homosexuality. Trapped between culture and religion, most of the population would rather stone to death anyone who publicly claims to be attracted to the opposite gender rather than consider the possibility of accepting such a life style. Homophobia is rampant and widely accepted, and the books I read with positive LGBTQ representation might as well be written about people living on Mars. This puts me in a very awkward position: ideally, I want representation of Muslim parents who are open to homosexuality and not the stereotypical products of our society, but when I do get it I roll my eyes because it sounds so unbelievable, so not reflective of the reality I know. I get the dichotomy, I’m aware of it; as aware as I am of the fact that there </span><span style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; font-weight: 600;">must</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;"> be Muslim parents out there who don’t have an immediate ‘we banish you forever’ response to their child’s emergence from the closet. But the reality I inhabit doesn’t allow this fact to seem plausible, which makes the story so very hard for me to swallow. I suppose this just makes the argument for books like these to be more widely available, so that this possible reaction also becomes something we can accept.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915;">The worst part? His parents hadn’t even said the wrong things. It wasn’t as though when Leyla had admitted in shaky whispers that her best friend, Priti, was way more than just a friend, they’d told her to leave and never come back. They weren’t like Qasim Uncle, who’d cast out his own son a few years ago, openly called him horrible things in front of the whole mosque.</i><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">Another thing that was done differently was the representation of mental health in authority figures, and how it can affect the children around them. The only other story I remember that comes close to such a treatment is Marchetta’s Saving Francesca, one of my all-time favourite young adult novels, where the heroine’s mother suffers from depression. Over here Cate, the only female protagonist in the story, has a mother suffering from schizophrenia, in what is once again a really well-handled narrative arc. Cate is a wonderful character, multifaceted and capable of being both responsible as well as impulsive and reckless in all her teenage glory. Of course, that still doesn’t mean I enjoyed reading any of her chapters, but then again none of my reactions to this book made any sense to me, so there you have it.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915;">Mom, who loved sci-fi movies, who asked too many questions about Cate’s nonexistent social life, who made the best mind chocolate chip brownies. Mom, who heard voices in the walls, and starved herself, and begged Cate to forgive her in spite of everything.</i><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">In fact, this book deserved even more points than usual because Cate was that rare breed of teenaged characters in young adult who actually like their parents. Even though Cate’s mother ends up in a hospital at the very beginning of the last week on earth and sends Cate on a wild-goose chase looking after her absent father, her presence permeates every moment of Cate’s story. This story, of children forced to grow up too quickly because of parents who are unable to bear responsibility, is one I have read in multiple other places, but in almost all of these situations the parents are seen as burdensome and a restriction to the teenager’s ability to live their life to the fullest. Cate’s story also includes that perspective to a degree, but there was one particular part which had me blinking in surprise, amazed that a young adult novel could look at things from such a refreshing angle.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915;">She had to be strong for Mom. She had to be strong for her because, for better or worse, that’s who Cate was: stupidly, stubbornly dutiful, until the end. And that was okay. Living for her mom wasn’t such a bad thing. She loved her.</i><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">So Adeem was great because of the Muslimrep and Cate was great because of the complexity (and also because her angle included the female friendship bit that I loved), but it was the third character whom I should have loved the most. Jesse, single child of a single mother, is a troublemaker, full of angst and yet kind at the centre, just the way I like my characters to be. His story includes a diabolical scheme to make money in desperate times (good guy forced to do bad things), a cute love interest (so the romance aspect) and proper gay representation. All of these things I should have cared for, but from the very beginning, when it is established that Jesse lives in Roswell, I just could not invest. I vaguely remembered the place Roswell from that American TV show a few years ago that I never actually watched, and only ever associated with aliens in my head. In this book, Roswell is the central hub of all our alien activity: it is the place where Jesse lives, and the other two are drawn towards. So Jesse was just the right mixture of cynical and wanting to believe, angry and desperate for affection. So much possibility for me to like the book. Sadly, none of it translated into the reality of the reading experience.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915;">Could it be real? He was a Roswell kid, for Christ’s sake. Half the tourists that came through believed in little green men. He knew better than to fall for this shit.</i><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">The final nail in the coffin was the ending, which I can’t exactly discuss in detail except to say that I don’t care for the ‘guess what happened next’ vibe in fiction. I want to </span><span style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; font-weight: 600;">know</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;"> what happened. Real life is confusing and ambiguous enough; books are supposed to wrap things up in one neat little package so I can carry that version of the end in my head, nicely balancing out the more perplexing aspects of actually living in this world. I kept waiting, throughout the book, to reach that point where I would get hooked, or I would at least sufficiently care enough to want to flip the page, but it just never came. Which is honestly a sad state of affairs, and all in all I hope I never have to go through this experience ever again.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">Recommendation: I honestly couldn’t say. By all accounts it’s a very smart novel, which managed to bore me to death. That’s the only caveat I can give. Read if you must.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915;">“I know it’s stupid. But if there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that fear”–she gestured around them–“makes people kind of lose their heads.”</i></span><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915;"><br /></i></span></div>Anum Shaharyarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07742790825147781762noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276671725093561311.post-47670922356476348752023-05-08T23:22:00.003+05:002023-05-23T00:47:01.814+05:00Of Desis and the Diaspora: Farah Naz Rishi's 'It All Comes Back to You' is the best kind of South Asian YA<p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggKMSgkF9jY1EAznwpXQ6N914YHQn7U9GD4r-G_3sBFxm37fGlZZm00aS8MJMXSSXZTWCT58MZJz9J0nfaJSG2xs6oNZhkhDwC38j_PXtCYSPGulcUY4hMj9eoofpvTBNdMQytmZAIh7_IIbYoW26HdJHpVmNWLd9EXQEnEdFTNmHnBEOXojGq6KbYkw/s2048/55577204.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1356" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggKMSgkF9jY1EAznwpXQ6N914YHQn7U9GD4r-G_3sBFxm37fGlZZm00aS8MJMXSSXZTWCT58MZJz9J0nfaJSG2xs6oNZhkhDwC38j_PXtCYSPGulcUY4hMj9eoofpvTBNdMQytmZAIh7_IIbYoW26HdJHpVmNWLd9EXQEnEdFTNmHnBEOXojGq6KbYkw/s320/55577204.jpg" width="212" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: inherit;">Even though Pakistani authors writing in English have really started to branch out into other genres in the recent decade — moving away from literary fiction into the world-building of science fiction — the creative characters of fantasy, or even the haunted tales of horror and young adult (YA) fiction, still remain a pretty undeveloped area.</span><p></p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">Very few authors from the country are creating stories centred solely on the lives and trials of teenagers, which makes It All Comes Back to You, the second book by Pakistani American writer Farah Naz Rishi, a rare occurrence.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">Written from the point of view of two teenagers caught up in the impending wedding of their siblings, Rishi’s work subscribes to all the prerequisites of a YA novel. While it is generally agreed that the themes available in the young adult universe are expansive and can include those found in adult fiction, there is a commonly accepted focus on subject matters which relate to friendship, first loves, relationships and, most importantly, the concept of one’s own identity.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">Rishi’s work has the added benefit of not only tackling all of these basics in a deft manner, but her protagonists also happen to be Muslim, which means that the complications of being a young person from a religious minority growing up in an American society are also questions that the author tackles.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">To this aspect of the story, Rishi clearly brings her own lived experience, which lends the novel an air of authenticity. Kiran and Deen, the protagonists of the tale, are both teenagers living in New Jersey with their families, and it is a New Jersey drawn really well, with regular mentions not only of streets and shops, but also that nostalgic smell of the inside of a mosque, or the local shopping centre where desis go to buy things they can only find in the Subcontinent.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">Because the story revolves around the wedding of Kiran’s sister with Deen’s brother, the author also has a lot of fun mentioning all the various traditions that are part of a typical South Asian wedding, such as the groom’s shoe being held hostage in exchange for money. These things make it obvious that the author has deep familiarity with the culture, which makes the reading experience much more enjoyable.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">Unlike the author’s first novel, </span><a href="https://thedesiwritingguide.blogspot.com/2023/05/of-dystopia-and-disappointment-farah.html" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px;">I Hope You Get this Message</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">, which featured Muslim characters in name only, It All Comes Back to You focuses at a much greater level on religion also, and on what it means to belong to a Muslim family. Characters routinely quote Quranic ayats in normal conversations, the masjid is a place of importance, and Faisal, Deen’s elder brother who is clearly cast as a character worth admiring, is regular in his prayers and avoids alcohol.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">This is a strange, albeit wonderful, change from tales where anyone religious is shown as uptight and in need of an intervention in order to break them away from the supposed shackles unfairly imposed on them by their faith.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">However, this doesn’t mean that the author doesn’t show her characters engaging in behaviour that most would deem un-Islamic. Kiran’s mother, no longer alive, plays a significant part in the narrative because of her love for dance, which is represented in Kiran’s own desire to be a dancer. Deen regularly parties and drinks with his friends, and both teenagers swear sometimes.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">Instead of showing a make-believe world where teenagers strictly adhere to prescribed teachings, Rishi’s characters tend to be more flawed and thus feel more believable. By creating sympathetic, flawed characters who sometimes act in selfish, horrifying ways, Rishi manages to show how being a teenager is a tumultuous period in one’s life, full of revelations about ourselves and those we love.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">A main aspect of this turbulence is, of course, the romance, which is a major part of the narrative. Kiran and Deen’s relationship, full of chemistry and snark, already has a built-in reason for sparks catching, given that the two are shown as having been in a sweet relationship three years before our story starts — right before Deen ghosts Kiran without giving her a reason for why he vanishes.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">This, coupled with Kiran’s immediate distrust of Deen’s elder brother Faisal, leads her to question her sister’s decision to marry Faisal without knowing him in detail. The plot keeps thickening from here onwards, with secrets and betrayals coming to the surface as the story progresses. Rishi keeps the romance at the forefront, bringing it back into the narrative as Kiran and Deen slowly rediscover buried feelings as they prepare for their siblings’ weddings.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">The book, in a true nod to the world of young adult literature, also focuses on the relationships that teenagers have in a more platonic sense, such as the love between siblings, or the camaraderie between friends.