FICTION
Tale of disenchantment
AJIT DUARA
|
On the life and fortunes of a Mohajir family during the times of General Zia.
|
Azhar Abidi is very good at creating an ambience.
Twilight; Azhar Abidi, Penguin/Viking, Rs.399.
Azhar Abidi's Twilight is a Pakistani novel about regret. “Disappointment” might be a better word. Set in Karachi in the mid-1980s, the book is about a “Mohajir” family during the time of General Zia.
Bilqis Ara Begum, the matriarch of the Khan family, comes to Karachi from Calcutta, shortly after Partition. She remembers the city in Bengal with affection and nostalgia: “It was such a wonderful time. We were young and full of life. No one cared who was what. We were all Indians and that was what mattered, none of this Hindu and Muslim business.”
Plot
For Bilqis, the state of Pakistan is equated with a decline in her family fortunes. Not that she is short of money. Upper middle class with a home in Old Clifton, an elegant sea side suburb of Karachi, she potters around fussing about her son, Samad, and his marriage to Kate, an Australian. Her daughter-in-law is, at the moment, having her hands painted with henna for the wedding reception at the Sind Club. She is a pretty and polite girl from Melbourne but Bilqis is convinced that the girl has stolen her son, seduced him with her milk and honey complexion and forthright manner, taken him to a foreign country and turned his life into her own.
But these are mere disappointments. Most of Bilqis' resentment towards life is from what she sees happening to the secular state of Pakistan. The Islamisation started by General Zia has turned the country she chose at Partition into a land of the puritan zealot. Her brother, Sikander, an army officer commissioned at Calcutta who joined the newly formed Pakistan army but resigned within a year when he realised he would have to fight his old friends on the other side, now sits at his typewriter, banging away his regular column for The Dawn. He recommends a dance performance at the Alliance Francaise and suggests to his family that they should go quickly, “before the mullahs put a ban on it. They will come round to it sooner or later.”
Azhar Abidi is very good at creating an ambience. The post-Partition English-educated elite are beautifully described. When we look at Samad, born in Pakistan and his five years as a boarder at Lawrence College, Murree, that extraordinary hill station comes alive as an ageless relic from the Raj: “Time stood still there. The only sport that had gone out of fashion after the partition was rugby, and although there were more curries on the menu than there used to be, the boys still had porridge for breakfast and tea and cake in the afternoon. Every morning the gardeners put an iron roller over the cricket pitch.” What strikes one is the extraordinary similarity to relics in India — Nainital, Simla, Darjeeling — the only difference being the succumbing to postcard tourism in this part of the sub-continent.
Multiple perspectives
Abidi's narrative technique is to switch perspectives when he tells his story. So from the lens of Bilqis we change to the wider aspect ratio of Samad in Australia and thence to the filter of Bilqis's maid, Mumtaz, in the by-lanes of Karachi. When the tale is Mumtaz's, we drop down the social ladder to the Pakistani working class and this point of view is the most interesting but the least well told. We know that Mumtaz is a trained maid, pretty and intelligent, that she likes the look of the next-door watchman, a handsome Kashmiri ‘jehadi' called Omar, and that she accepts regular calls from him on the memsahib's telephone when Bilqis has gone to deliver her guest lectures at the University of Karachi. We can see how the plot thickens, but the earlier conviction is missing.
When the angle of vision in the narrative switches so frequently, so much so that we even have Omar's point of view when he is fighting a battle in Kashmir, the reader loses track of the ‘auteur'. Multiple narratives do work well sometimes, but only when the author keeps his own position on the narrative accessible.This does not always happen in Twilight.
The Melbourne-based Azhar Abidi is an expatriate writer whose love for his country and his sense of deep regret about the direction in which it is heading forms the core of his self- expression. What is palpably felt in Twilight is disenchantment atPakistan's promise — “the land of the pure” — and its gritty, sometimes very nasty, reality.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Literary Review