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">Kiran’s obvious affection for her sister, or Deen’s side-plot regarding his roommate at college, all serve to show how multifaceted a person’s interiority can be, with moments of selfishness, frustration, or guilt balanced out with grace, humour and an ability to ask for forgiveness. Both Kiran and Deen are ultimately protagonists that one can root for, even as they take decisions that seem obviously primed to lead to disaster.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">Like a majority of YA novels that feature immigrants in the plot, this book also looks at a number of heavy topics, such as addiction, bullying and the death of a parent and how they relate to the immigrant experience. The trauma caused by all of these problems plays a significant part in making the characters who they are, affecting not just their present but their future plans as well, with Kiran planning to become a doctor in memory of her mother.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">The tale also doesn’t shy away from shining a light on the unrealistic expectations immigrants can have from their children, or the way creating an idealised image of a good life can affect a child, as shown through Deen’s parents and their inability to understand why their children are suffering.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">All in all, it feels like, out of the multiple books coming out these days which tackle the desi experience abroad, this one comes the closest to treating its subject matter with the respect and excitement it deserves. All the details mentioned even casually in the story serve only to highlight how well the author understands the culture she is talking about, which increases the enjoyment involved in reading this book tenfold.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">This is also visible in the cover of the book, where the attention to detail shows that it was clearly illustrated by someone who was given a pretty thorough art brief. Even the beauty spot on Deen’s face is visible in the picture; it is a stroke of subtle genius and shows how meticulously the book was treated from an editorial perspective.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">A truly enjoyable read, and one can only look forward to what the author will produce next.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">***</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">This review was </span><a href="https://www.dawn.com/news/1655105/fiction-young-and-pakistani-in-america" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px;">originally published</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;"> in </span><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915;">Books and Authors</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;"> on 21 October, 2021.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;"><b>Disclaimer:</b> I got a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.</span></span>Anum Shaharyarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07742790825147781762noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276671725093561311.post-65114114342842643442023-05-02T01:15:00.002+05:002023-05-05T20:05:54.437+05:00Of Mysteries and Maharajas: Imran Kureishi's 'In the Realm of Demons' is a fun little supernatural mystery<p><span style="background-color: white;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjti67CCUCwmHNZQfIv4ZYt-oY3HC1-uY4VcabWs4qRJpreGQLqD8OrG0Uw8NLN0uVtQH1jISTfj0Y_KmKcaj5ggGneXMxIuMZ0SMoINiR0yh9l7wuzP--7LbmlEjWd5bVLqb7WCamYK7B-wXupfXJT08CfvsnhnrE66CcOnX5owwdWfwSAXmqcrzu8Q/s480/5dd97f777f3f2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="313" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjti67CCUCwmHNZQfIv4ZYt-oY3HC1-uY4VcabWs4qRJpreGQLqD8OrG0Uw8NLN0uVtQH1jISTfj0Y_KmKcaj5ggGneXMxIuMZ0SMoINiR0yh9l7wuzP--7LbmlEjWd5bVLqb7WCamYK7B-wXupfXJT08CfvsnhnrE66CcOnX5owwdWfwSAXmqcrzu8Q/s320/5dd97f777f3f2.jpg" width="209" /></a></div>Compared to a few decades
ago, Pakistani literature is making huge strides these days, not only in the
amount of content that Pakistani authors are producing, but also in the
diversity of genres that they’re choosing to dabble in. While a majority of the
books being written do have a certain narrow-minded focus on politics or
religion — understandable in a country where so much of daily life is affected
by these two factors—a number of writers are choosing to take a different
path, veering into the lesser touched of the genres.<p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; float: none; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">Amongst the best outcomes of this defiant risk-taking in
Pakistani writing is the emerging interest in all things supernatural. With the
joyous indulgence of <a href="https://thedesiwritingguide.blogspot.com/search?q=sami+shah" target="_blank">Sami Shah</a>’s Boy of Fire and Earth duology in all kinds of
South Asian horror tropes, and <a href="https://thedesiwritingguide.blogspot.com/search?q=Usman+Malik" target="_blank">Usman Tanweer Malik</a>’s Bram Stoker Award-winning
short stories, Pakistani writers are slowly gaining visibility in the
marketplace, and the latest entry in this genre is Imran Kureshi’s In the Realm
of Demons.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; float: none; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">Combining historical fiction with a touch of both
supernatural as well as horror, the author has managed to craft a pretty
captivating story, given that this is only his debut novel. Starting off in
pre-Partition India, we meet our hero as a young Rajput aristocrat in the royal
palace of Hashtpur, an imaginary equivalent of a subcontinental princely state.
Left with his widowed mother at the mercy of his uncle after his father’s
untimely death, Mehran spends his days being unaware of the politics of the
palace. Instead, he is too busy being enamoured with his young cousin, Koyel,
the daughter produced as the result of a hasty love marriage in the nawab of
Hashtpur’s youth, who is treated with as much disdain in the household as
Mehran himself.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; float: none; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">It is the curse on the nawab’s family—that each
eldest child will be beheaded at the appearance of every red moon—that acts
as a catalyst for our hero’s journey. On one balmy night in August 1945, a red
moon appears and, while the nawab’s eldest son from his second marriage is
hurriedly taken away for protection, his actual first child—his daughter
Koyel—becomes a victim of the curse, carted off into oblivion by some unseen
demon and never seen again.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; float: none; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">Distraught at the disappearance of his cousin,
Mehran grows up lonely but unable to focus on his misery given that Partition
soon happens in the subcontinent—an event that affects not only the religious
communities of the subcontinent, but also the princely states that dot the
region. Moving into a decaying mansion in the newly created Pakistan with his
mother, Mehran is forced to grow up quickly, handling finances and learning how
to make adult decisions to keep his small family in respectable conditions.
Kureishi does a good job in moments such as these of entwining the reality of
living in that moment of history alongside the strands of the creepy and the
unexplainable that run in his story.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; float: none; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">However, he never takes long to thread the
story back into one where demons and djinns run amok, with spectres haunting
nightmares and whispers in the dark that coalesce into mystical beings.</span></span><br style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;" />
<span style="background: white;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; float: none; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">One of the most fascinating things about this book
might be the fact that it actually does manage to create a pretty terrifying
ambience for the reader, keeping the reader in a state of just enough
heightened suspense to draw the scary parts into a moment where the heart
starts to beat faster. It is the middle of the night when Mehran sees a vision
of his young cousin Koyel, come to warn him that he is in danger. </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: white;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; float: none; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">Galvanised by
the thought of his cousin being alive, Mehran becomes obsessed with finding
her, and it is this obsession that forms the majority of what we call the
hero’s journey. From the pirs that he meets in his own city, to an exorcist
with a demon for a wife that he bumps into at a wedding, Mehran becomes even
more deeply intertwined in the mystery of his missing cousin as the book
progresses.</span></span><br style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;" />
<span style="background: white;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; float: none; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">Even beyond the fascinating multiple supernatural
creatures that inhabit this book—from those in Mehran’s hometown, to the ones
in Tibet where Mehran goes on a quest to find some answers, to a parallel
demon-infested world with completely new and unique creatures—every aspect of
the book feels like an author having fun with the world he is building. While
the writing gets sketchy in a few places, with the dialogue placement becoming
awkward and the sentences requiring some editing, there is still enough going
on that can keep the reader hooked. Overall, there is definitely some odd
phrasing in the book here and there, and the entire manuscript could have used
a more deft editorial hand to clean out the awkwardness in the flow of the
writing. But in some cases, it is the story that is more important than the
means by which it is told, and Kureishi’s book might be a true example of this
very phenomenon.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: white;">The novel also suffers slightly from the weak love
story and the fact that Mehran is obsessed with a cousin he knew before he had
even hit his teen years. While all stories which involve an epic journey
require some reason for our protagonist to set out on his or her quest in the
first place, in the case of this book it can stretch the reader’s disbelief a
little that Mehran chooses to face such vicious, possibly life-threatening
creatures, in the dark and alone, repeatedly, for someone he saw when he was so
young. While it’s clear that the author had the more exciting aspects of the
story planned out, a little forethought in this case would have served him
well. As it is, though, it is the action and the suspense of the story that
acts as the saving grace of the narrative, keeping us reading even when we must
suspend disbelief in certain parts.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; float: none; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;">It is sad that Pakistan doesn’t have a booming
film industry for books of this genre, because with the recent interest in all
things supernatural, the possibility of an eager viewing audience for such
stories is great. In the Realm of Demons might not win any awards for great
literature, but it’s a quick-paced and fun read, worthy of a little time spent
tucked in bed and reliving the way horror films make us feel. While we already
have so many authors writing about the serious and alarming parts of living in
Pakistan, it is authors such as Kureshi that need all the encouragement we can
give them, to ensure that literature such as this continues to be produced in
the same manner.</span></span><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #1e1915; font-family: Proxima Nova, Montserrat, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white;">***</span></span></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; float: none; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #1e1915;">This review was </span><a href="https://www.dawn.com/news/1518427/fiction-supernatural-histories" rel="nofollow noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px;">originally published</a><span style="color: #1e1915;"> in </span><i style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915;">Books and Authors</i><span style="color: #1e1915;"> on 24 November, 2019.</span></span></span></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background: white;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; float: none; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #1e1915;"><br /></span></span></span></span></div>Anum Shaharyarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07742790825147781762noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276671725093561311.post-83785506634432915742023-04-25T02:07:00.002+05:002023-05-11T02:53:34.850+05:00Of Simplicity and Sparseness: Shahbano Alvi's 'A Woman and the Afternoon Sun' keeps it short and simple<p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihhBXgBI0m7DGiySjojJ7Zp0GWqmc-brleIRo269ag4AcK5nFzh3ul2jyOKT5ARU9bJfvl94k_LzU78ZNDftLxewDoKvaqwNNYdtXVu7zC0RcsNb8wd4idzh_Q95e58c5EWHAQGUP20VheNZ2TsEKuawXtBkt1U2xHYXS_bOsPlpby9JSztyEFm6DAdQ/s300/58993900.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="196" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihhBXgBI0m7DGiySjojJ7Zp0GWqmc-brleIRo269ag4AcK5nFzh3ul2jyOKT5ARU9bJfvl94k_LzU78ZNDftLxewDoKvaqwNNYdtXVu7zC0RcsNb8wd4idzh_Q95e58c5EWHAQGUP20VheNZ2TsEKuawXtBkt1U2xHYXS_bOsPlpby9JSztyEFm6DAdQ/s1600/58993900.jpg" width="196" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: inherit;">As a form of storytelling, a popular trend among Pakistani writers is shorter tales to get their points across. Maybe it’s the creative restraint demanded by the word length, which encourages the author to be precise in what they want to say, or maybe it’s just that a short story compilation allows for a greater variety of plots and characters to be covered.</span><p></p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">Whatever the reason may be, a multitude of authors, from <a href="https://thedesiwritingguide.blogspot.com/2016/05/of-rich-and-the.html" target="_blank">Daniyal Mueenuddin</a> to <a href="https://thedesiwritingguide.blogspot.com/2021/06/of-enjoyment-and-ennui-mira-sethis-are.html" target="_blank">Mira Sethi</a>, have explored this form of engagement with an audience, dabbling in the richness and depth provided by short story compilations. The latest entrant in the genre is Shahbano Alvi’s collection A Woman and the Afternoon Sun.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">Composed of 23 supremely short tales, within a 150-page count, Alvi keeps each story brief and to the point, with a writing style that relies heavily on a person’s ability to read between the lines. Interestingly enough, the sparse writing style and utter dependence on a reader’s intuition serve to create a greater depth to each narrative’s characters, allowing us to interpret each story in our own ways.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">Because of the limited time spent introducing us to protagonists and settings, we usually jump right into the plot and things wrap up as quickly as they had started. While it would have been possible in such a situation for the endings to feel abrupt and rushed, most of the stories allow for a natural and well-thought-out ending. Things are either tied up neatly in a pretty little package, with all plot points rounded off, or they are left open-ended enough so as to be, instead of merely frustrating, an exercise in musing on the future possibilities of each character.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">Thematically, the collection takes on some pretty heavy topics, not shying away from discussing subjects which might be taboo, or considered too vulgar or insensitive to treat in literature. Alvi’s stories cover heartbreak in all its varied forms, caused by factors such as death, sexual abuse, physical suffering or emotional turmoil.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">One could say that survival is the theme that reigns supreme above all within this collection, with characters forced to confront monsters made by others, or by themselves, again and again, and scrambling to figure out exactly how to deal.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">Even though this means that a general air of doom is threaded throughout the stories, one gets the feeling that the author is not as interested in leading her readers to a happy ending, but rather to one that makes sense, which feels realistic. Greater attention is paid to the representation of life as it is, instead of how it should be, and no tale truly offers escapism. Rather, all the stories combine to portray the truth of our messy, conflicted lives, bringing them to the reader’s attention in all their chaotic glory.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">These themes help to make emotions the main focus of each story, with grief and longing being a significant presence in most. From tales of wives whose husbands have left them, to a bird’s perspective of a dying human who regularly provided it with food, we shift between ages, genders and even species, but there is a constant presence of a low-lying anguish tied almost inexorably with hope.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">In each tale, while most emotions remained unnamed, they are always visible behind the screen of carefully crafted sentences and, to the astute reader, are clearly the most important part of the narrative. The emotional weight of each story is very present, no matter if the relationships being portrayed are those between strangers, or between the most familiar of people such as siblings, spouses, parents, etc.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">In some stories, the severity of the writing and the distance through which these emotions are being explored can come across as cold, even a little unfriendly, and for readers who prefer that the details of each character’s inner turmoil be more visible, this collection can feel unsatisfying. It takes a greater amount of patience and willingness to speculate to enjoy these tales as they are meant to be read and enjoyed.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">The characters through whom Alvi has chosen to tell her stories present a varied lot, with no strict adherence to any one age group or gender. We see tales being told from the point of view of traumatised youngsters, heartbroken older women, even healthy young men who grieve the passing of an older colleague. All sorts of living things serve as protagonists, from humans to creatures such as birds, or even other sentient beings such as trees, which serve as narrators of their own personal story arcs.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">Alvi’s characters are so very varied that it is a pleasure to read across the board. It takes great skill to create such a plethora of characters in so small a word count, and it’s hard to categorise them into one lump, since so many inner lives are explored in so wide-ranging a manner.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">Although this can lead to some stories feeling a little odd or pointless, with the reader unable to connect with every single viewpoint being explored, on the whole the protagonists and antagonists of each tale provide a healthy dose of three-dimensional authenticity in the reading experience.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">What’s fascinating to see is the great amount of focus on women as protagonists, who take centre-stage in several of the stories, and these feel stronger and more hard-hitting. Told from a more personalised point of view, these tales have greater weight in terms of storytelling, or in leading the reader to a certain resolution.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">The author is unapologetic in letting her female characters express their emotions to the widest possible range, showing their frustration, heartbreak and anger in equal measure. These women are confused and upset, and allowed to be — which is seldom seen or explored in fiction with such an eye for detail. Allowing women to be flawed creatures, who sometimes exhibit agency and sometimes don’t, is a trick Alvi has managed to do well, and should ideally continue to explore further.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">One must also focus on the layout of the book, which bears commenting upon from an editorial point of view. With the open spaces between paragraphs and wide margins, the layout of the text serves to accentuate the spare writing style in an incredibly complementary manner.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">It was impossible not to notice the slight editing issues, with random underlines or words struck out — which shows that it could have benefited from a final round of copy edits before being sent into the hands of a reader — but overall, the book has a clean, sparse look that harmonises with the writing. It is easy to disregard the importance of the layout of a book and focus only on the content, but here it has been done only as an advantage to the stories themselves.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">On the whole, the collection is a quick, stimulating read, with the stories intertwining either with each other, or with the final, longer story that gives its name to the volume. A lot of things are left unsaid for the reader to decode, and connecting the dots serves as its own pleasure while going through each tale. One hopes that the author’s calibre will only continue to improve with time.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">***</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">This review was </span><a href="https://www.dawn.com/news/1645960/fiction-survival-reigns-supreme" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: white; color: #00635d;">originally published</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;"> in </span><i style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">Books and Authors</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;"> on 12 September, 2021.</span></span><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;"><br /></span></span></div>Anum Shaharyarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07742790825147781762noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276671725093561311.post-6552977398689594012023-04-18T02:31:00.002+05:002023-04-18T02:31:28.186+05:00Of Race and Resentments: Maniza Naqvi's 'The Inn' takes a slow path down a winding plot<p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvX__0oJfHUcbq14hLwag6V0yMe1M8iUCk_-4dS0ocQilRZYDv1BqffakZCPGxF4KZ-4WmEsXV_aWZu5THUkd8KMISQw2uQaGueVK-v1uDvyR9MGcxdHMD4OGAasVYsNn21r4MomJB-vte30f7bnJJ83r30xCWO3uKOfMOJ4B1eTDljxEpVagzlZ4UlA/s996/61832540.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="996" data-original-width="640" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvX__0oJfHUcbq14hLwag6V0yMe1M8iUCk_-4dS0ocQilRZYDv1BqffakZCPGxF4KZ-4WmEsXV_aWZu5THUkd8KMISQw2uQaGueVK-v1uDvyR9MGcxdHMD4OGAasVYsNn21r4MomJB-vte30f7bnJJ83r30xCWO3uKOfMOJ4B1eTDljxEpVagzlZ4UlA/s320/61832540.jpg" width="206" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: inherit;">Some stories find their strength not in plot, but in characters. Instead of events propelling things forward, it is the reactions and feelings to events that take centre stage. Maniza Naqvi’s The Inn is such a novel; it takes immense pleasure in taking the slowly simmering inadequacies and resentments that exist under the skin of all humans, and bringing them to a boil with the slow, careful craft of a master storyteller.</span><p></p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">At its surface, The Inn is a contemporary novel, one meant for our times. It takes into account the history of the past few decades—the destruction of New York’s World Trade Centre, the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the crisis in Sudan—and connects these events to its central characters, so that each moment feels personal to the few around whom the novel revolves.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">And yet there is a greater stake involved, where the conversation is not just about the resultant death or misery, but about how the characters felt, or reacted, or were involved in their own flawed ways with each of these moments in time. That is where the novel’s actual strength lies.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">Our protagonist Salman—casually Americanised to the shorter, non-desi Sal—is the Pakistani immigrant through whose eyes we watch the tale unfurl. Moving from a small village in Punjab to hallowed hospital corridors in Washington, DC, Sal spends his days in a dark room as a radiologist, delivering—sometimes good, but mostly bad—news to worried patients.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">Overburdened with the wretchedness of being the frequent bearer of bad news and unable to keep his empathy in check, Sal finds himself in the Virginia countryside, invited there by a nurse friend who wants Sal to relax. But Sal is unable to gel with the friend’s family and so books a room at a nearby inn.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">Sylvia and Billy, the retired couple running the inn, are the counterpoint to Sal’s anxiety over his identity, his sense of belonging and his inability to find peace. Having spent time in multiple countries as aid workers, the couple just narrowly misses being a cliché, despite their white saviour complex being out in full force throughout the entirety of the novel.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">It is only through a careful unveiling of their humanity that Naqvi manages to make them into fully rounded individuals, with past lives and intricacies that go beyond the formulaic limitations of their professions and interests.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">Sylvia and Billy welcome Sal to their inn, at first reluctantly, and then with a degree of warmth and understanding, but their relationship with him has a strain that eventually explodes, in a manner that the author presents as seemingly inevitable.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">Can we ever look past who we are and truly understand another? This seems to be the question the author set out to answer in her careful exploration of Sal’s laconic days spent at the inn, interacting with the other guests: Adrian, a man from Sylvia and Billy’s past and Maribeth, the next door neighbour.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">These people bring their own issues, their own complicated histories and their biased understanding of the world into Sal’s life, who tries to circumnavigate them as best as he can. Is he flawed himself? The other characters certainly seem to think so, in conversations that revolve around identity, politics, culture and history.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">Sal’s understanding of the world, his obsession with the so-called ‘war on terror’ and his irritation that the others at the Inn never seem to take it seriously enough, provides much of the friction and drives the plot towards its tumultuous conclusion.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">Naqvi takes her time exploring this dichotomy between what matters to people. Sal’s marriage to a very young girl back home, and his subsequent divorce, don’t create as big a ripple as does the fact that she’s his cousin. That he decides to leave his young son with his wife, and not fight for him, is a bigger shock to the couple who—by that point—treat Sal like a family member.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">This distinction between what his culture permits and what Sylvia and Billy believe to be right, is jarring to Sal, who responds with awkwardness and gloom, unable to explain to this newfound family that what they believe does not necessarily translate into an undeniable truth in his own reality. This distinction is mellow at first, but grows increasingly stronger as the story progresses, culminating in a clash of expressions that seeks to reiterate what the author has been trying to point out all along.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">Immigration gets a nod—inevitable, given how assiduously the concept of identity and belonging is threaded throughout the narrative. Sal’s persistent memories of the village in his homeland, coupled with worry for the son he left behind, serve to heighten his feelings of alienation, further reinforcing his belief that no one cares about the drone attacks on Pakistani soil as much as he does.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">As Sal’s frustration mounts, so does his friends’ irritation with what they see as his rage, his inability to relax, his insistence that only he understands pain. At numerous instances, they try to convince him to see the Inn as a temporary place of belonging, to see Virginia as an island of relaxation, or to find pleasure in the quiet peacefulness of the American countryside. Juxtaposing the Inn’s importance in Sal’s life to his mounting sense of unease in America is masterfully done, and a tactic that the author employs to the maximum.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">Strewn through the pages is an abundance of nature. The setting is important and Naqvi pays careful attention to detailing the scenery. A variety of trees—birch, maple, dogwood, elm, mulberry, oak and sycamore—put in appearances. These are accompanied by poison ivy and wild grass, weeds and the creatures that sneak among them. Animals of all types lurk around, native species described in all their spectacular glory.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">In some places, the story feels slow and meandering, purposeless but not irritatingly so. The occasionally sluggish, intermittent dialogue takes its sweet time to reach a point of purpose. The first half has a sort of lazy, desultory feel, redolent of languid summer days when there’s not much to do. In the second half, the pace accelerates as emotions long held in check bubble to the surface.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">A very careful exploration of the outer atmosphere, as well as the rich inner lives of her characters, The Inn by Naqvi is a novel worth reading a second time.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">***</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #181818;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">This review was </span><a href="https://www.dawn.com/news/1677098/fiction-what-matters-to-you" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: white; color: #00635d;">originally published</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;"> in </span><i style="background-color: white; color: #181818;">Books and Authors</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818;"> on 27 February, 2022.</span></span>Anum Shaharyarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07742790825147781762noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276671725093561311.post-66698895564559508732023-04-11T03:14:00.001+05:002023-04-11T03:14:32.873+05:00Of Cities and Conflicts: Sorayya Khan's 'City of Spies' makes for interesting analysis material<p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvHI4426xqn7JyLNnjtMGcIg4khMrvXSe50LYMac7OWfnpIUzdT4DNClZQnJyjzQUzo1Th1mKhDgWOwm6J2yaE8qQK9J_Ah9ODS30RL_Xox2z7Y-str_kknNFigdPDb8GdTAufLNuuF0znsOp_Jm41Pztap3SYWsJQE__tgse0H6QA7sJ0vTr0BRm3hQ/s500/36040429.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="333" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvHI4426xqn7JyLNnjtMGcIg4khMrvXSe50LYMac7OWfnpIUzdT4DNClZQnJyjzQUzo1Th1mKhDgWOwm6J2yaE8qQK9J_Ah9ODS30RL_Xox2z7Y-str_kknNFigdPDb8GdTAufLNuuF0znsOp_Jm41Pztap3SYWsJQE__tgse0H6QA7sJ0vTr0BRm3hQ/s320/36040429.jpg" width="213" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: inherit;">For years now, I’ve been reading and writing reviews, the first for longer than the latter. And one thing I noticed in every reviewer’s repertoire was that at one point or another, there would be something along the lines of ‘I took more notes on this story but my review got deleted/notes got wiped/hard drive crashed’.</span><p></p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">Well, guess it’s my turn to be burned now.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">What’s doubly frustrating about this whole business is that I had </span><span style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; font-weight: 600;">so much</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;"> to say about this book. Some stories tend to be a little one-dimensional and the sum of what I have to say about them is ‘This was absolute crap</span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">’</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">. But that wasn’t the case here. There was tons of material worth analyzing. My notes went on and on and on, and even while I was reading I knew I was going overboard, knew I would end up with a super long review, but turns out we’re going to be stuck with a super short one.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">Overall, my final impression is that it’s a good read, the equivalent of a weaker Kamila Shamsie. Shamsie does to perfection what the author has tried to achieve here: the idea of large-scale politics affecting our individual lives. While Shamsie’s </span><a href="https://thedesiwritingguide.blogspot.com/2015/07/she-had-not-thought-ofdestination-so.html" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px;">best work</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;"> tackles things at a global level, this book’s vibe felt more similar to her more localized narratives such as </span><a href="https://thedesiwritingguide.blogspot.com/2016/11/of-myths-and-money-kamila-shamsies-salt.html" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px;">Salt and Saffron</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">, another book which got a very similar rating from my end. Mostly that’s because both books had that similar thread of interesting but not enough. Just good enough to be better than the average, but not overwhelming great, even though the beginning was strong, with a sentence that hooked me completely.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915;">My parents tell me that we are defined by the wars we have lived, regardless of whether we can name them. They did not have the luxury of not knowing their wars.</i><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">The story revolves our teenaged narrator, a young girl living in Pakistan during the 1970’s, during the Cold War and Bhutto and Zia and one of Pakistan’s most tumultuous historical moments (which isn’t saying much considering how tumultuous everything that comes before and after this decade continues to be). Politics has always been an important part of a lot of Pakistani books, mainly for 2 reasons. A, because so much of our lives are ruled by it, but also B, because the kind of genres that sometimes ignore politics such as young adult, horror, romance, etc. aren’t really as pervasive in Pakistan as contemporary fiction, which relies pretty heavily on the holy trinity of religion, politics, and terrorism to form its plot. This book takes on even more, tackling nationality, language, and identity within what is essentially a very simple plot.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915;">The beginning of this story is simple if you have an eye for color, a gift for geography, and a mind for fractions. My father, Javid, is brown and Pakistani; my mother, Irene, is white and Dutch; and my siblings and I are half-and-halfs.</i><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">A huge part of the story is about belonging: belonging to a country, and what the connotations of that belonging are. Because our narrator is what she herself calls a ‘half-and-half’, there is an overwhelming sense of discomfort that she attests to while living in Pakistan but studying in an American school. Personally, I didn’t really care for the first person perceptive, or maybe it was just because it had been so long since I had read a really good narrative written in such a manner, but I felt uncomfortable through a significant portion of the story. Sometimes that was also because I didn’t believe such a young narrator could harbor the kind of nuanced thoughts that usually adults view the world through. I don’t mean to be disparaging of younger protagonists and usually argue for intricacy in the inner lives of teenagers, but there’s a difference between the thought process of an adult and a child that the author seemed unable to balance quite properly in a few scenes. Still, overall the book presented an admirable level of complexity in its characters and plot, enough to paint the world grey instead of its usual black and white.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915;">As a rule, truth is as wide and all-encompassing as you let it be, and there is always more of it.</i><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">Anything else I have to say about this book is going to be vague and unreferenced, because of the deleted notes fiasco mentioned earlier. I do remember that there were lots and lots of local references, in a manner that particularly warmed my very desi heart. Growing up, I read a copious amount of western literature, which mentioned in numerous ways western books, tv shows, songs, and on and on. So it was great to see how very particular to the region this book was: all the street names, shops, clothing brands, even very tiny stuff like the butter they used or the drinks they drank were things I knew and recognized, which made me particularly happy, which made me feel very seen.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">There was also a wealth of material on languages which I am particularly miffed about losing, because the book addresses the complexities of being bilingual without being didactic, which I am a particular fan of. Honestly, I feel like this book lends itself really well to the possibility of being a thesis subject, purely because there’s so much to discuss here. Even beyond languages, there are conversations about what separates the rich from the poor, or what it means to be of a particular skin colour. Patriotism is also an oft-mentioned conversation topic, with characters frequently questioning what it means to love a country, even in the face of all its multiple flaws.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915;">My home is a barrage of headlines. You see, my country is at war. My cities are burning. My capital is a police checkpoint where journalists disappear.</i><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">I’m not sure if the author meant for it to be read as such but featuring Islamabad as the City of Spies is a clever twist on Karachi’s oft-used title of City of Lights. This is one of the few points I managed to remember from the original notes I took, none of which exist anymore, and so we are going to have to stop here. Overall, I recommend this book as a one time read, good for a lazy afternoon and better still if a friend has read it so you can discuss the complexities together. 3 stars overall.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915;">He explained that when your country called on you, it was your duty to run right back to it with arms outstretched and fall on your knees, ready to deliver whatever it needed.</i><br /></span><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915;"><br /></i></span></div>Anum Shaharyarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07742790825147781762noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276671725093561311.post-40519080071627376642023-04-03T23:41:00.000+05:002023-04-03T23:41:17.378+05:00Of Science and Screwballs: Sidra Sheikh's 'The Light Blue Jumper' doesn't deliver on its promise of good speculative fiction<p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8N_7iZOazMwG0o0rkT9AHWKb1znowVumaU6ljwOJYN9E44q2EcDpmAkkNv3pq_UIEjy4QRaMI6-6wyL00DvW3FdxqWISY2x5kx0ju13jWDfMG9bMJ5Eyq-p6WUezDlUBPlcrIPuQuoT1eTq57RpyuBXj6KGOeo8rR9GitWNGWf475-PZPiJ0KBdQQ2A/s500/35604150.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="337" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8N_7iZOazMwG0o0rkT9AHWKb1znowVumaU6ljwOJYN9E44q2EcDpmAkkNv3pq_UIEjy4QRaMI6-6wyL00DvW3FdxqWISY2x5kx0ju13jWDfMG9bMJ5Eyq-p6WUezDlUBPlcrIPuQuoT1eTq57RpyuBXj6KGOeo8rR9GitWNGWf475-PZPiJ0KBdQQ2A/s320/35604150.jpg" width="216" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: inherit;">This book is what you call a good idea with a really bad execution. I went into it so excitedly, primarily because I loved the cover art, but also because desi science fiction! What a rare treat! Instead, what I got was a plot so convoluted I had given up at around the halfway mark. Not because there were too many threads to take care of, but just because the absolute zaniest things kept happening.</span><p></p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915;">I was suddenly compressed like I was being squeezed out of a tube of toothpaste. My head felt like it would explode. As this is a very real possibility, given the history of my people, I was alarmed to say the least. To add to my woes, I had lost all feeling in my limbs.<br style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px;" />I later realised that was the case because I had, in fact, lost all my limbs. Hence the lack of feeling was a natural consequence and not at all alarming, nor surprising, in the least.</i><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">I got the weirdest feeling that the author had tried to create the wackiness one can see in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a truly bizarre book that left me quite entertained. Unfortunately, this book did not leave me entertained at all. What it did leave me with was a steadily rising desire to just finish it already, with me regularly cursing my inability to leave a book halfway through, if only so I wouldn’t have to suffer anymore.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">It is at this point in any review that I would attempt to explain what the plot of the story was, but honestly almost half of it went over my head, just because I simply no longer cared what was happening. I was slightly aware of the story a few pages into the book, when an alien creature met resistance fighters and unwittingly got embroiled in their mostly mad uprising efforts. This brief spell of comprehension only lasted up until, I believe, page 45, after which I gave up entirely and just kept reading for the sake of finishing the novel. If you asked me now who the IPF were, or what the objective of the puranas was supposed to be, or even what happened in the end, I literally couldn’t tell you.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915;">Our objectives would be to discover the latest IPF weaponry and plans, identify their top leadership, and find their connection to the Puranas.</i><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">I mean. If you say so.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915;">I was beginning to understand his game plan.</i><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">Reader, I assure you. I understood none of it.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">I get that I’m making the book sound like a complete and total failure of a reading experience, but there </span><span style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; font-weight: 600;">were</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;"> some funny parts, which are honestly the only reason this book managed to be okay instead of being the absolute worst. Amidst all the ridiculousness, which was by far the majority of what was going on in the book, there were scenes which made me snort. This was most definitely due to the fact that I have a very lame sense of humour, which is very in line with the jokes this book indulges in. And because I have loved the works of authors such as Douglas Adams or Tom Holt, my mind was prepared for the sort of silly, over-the-top, mostly madcap jokes that dotted the narrative.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915;">A hush fell over the audience as the master of ceremonies spoke from the well-lit stage. “Welcome, great leaders of the Universe, our allies and our friends. As you know, we are all here for one reason and one reason alone; to promote world peace!” A groan went up from the audience, coupled with a few boos, at which he adjusted his silver bouffant and hastily continued, “By promoting new and powerful weapons!” At that there was enthusiastic applause from the audience, in which we joined heartily.</i><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">There were also some attempts, mostly weak, at world building, which I appreciated but could not get into, mostly because they felt so tacked on. Moments such as the encounters between characters belonging to different planets showed that the author had spent at least a few seconds trying to think of ways to make a new and interesting world. It was just sad that it wasn’t a full fleshed-out universe but rather a disparate set of locations that came and went with such minimal fanfare I can hardly remember any distinct qualities of even a single setting in the book. This is a rather large fail for a science fiction book, where the world the author builds, with its various cultures, clothes, languages, or even settings, is as important as the characters that live in it.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915;">“Greetings,” I said, and extended my hand.<br style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px;" />“Welcome to Zaaron, I mean Dephron,” he mumbled shyly, putting a pebble in it.<br style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px;" />“Zaaronian custom?” I whispered to Dinaara.<br style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px;" />“No, I think he wasn’t quite sure what to do with your hand.”<br style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px;" />Then the funny creature suddenly reached out and tweaked my nose.<br style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px;" />“That was Zaaronian custom,” Dinaara whispered back.</i><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">For a science fiction novel, there was also some science, enough to be visible but rare enough to not count. There were spaceships and retractor beams and shields, but most of it was so perfunctory so as to be redundant. Which is sad because science fiction just has so much potential! Think of the limitless possibilities. But beyond a superficial mention of travelling at warp speed or memory stealing machines, there is barely any attempt at exploring the depths of a futuristic universe. I’m not even asking for a very detailed, painstaking look at each machine’s inner workings within the story, but the sort of casual tone the story takes makes it clear that the author was hoping the humour would help gloss over its insubstantial and mostly invisible science.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915;">“The broadcast range for Spaceradio.fm is fairly limited. We will not be able to reach the kingdoms or any planet in the outer rims.”</i><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">All of this is very sad because, just like with any other science fiction title, there were multiple possibilities of actual commentary which the author truly missed. To be fair, maybe there were some moments of smart social discourse that I neglected to pay attention to purely because I had given up having any real investment in the book’s rapidly disintegrating narrative arc. But given that there is one apparently evil power and others trying to stop whole planets from being controlled, the overall theme of the book seemed to fit into what science fiction, as a whole, tries to address: the idea of the Colonizing power, and those under its hegemony. It just didn’t do it well enough to be convincing.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915;">We would be the leaders of the New World, a free, fair and better world for every race. With that in mind, this was but a small sacrifice made by few for the betterment of many.</i><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">And even if I had been convinced, the plot was simply too convoluted to stay invested for long. I mean, there’s wacky, and then there’s ‘you’re-trying-too-hard’, and this book definitely tumbled over headfirst into the second category. Time travel popped up. So did alternate universes. At one point there was a machine that implanted memories from one person into another. And did one of the characters randomly just turn into a spider?</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915;">I found him curled up on a sofa in an office of sorts. As I smiled through my mask, he changed into a blue spider.</i><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">I think I could have forgiven a significant part of the book’s flaws if there had been a greater amount of South Asian representation in the story, which was what had me excited in the first place. But there was barely anything to distinguish this book from any other sub-par science fiction book published in any other country. Except for some random mentions of Chicken Tikka masala, there really wasn’t anything that could make you feel like the characters were desi. Of course, one could argue that in a setting that’s literally on another planet, national identity doesn’t matter, which would have been a fair point if the world building had been so intricate so as to convince me that there was no need for any desi-ness to be visible in the first place.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915;">I ate it without complaint, thinking wistfully of my wife’s cooking skills. If only I could get hold of some chicken tikka masala from somewhere, it would make everything palatable.</i><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">So, to summarize: not worth reading. I’d say stick to waiting until someone like Usman Tanveer Malik writes a full-length novel, because great South Asian science fiction is not to be found here. I went in with an open mind, but the urge to be snarky was too hard to resist right about the point where I realized that the rebel movement in the book was called ‘The Rebel Movement’. If really lame humour and convoluted plots are your thing, give it a go, otherwise this one can be missed.</span><br /></span><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;"><br /></span></span></div>Anum Shaharyarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07742790825147781762noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276671725093561311.post-72207536491604771662023-03-30T21:23:00.003+05:002023-03-30T21:23:53.047+05:00Of War and Violence: Nadeem Aslam's 'The Wasted Vigil' deserves a longer discussion<p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915;"></i></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8TPbLptx-8YAe1URJwo8g5A6Cm4DS2bsDmhc1q0bySW6zEuaSA7QJ525MTddtHAvV9XIfS4k8xew6G8EdhcvpCdhGmBOHK4zysS_nun14YguR8FVTGLwCT6SBu845FvcZjmhjrrYuTuWv6TttlgUbZi8hkY-Rnh1_HrINW7LJ31D4qS2cAwMR5ohxig/s279/download.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="279" data-original-width="181" height="279" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8TPbLptx-8YAe1URJwo8g5A6Cm4DS2bsDmhc1q0bySW6zEuaSA7QJ525MTddtHAvV9XIfS4k8xew6G8EdhcvpCdhGmBOHK4zysS_nun14YguR8FVTGLwCT6SBu845FvcZjmhjrrYuTuWv6TttlgUbZi8hkY-Rnh1_HrINW7LJ31D4qS2cAwMR5ohxig/s1600/download.jpg" width="181" /></a></div>“This is among the few things that can be said about love with any confidence. It is small enough to be contained within the heart but, pulled thin, it would drape the entire world.”</i></span><p></p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">The Wasted Vigil is the type of book I felt blown away by while reading, even though two months down the line not only will I not remember why I was so amazed, I probably won’t even remember what it was about. This happens with books that might not emotionally change me, but are so well-written or say something so interesting that I’m forced to take a momentary pause to just appreciate the idea, or the emotion, or the placement of words. In the past it used to happen so regularly that when making a list of my top ten favourite books of the year to share with my best friend, we started making two separate lists: one for books that we felt emotional about, and another for books that might not connect with us but were so smart, or spoke from such a completely new perspective that we wanted to shove the book at the other person and say, ‘Read it so we can discuss!”</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">This is the kind of book I want to read a smart analysis of, because there’s a lot of material in here to discuss. In all honesty, most books about war and Afghanistan and America pack lots of content worth poring over, even if it’s just to see whether the representation is valid or if the opinions are skewed. And it’s entirely possible that there’s a lot of problematic content within this book, but I enjoyed it, so until someone disabuses me of that opinion, I shall carry on with that sentiment.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915;">This country was one of the greatest tragedies of the age. Torn to pieces by the man hands of war, by the various hatreds and failings of the world. Two million deaths over the past quarter-century.</i><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">Primarily, this book is about suffering, and that too of a very specific type of suffering: that caused by war. Even though the narrative focuses more on the intricate relationships between our multiple protagonists, almost all the relationships and by extension the actions and reactions of all our characters are guided by the fact that they are present in Afghanistan in a horrible moment of time for the country.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915;">David had heard the truck explode from a mile away. Elsewhere he would have thought it was thunder, but in this country he knew what it was, what it had to be.</i><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">What’s interesting (or, one could argue, problematic) is that for a major part of this book we view the war through the eyes of foreigners, even if some of them have been in Afghanistan for a while. Marcus, an aged widower from Britain and one of the focal points of this story, has been living in Afghanistan for ages, a Muslim convert who lost both his wife Qatrina as well as his daughter Zameen to the patriarchal horrors of brutality. Our narrative starts when a Russian woman named Lara arrives from Saint Petersburg looking for her soldier brother who disappeared during the Soviet invasion. It is in looking for her brother, and in the connections that slowly spool open as the writing progresses, that we see the true mastery of Nadeem Aslam. Even though he takes his sweet time drawing out the past and present and how it all connects, and one could easily get confused between what had happened to which individual character out of the multiple important ones in this story, I couldn’t help but keep reading, even when I had to flip back to check which character we were actually talking about.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915;">“Only the dead have seen the end of war.”</i><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">Each character that gets introduced eventually finds their way into Marcus and Lara’s story, from American ex-spy David to young jihadist Casa, or from local schoolteacher Dunia to the Special Forces soldier James. All of them are part of a wider story of which they form intersecting points, overlapping in sometimes good and mostly bad ways. But what Nadeem Aslam does really well is to at least try to give each character some complexity.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">Of course, the book has lots of things to say about religion and oppression and basic human cruelty, most of which was horrible and depressing. Religion clearly doesn’t resonate with Aslam, who uses it mainly to explain how acts of brutality are justified by a large number of people. Although one could argue that this book is based in an era where the Taliban abused religion to carry out their strongest perversions, surely a narrative which can’t provide a nuanced look from all angles is weak in certain aspects? At any rate, I’m sure that there are </span><a href="https://writersmakeworlds.com/essay-aslam-wasted-vigil/" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px;">lots</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;"> </span><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/oct/12/fiction2" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px;">of</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;"> </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/11/books/chapters/chap-wasted-vigil.html" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px;">people</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;"> out there who are smarter, more informed, and better at vocalizing their opinions than me on the intricacies of representation within this book. I’d be willing to have a smart discussion about this, and am most certainly open to changing my opinion about the book itself, but until then I’ll have to make do with my sleep deprived, read-it-in-chunks version of a review.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915;">A public spectacle after the Friday prayers, the stoning of a sixty-one-year-old adulteress. A rain of bricks and rocks, her punishment for living in sin, the thirty-nine-year marriage to Marcus void in the eyes of the Taliban because the ceremony had been conducted by a female. A microphone had been placed close to her for her screams to be heard clearly by everyone.</i><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">What this story does really well though is to stress, again and again, on how senseless and full of malice war can be. All the characters involved are not only flawed, they are also in trouble, or have been in trouble, or have suffered a sort of meaningless indignity in a fight that they didn’t even start. I’d be revealing too many spoilers if I mentioned them here, but suffice is to say that Aslam takes what is a larger narrative and uses a very small one to give it depth and life. Things that happened on a global scale are suddenly personal, and described well enough to make it all seem so very real.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915;">“The Cold War was cold only for the rich and privileged places of the planet.”</i><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">It’s true that the book makes liberal references to other stories, to literature that I haven</span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">’</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">t read and myths that I don’t know of. But unlike other instances where I might have gotten irritated by this constant allusion to things I didn’t understand, for some reason within this story it felt fine. Maybe because it was all done so naturally, and because with every reference I didn’t feel the need to a google search, but the mention of unknown literature didn’t feel as uncomfortable as it could have.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915;">Both sides in Homer’s war, when they arrive to collect their dead from the battlefield, weep freely in complete sight of each other. Sick at heart. This is what Marcus wants, the tears of one side fully visible to the other.</i><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">The only very visible issue with this book was that the ending was quite abrupt. Usually I prefer a clean, proper ending which grants me closure and helps me let go of the characters so that there’s a smooth transition to my next book. But over here a lot of things feel like they were wrapped up hastily, or like the author suddenly realized he was running way past his designated word limit and tried to finish it all up quickly. Which might be one of the reasons why I dropped it from a five to a four star rating.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">Overall though, I still enjoyed it pretty thoroughly. I might have read it in fits and bursts, and I probably won’t read it again, but in terms of recommendations, I’d suggest that everyone give this a go, at least once. Worth the read.</span></span><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;"><br /></span></span></div>Anum Shaharyarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07742790825147781762noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276671725093561311.post-29892051400584994222023-03-27T21:07:00.004+05:002023-05-02T01:02:01.501+05:00Of Djinn and Duologies Part Two: Sami Shah's 'Earth Boy' is a nice conclusion to a fun story<p><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnql3tGqWNBjX4R8aFlRbBL8cT_bWq1mRPNZEFUORfFsyboY8wSMp1bHRtL-1Fi5Mg8Mbbid--7VEBCdWKSYT5dpUut1-GkelT1ZpKNq6p6_1sU8aazy__cc6q3oO6CXDwpfdYx9jcox-HTn0FxLdh30JbUKXoEakPXx0zvUX4e7Vbg73oqcFNWlsbqA/s475/earth%20boy.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="475" data-original-width="308" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnql3tGqWNBjX4R8aFlRbBL8cT_bWq1mRPNZEFUORfFsyboY8wSMp1bHRtL-1Fi5Mg8Mbbid--7VEBCdWKSYT5dpUut1-GkelT1ZpKNq6p6_1sU8aazy__cc6q3oO6CXDwpfdYx9jcox-HTn0FxLdh30JbUKXoEakPXx0zvUX4e7Vbg73oqcFNWlsbqA/s320/earth%20boy.jpg" width="207" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: inherit;">I can honestly say that I’m really disappointed I didn’t review this book sooner. I read it ages ago and I took my sweet time procrastinating, which means I don’t remember any of the notes I made – mentally, of course – while I read it. Which now means I don’t remember all of the completely valid, very relevant things I had to say about this.</span><p></p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">The reason this is a shame is because there’s lots and lots of stuff to talk about in this book. With its status as a rare fantasy entry in a country which primarily deals in contemporary fiction about religion and terrorism and global politics, it’s inevitable that Sami Shah’s work would produce ample material for me to pour over. Not only that, but this is a fascinating title, full of very interesting creatures that Shah has taken the time to research and incorporate.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915;">Wahid and Iblis walked through the hole in the wall, and into another world.</i><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">I mean, take Iblis, for example. In Islamic theology, Iblis is just another name for the devil, which means we start off our second part of this duology with the hero setting off on a journey into an unknown world with the devil by his side. Imagining a set-up as cool as this and then delivering is something that Shah does well, pulling in multiple other creatures into his story. However, the fact that most of the story line is largely episodic is also one of this book’s major flaws, with Wahid moving from an encounter with one creature to another completely different one. While this means that the world building itself is interesting, the narrative arc gets somewhat affected, making it weak and not holding as much interest as a single, fluid story line would have.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915;">‘I’m scared, if that makes you feel any better.’<br style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px;" />‘Thank you, I suppose it will have to do.’</i><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">The female characters also continue to serve absolutely no purpose, with Maheen, the girl whose soul Wahid has set out to save, existing only as a reward for the hero to attain at the end of this journey. Wahid’s mother is equally pointless, which is a sad turn of affairs, because unlike the usual clichéd formula of orphaned heroes in famous ‘Hero Journey’ stories Joseph Campbell-style (Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker, etc.), our protagonist actually has a living, breathing parent who could provide solace and comfort. Conveniently, Wahid is gallivanting around looking for a lost soul for pretty much the entirety of this story, while his mother must (one guesses) run around looking for her lost son worried to death.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">What also doesn’t help move our story along is the fact that Wahid is a singularly pointless character, unable to save himself in any situation whatsoever without help. Quite late in the story does the Dues ex machina kick in, with Wahid’s hitherto undiscovered powers suddenly appearing from nowhere, at the right time in conveniently the right place. In fact, a lot of times it is Wahid getting saved by either another creature, or by his suddenly discovered powers that enable him to get away unscathed. Funnily enough, for a book that fits best in the genre of bildungsroman, there is very little growth in the main character. At best, the only thing that improves in the book is the unending variety in the creatures we meet.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915;">‘That’s why most people probably think djinns live in lamps and grant wishes dressed in turbans. It certainly stops them fearing us. Not like they used to in the old days.’</i><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">I said it in my </span><a href="http://thedesiwritingguide.blogspot.com/2018/09/of-djinn-and-duologies-sami-shahs-fire.html" rel="nofollow noopener" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; outline: 0px;">review for the first part of this duology</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;"> and I feel like I should say it again: major props are due to Sami Shah for attempting to incorporate most of what desis understand about supernatural creatures, which is an overlapping of religion and culture and history into one messy, amalgamated sort of folklore we all hear about in late night story-telling sessions. Even more importantly, he doesn’t get scared of referencing what one can argue is a very major proponent of all the stories Pakistanis grow up hearing: the belief that jinns are real, based on the teachings of the Quran. Given that there is a whole surah in that holy book about the creatures and how they most definitely exist, lots of Pakistani kids grow up being told that jinn aren’t a figment of an over-imaginative imagination, but rather creatures who choose to remain invisible, but who might be lurking at the very next corner. Given how huge a part the Quran plays in our beliefs in supernatural creatures, I’m glad Sami Shah has incorporated it into the dialogue as well.</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><i style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915;">‘Religion is a changing thing. It evolves, if you will. The core belief may be the same. The Quran is unchanging after all. But the interpretations? Those shift and morph according to the moods of the time.’</i><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;">I really, truly can’t talk about this book anymore given that I barely remember it. But what I do remember is enjoying it, and wanting to tell my best friend to read it, if only so we could discuss it the next time we met. For that, I’m going to give this book a ‘recommended’ rating, and hope that Sami Shah continues to churn out more of the same, maybe with a slightly better protagonist. Maybe even a female one?</span><br style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e1915; margin: 0px;" /></span><div><span face=""Proxima Nova", Montserrat, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #1e1915;"><br /></span></div>Anum Shaharyarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07742790825147781762noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276671725093561311.post-55609952366169918572022-10-24T19:36:00.006+05:002023-05-16T20:00:30.988+05:00Of Babies and Butchery: Dur e Aziz Amina's 'You Get What Is Yours' is one of the better Salam Award winners<p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjt81E2-0wHLMu7SNLVK4hcmU6AaudeQn2YExwlusoV00VBKPr2Fo8ejWoAlCmCsFAPqRRSgHpcTEM7tk9p-sA5s7FtCxHvsgin-_q_TLDK1zsL7CFcei71oYzrY0FnSnDwcItGYJOhxCg3JDBh1mx_I_ofpx49PdhcNeJPkr-U6PD03UDnKbVhE_CuPA" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img alt="" data-original-height="427" data-original-width="640" height="214" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjt81E2-0wHLMu7SNLVK4hcmU6AaudeQn2YExwlusoV00VBKPr2Fo8ejWoAlCmCsFAPqRRSgHpcTEM7tk9p-sA5s7FtCxHvsgin-_q_TLDK1zsL7CFcei71oYzrY0FnSnDwcItGYJOhxCg3JDBh1mx_I_ofpx49PdhcNeJPkr-U6PD03UDnKbVhE_CuPA" width="320" /></span></a></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #666666; font-family: inherit;"><span>This is part four of reviewing short stories which won </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://thesalamaward.com/" style="font-style: normal;" target="_blank">The Salam Award for Imaginative Fiction</a></i><span>, which promotes science fiction and related genres of writing in Pakistan, and includes everything from regular science fiction and steampunk to magic realism and weird fiction. 'You Get What Is Yours' was the fifth winner. Reviews for the other winners can be found </span><a href="https://thedesiwritingguide.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20Salam%20Award%20for%20Imaginative%20Fiction" target="_blank">here</a><span>. </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit;">That’s
how the past works—after a house has burned down, who can tell where the first
match was struck.<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit;">The fifth Salam Award winner is a short
story that manages to have what the previous ones didn’t even come close to
achieving: the decency of actually having a coherent plot. And while allowing
the readers to connect the dots from start to finish would seem, to some, to be
the most basic requirement of any story, it felt like those writing for this award
as well as those involved in selecting the winners were taking this simple
necessity as more of a casual formality, which is the main reason why I was so
pleasantly surprised by this particular tale. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit;">I
knew that was the night destinies were written, and I knew what the writers
of destiny thought of unborn demons that grew inside unmarried
women. <o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit;">Dur-e-Aziz Amina has written a good story,
albeit one that mostly follows the lines set down by the earlier ones in terms
of themes. Honestly, a month later I’ve all but forgotten all of the preceding prize winners already, which should give you some idea of how
interesting they were. But what I do remember are the vague threads of religion
and agency interspersed in the lives of their female characters, who are the
protagonists of each winning tale. Which makes it even more baffling that I
didn’t like any of them, since I’m usually pretty highly inclined to tilt
pleasantly towards tales with female characters dominating the narrative. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit;">I
have never been with a man, but I can tell you this—women are a much deeper
joy. We eat simply and dance joyously. Do you know that when the drummer hits
the <span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">dhol</span> on the men’s
side, no one dances more than I do? <span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Veeray</span>,
you can’t understand this, but if any man saw his wife in here, I bet he would
not recognize her for the bliss on her face.<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit;">As a tale, this fifth winner is pretty
well done. Easy to read, and short enough to swallow without getting boring, it
still manages to pack a punch. Told from the point of view of a woman telling
another the whole story, our setting is a Sufi shrine in Multan where a female
saint, highly unorthodox as a saint because of her gender, takes a vow of
chastity in order to appease the community into letting her keep her elevated status,
and then promptly gets pregnant.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit;">As a devotee and the main caretaker of the
saint in this story, our protagonist, Safia, doesn’t really show much of her
personality throughout. Instead, most of the story revolves around the Saint
herself, and the ways in which people, especially women, come to these places
to ask the saints to intercede on their behalf with Allah for all manners of
things.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit;">“<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Behnee</span>, you weep so much, no wonder
our river is drying up,” I say, and they laugh, as if suddenly remembering that
they can do that—turn their sorrows into demented joy. Then they make jokes
about their husbands’ shriveled penises, their rotund mothers-in-law, the
children they love dearly but sometimes want to smother with pillows.<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit;">Writing about shrines isn’t a new and original
move by any stretch for a Pakistani author, and we can easily find mentions of
such practices in every one out of five South Asian books. However, the
argument that one must create something new and original is by no means a
requirement of good storytelling. After all, most stories are just different amalgamations
of the same few elements in different ways, and if every Pakistani tale is
stereotyped as being obsessed with religion or corruption, what matters is how the
same old repetitive themes are covered. In the former winners of this
award, religion was as faithfully mentioned as it is in this short tale, but
because I was so bored during the reading of them, it didn’t feel worth talking
about. Over here, Amina also incorporates the presence of religious teachings
into her narrative, in a manner that initially used to shock me, but has now made me
realize that jolting readers through contentious Islamic content is a thing a
lot of desi writers seem to be enamoured with. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit;">Look,
I know what brings these women to the shrine. It is what brought me
here, all those years ago. Islam tells us to pray five times a day, but
should I count for you the number of times I have seen anyone on a prayer mat
in my fifteen years here? I could, and it would take mere seconds. There’s a
reason our beloved Bibo Mai’s forehead creases slightly when anyone talks too
much about Allah. If Allah were enough, why would we be here? <o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Of
course, the usual issues that bother me, and bothered me so maddeningly in the aforementioned tales, were also present here to some degree. Not only was the italicization
all over the place, but there were also random editing errors that made me want
to pull my hair out in frustration. This, then, is the reason why Pakistani literature
awards can never hope to compete on a global level, because stupid mistakes in proofreading
and editing are absolutely inexcusable when you’re working with such high
stakes. If we’re ever hoping to create a name for ourselves with our
literature, if we’re going to claim that winning these awards carries real
prestige, we simply can’t allow such silly blunders to be so visibly present
where these award-winners are displayed. Stories can allow for interpretations.
Insufferably bad editing simply cannot. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit;">But
how could she not care forherself?<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit;">All in all, a good enough tale, nothing
that I’d jump up and down in excitement about, but also so much better than the earlier winners that it shines in comparison. With this review done, we’re now reaching
this year’s winner, and I have all my fingers and all my toes crossed that the
latest offering will, hopefully, optimistically, prove to be the best. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Men want our bodies, but they don’t want
to know what happens inside them.</span><o:p></o:p></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p>Anum Shaharyarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07742790825147781762noreply@blogger.comKarachi, Pakistan24.8607343 67.0011364-3.4494995361788447 31.844886399999993 53.170968136178843 102.1573864tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276671725093561311.post-88645102753293408192022-09-21T11:49:00.004+05:002023-04-19T23:43:45.017+05:00Of Stories and Staleness: Nihal Ijaz Khan's 'The Smokecense of Pluvistan' feels like squandered potential<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyorun9-cXOnJb7wCxjX_5xnBRxFlFczgjUeWlr1DsDH02okiDvqi0ZU7uUQr9GtdwnzqkvVRFFXpBkZiOwZG-Y4beWZ8il03OaokqPZk3D1U79-ntMUyRBFvr4McAkSrQyEz-AEb633GPTBnwJOnF87pCEMyzp3CdBUKYZEQ7DFi0bDRqkbOKf6DPcQ/s640/short%20story%20salam%20award.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: left;"><span style="color: black;"><img border="0" data-original-height="426" data-original-width="640" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyorun9-cXOnJb7wCxjX_5xnBRxFlFczgjUeWlr1DsDH02okiDvqi0ZU7uUQr9GtdwnzqkvVRFFXpBkZiOwZG-Y4beWZ8il03OaokqPZk3D1U79-ntMUyRBFvr4McAkSrQyEz-AEb633GPTBnwJOnF87pCEMyzp3CdBUKYZEQ7DFi0bDRqkbOKf6DPcQ/s320/short%20story%20salam%20award.jpg" width="320" /></span></a><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #999999;">This is part three of reviewing short stories which
won <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://thesalamaward.com/" style="font-family: helvetica; font-style: normal;" target="_blank">The Salam Award for Imaginative Fiction</a></i>, which promotes science
fiction and related genres of writing in Pakistan, and includes everything from
regular science fiction and steampunk to magic realism and weird fiction. 'The
Smokecense of Pluvistan' was the fourth winner. Reviews for the other winners can be found <a href="https://thedesiwritingguide.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20Salam%20Award%20for%20Imaginative%20Fiction" target="_blank">here</a>. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">I really really wanted to like this story. Primarily because
I want to support the Salam Award and what it stands for, but also because I
thought the first two winners just plain sucked. Unfortunately, I’m one short
story away from giving up on this award as a whole.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><div style="text-align: left;"><i>“Is hunger a forever
thing, Papa?”</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><br /></i></div></i><div style="text-align: left;">Once again, the best I can say is that there were <b>some </b>good parts. Admittedly few, and
mostly hard to find, but they were lingering here and there. Buried under a
story that literally made no sense to me. And while I get that the magical, dream-like,
allegorical strands of storytelling that can exist in this type of genre are
meant to be read between the lines, there were points where I literally
couldn’t understand what was happening. That is something I <b>have</b>, in fact, encountered before in
the works of South Asian writers such as Usman Tanweer Malik, whose <a href="https://thedesiwritingguide.blogspot.com/2015/08/of-sci-fi-and-family-ties-usman-t.html" target="_blank">The Vaporization Enthalpy of a Peculiar Pakistani Family</a><b> </b>made almost no
sense. But the difference between this story and <a href="https://thedesiwritingguide.blogspot.com/search/label/Usman%20Tanveer%20Malik" target="_blank">Malik’s works</a> is that
Malik had a greater degree of control over his craft, whereas Nihal Ijaz Khan
clearly doesn’t.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Usually at this stage in a review I’d try to at least
summarize what the story was about in order to convey some sort of idea about
what a reader could expect, but in this case I’m drawing a complete blank. A
man and his daughter roam around some sort of magical land where there’s rain
and then sunlight, and there was something about his wife’s bloated toe, and
hunger, and an injured dog, and what was that about the heaventree again? I
couldn’t tell you, because I have absolutely no idea. Even the worldbuilding
was confused and all over the place, and elicited all sorts of frustrated
ramblings from me at my friend about the ethics of using one language (Urdu, in
this case) as a tool in a tale told in another language (English).</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><div style="text-align: left;"><i>The elders, who were
called Buzurghs, scavenged the Pind in search of prayer signatures and
parties to sermonize. </i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><br /></i></div></i><div style="text-align: left;">This quirky little trick of building up your world by using
Urdu words as proper nouns is something I’ve noticed in <a href="https://thedesiwritingguide.blogspot.com/2021/04/of-queens-and-qissas-usman-t-maliks.html" target="_blank">works by other South Asian writers</a> as well, but it doesn’t get any less irritating. At the beginning
I just considered it lazy writing. After all, how convenient if, for example,
instead of making up a specific name for the elders in a community, we can just
say they are called ‘Buzurghs’? How easy, but also how ridiculously uncreative!
Because sometimes the best part of reading fantasy or supernatural as a genre
is the absolutely fantastical ways in which authors can set up the worlds which
our characters inhabit. Using words from Urdu used to feel like a cop-out, although
I’m now starting to wonder, could it be a compliment? Do these authors think
they’re adding an extra layer of representation by putting in these little sign
posts for desi readers and desi readers only to understand? Should I be
flattered to know that if an author calls the village birth attendants ‘Dai’, I
know, as an Urdu speaker, that Dai is literally the word for the midwife in my
mothertongue?</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><div style="text-align: left;"><i>Human breaths slipped
out from their lungs to settle under their skin, and when a group of </i>Dais<i>, the village birth attendants, swore upon witnessing a newborn
slipping out from a mother’s womb as a distillation of smoke, the
Buzurghs finally announced it was the end of life.</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><br /></i></div></i><div style="text-align: left;">I’m not sure. I’m not sure at all, so I’m going to do what
I’ve been doing so far, that is, engage in long-winded debates with my friends to
try to find a solution to this pernickety little thing that I can’t let go of.
Just like my inability to be at peace with the italicization of text in any
story whatsoever, and what style guide was being followed. Usually, as a rule most
publishers will italicize the word that belongs to another language. But if a
South Asian author is using Buzurgh as a proper noun, then it can’t be
italicized, because it is then part of the world building. In which case, why
was the word ‘Dai’ italicized in this story? And more importantly, why are the
editors of these short stories so useless at their jobs?</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><o:p style="font-style: italic;"><div style="text-align: left;"><i>In those days, as they
shuffled in the vacuumed streets, waiting for their meals from the sun showers
that had grown infrequent, Mumtaz often wondered if they were last humans
alive.</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><br /></i></div></o:p><div style="text-align: left;">I mean, actual words were missing from sentences. It’s a
short story. That won an award. Up on the official website. How are these basic
mistakes slipping through the cracks? I feel like the more I wanted to support
this award and what it stood for, the more I found reasons to be disillusioned
with its prestige. Even improper comma placement, which I generally find easier
to ignore since it can sometimes be subjective, bothered me to no end, and my
usual generosity in terms of forgiving unwieldy editing found itself at its
limits.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><div style="text-align: left;"><i>Streets, which one day
were narrow and muddy and abutted by nests of hawkers and the limbs of
encroaching houses would next be eroded into barren, swollen plateaus. </i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><br /></i></div></i><div style="text-align: left;">I think the thing that frustrated me the most was the fact that
the story had the potential to be good. In pretty much the same vein as the
other Salam award-winners, this one also felt like it could have been something
better, if only with a little bit of pointed guidance. Even convoluted
plotlines and obscure worldbuilding can be forgiven in a story that feels
purposeful and entertaining, such as Usman T. Malik’s <a href="https://thedesiwritingguide.blogspot.com/2016/05/i-think-best-advice-one-can-give-for.html" target="_blank">Pauper Prince</a>, my
favourite example of a story that makes little sense but still manages to
engage its readers. Fairly odd stuff I’m willing to wade through, but the fact
that it’s so boring is what makes the whole endeavour truly depressing. At one
point during the reading of this story I actually had to shift tabs and
mindlessly scroll through social media to wake myself up before I could get
back to forcing myself to finish it. On the whole, I’d say give this a miss.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>Anum Shaharyarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07742790825147781762noreply@blogger.comKarachi, Pakistan24.8607343 67.0011364-3.4494995361788447 31.844886399999993 53.170968136178843 102.1573864tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6276671725093561311.post-59891829373054988762022-09-13T16:11:00.005+05:002023-04-19T23:42:02.662+05:00Of Awards and Awkwardness: Kehkashan Khalid's 'The Puppetmaster' lacks cohesion and proper editing<div style="text-align: left;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEic3u65ZMWwvmu1Au3sPH3Fy-FDzX2Y-NeclgOMCR9Dxxcy0q-utj_gUhsCpQyS3cy8RicBGYTRMw5CJ_UIoU3UIlvUfsYK0pvm7v2kXFZVpLrP3m3Z4wcPmxYjsxW0nXGKcgHXfXt2IM1FosYCmxtSaQD3mF_6rrlghLiKeUj7GTk-8C0rZIXrqdxTwQ/s2048/PuppetMaster.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1500" data-original-width="2048" height="234" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEic3u65ZMWwvmu1Au3sPH3Fy-FDzX2Y-NeclgOMCR9Dxxcy0q-utj_gUhsCpQyS3cy8RicBGYTRMw5CJ_UIoU3UIlvUfsYK0pvm7v2kXFZVpLrP3m3Z4wcPmxYjsxW0nXGKcgHXfXt2IM1FosYCmxtSaQD3mF_6rrlghLiKeUj7GTk-8C0rZIXrqdxTwQ/s320/PuppetMaster.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #999999; font-family: helvetica; font-style: normal;">This is part two of reviewing short stories which won </span><a href="http://thesalamaward.com/" style="font-family: helvetica; font-style: normal;" target="_blank">The Salam Award for Imaginative Fiction</a><span style="color: #999999; font-family: helvetica; font-style: normal;">, which </span><span style="color: #999999; font-family: helvetica; font-style: normal;">promotes science fiction and related genres of writing in Pakistan, and includes everything from regular science fiction and steampunk to magic realism and weird fiction. 'The Puppetmaster' was the third winner. </span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #999999; font-family: helvetica; font-style: normal;">Reviews for the other winners can be found </span><a href="https://thedesiwritingguide.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20Salam%20Award%20for%20Imaginative%20Fiction" style="font-family: helvetica; font-style: normal;" target="_blank">here</a><span style="color: #999999; font-family: helvetica; font-style: normal;">.</span></i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><br /></i></div>On the third day, Gul
reached the end of the world.</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><br /></i>If I had thought the story which had <a href="https://thedesiwritingguide.blogspot.com/2022/09/of-prizes-and-pointlessness-firuza.html" target="_blank">won the Salam award in its first year</a> had been disappointing, that streak unfortunately
continued in its third year. And the weird thing is that the hint of
possibility that existed in the first story carried over here as well. It was <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">almost</b> good, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">almost</b> entertaining, but not enough. There was the idea of
greatness, and then it was unjustly squandered, so that all I was left with abysmal
worldbuilding, characters that couldn’t carry the narrative, and a word length
too long to keep me interested.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“As a woman, everyone
around you will always convince you your every idea is a flight of fancy. But
you’ve got to trust your intuition.”</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><br /></i>On the surface, there was lots of stuff that I really,
really liked. Strong-willed women caught in societies which look at them
weirdly for expressing different thoughts has always been a particularly favourite
trope of mine, and this story starts with our protagonist, Gul, confused by the
panels of glass she glimpses in the air above her village. The emergence of
lights in the air that no one can explain allows the story to lean into the
genre that the award is granted for, but soon any interest we might have in the
mystery of the lights gets lost in the family drama that overtakes the story
when Gul’s father reappears, having vanished years ago.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">He called her his
Shehzadi, his princess, and when he married her, he attributed all her stories
to a fanciful imagination. Until he realized, she believed some of them.</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><br /></i>Gul’s father’s vanishing, her mother’s death, her
grandmother’s secrets all play a part in tying the story closely to our main
character, but for some reason it all felt so <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">boring</b>. There was never any moment in which I actually cared about
Gul or her troubles. And one could argue that we don’t need to care about
characters to be entertained or involved in their lives, but none of that
happened either. Halfway through the story when I realized how much of it was
left I actually had to force myself to keep reading, that’s how uninterested I
was.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />It didn’t help that the world building was so haphazard, so
very weak in its very evolution. On the one hand, I loved the slowly emerging truth
of the glass slabs Gul sees in the air. On the other hand, there were so many
ways to do it better. Allowing the sci-fi portion of the story to only emerge
in the fourth quarter of the narrative was a huge disservice to the very
essence of the tale itself, because we spent way too long with the characters
and their messy lives and not enough trying to figure out the details of the
world that the author had set up. What that eventually meant was that the final
revelation, and our shift into the science portion of the story, felt very much
like a slapdash amateurish attempt at setting up a futuristic society around
our character’s personal dramas.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">PM105 had been there
when the humans breathed their last breaths. Ironically, it was no cataclysmic
war between nations that caused the end of all life. It was the hatred bred in
individual humans as they subsisted, atomized and fragmented, living life
through screens. A vast world of interconnectivity and unlimited potential, and
the humans had used it to isolate themselves to the detriment of empathy and
the complete loss of truth.</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><br /></i>No details of the story’s dystopian setting get explained properly,
brushed under the rug with some hasty descriptions of basic human villainy. Any
of the stuff that I was impressed by within the narrative so quickly got lost
within the absolute ridiculousness of the science fiction at the heart of the
tale that it actually felt disappointing to realize that all of the good
writing had essentially gone to waste. I <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">wanted</b>
to enjoy the story, and yet I was acutely dissatisfied pretty much throughout
the telling of it.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><p class="MsoNormal"><i>“I’m saying, the sky
is a glass dome!”<br />
“Is that a metaphor for feeling trapped?”<o:p></o:p></i></p></div><div style="text-align: left;">But there was something even worse than the story itself, a
factor that might have actually made my reading experience worse and affected
my enjoyment, and that was the simply godawful formatting. Someone really needs
to sit down whoever is in charge of this Award’s website and give them some tips
on how to lay out a text for the ease of the readers. Not only was the font
colour as abominably tepid grey and painful to read as ever, the actual centre
alignment of the text blew my mind. Why WHY in the name of all that is holy was
that editorial decision ever taken? I think I was too busy fixating on the font
colour when I read the first short story to notice this egregious
alignment, which might make sense when children in grade three are writing a
shape poem, but not in many other places.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /> To top it all off, my absolute favourite thing, the editor’s
incapability to decide which Urdu word to define and which one to leave alone, also
cropped up. I’ve been hitting my head against this issue for years, and it still
seems no one has managed to figure it out yet. Randomly, the word ‘bhoot’ is
used for ghost, without any explanation for the non-Urdu reader. Fine, one
could argue that context clues should be enough for decoding the text, but then
the word ghanwala is described? But paranda and mathapati aren’t? What even is
the reader supposed to think?</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The twins were
fighting over the last ghanwla, a kind of thin, sweet, crepe and pancake hybrid.</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><br /></i>As editors, these are issues that we check time and time
again. What is the level of consistency in terms of translated words, what can
the reader easily discern and what should be made clearer, where does the
writer need a little nudge and where can he or she be left alone, all these
things a discerning editor needs to keep an eye on. These issues might fly
under the radar for a reader, but usually there are multiple levels of editing
going on with every published text, which makes reading this story so
frustrating. And that’s not even beginning on the multiple copyediting issues
that littered the text. I know that commas can sometimes be
subjective, but in some cases, a comma simply doesn’t need to be there!</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">She stretched out her
arm to chase the fleeing light and hit, glass.</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><br /></i>Overall, there were just some really dumb editorial
decisions. In a sudden shift from third person to first person there were no
quote marks, no shift between lines. Honestly, even if the story had been good plot
wise, it would have lost me between all those improper comma placements and
tense changes. This story is basically the first draft that gets handed over to
an editor before it goes through three rounds of copy-editing and five rounds
of proofreading. It is amazing to me that stories with such a clear lack of
polish are winning what I had so far been assuming were prestigious awards. Either
not enough writers worthy of the craft are taking this award seriously, or I
need to seriously re-think the level of respect I have previously granted this
particular literary honour. <a href="https://thedesiwritingguide.blogspot.com/2022/09/of-prizes-and-pointlessness-firuza.html" target="_blank">2017’s winner</a> didn’t do much to win me over, and
this story only served to strengthen my low opinion. Maybe 2020’s story will change
this streak. Here’s to hoping.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>Anum Shaharyarhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07742790825147781762noreply@blogger.comKarachi, Pakistan24.8607343 67.0011364-3.4494995361788447 31.844886399999993 53.170968136178843 102.1573864