Brewing hatred, bartering souls

This story is an elegy for a city, Karachi, told through the perspective of one family. An impressive debut work, it superbly melds the political and the personal, having its author, Hamza Jalil Albasit, joining the ranks of talented Pakistani writers who have made a name for themselves internationally.

Rooted in its setting but universal in its messaging, it is a tale all too depressingly familiar, unfolding like a Greek tragedy, seamlessly switching between the first-person voice of the eldest son of the family, Waleed Ahmed, and the third-person voice for the other members.

This is a family stitched together with threads of silence, unhappiness and neglect. The father has lost his job. The mother, finding herself in a desperate situation, makes a Faustian pact: she will trade Waleed’s soul for a second son. Of course, the reader knows her actions will have predictable consequences. The daughter is prone to conversing with a dead sibling, and the poetry she writes is her only source of comfort. The second son, born of the pact with the devil, is the apple of his parents’ eye, but he wrestles with his own demons.

Waleed has some formidable odds stacked against him. Strange-looking, poor, disenfranchised and scarred by abuse at an early age, he falls into a life of petty crime. It is just a matter of time before the party that rules Karachi inducts him into their ranks to become one of their enforcers, thus weaponising his impotent rage and resentment. Hatred, assiduously bred by the politicians, subsumes Waleed and those like him, before finally engulfing them.  Hate, the author seems to say, is what you inherit when your soul is bartered to the devil.

Magic realism has been incorporated to stunning effect and in an inspired way in this narrative. A boy has a darker, dangerous shadow, reminiscent of a similar one in Ursula K Le Guin’s renowned book A Wizard of Earthsea. The shadow here is both menacing and yet works to the advantage of the boy.

All through, the imagery employed is stark. As Karachi spirals into a vortex of violence, the death count rises, the dead congregate in the sky, wailing at night and obscuring the sun by day. Black flies proliferate in a house, both as a warning and as a sign of the shadow of death that hangs over it. Fire ants multiply and keep biting a character, serving both as an example of his mental decline and a premonition of worse to come.

This is a story that is as much about Karachi as it is about the main characters. We learn about its political landscape, divided along ethnic and linguistic lines. Three parties are jostling for power, one of them has been ruling the city for years. In a trajectory all too familiar, after wresting power, they go on to become all that they had denounced. With the impending general elections of 2013, which is the period the book is set in, the battles between the factions intensify. Corruption is brazen, votes are stolen; the city, especially its poorer parts and slums, is neglected, allowed to deteriorate, reduced to a shadow of what it was, its past as a great city all but erased. In this lament for Karachi, there is both sadness and love. Where the book hits home is in dissecting the anatomy of hate. It tells of politicians and their respective parties raising their army from among the poor, the illiterate and the neglected, whose differences are erased in the sense of purpose and the reason to exist that the party gives them. That reason segues into hate for the ‘other’ as defined by the party, and catharsis is found in instilling terror in those who deride them. Change, this army is given to understand, comes not through democracy but warfare and violence. They form the closed fist of the party that will land the blows on the ‘other.’

However,  the circumstances of their lives don’t change much. And like the city that has been exploited and left to die, they too are rendered expendable. A new army is raised, and the hate injected into the system remains like a miasma. The tragedy is how familiar all this sounds to us on this side of the border,  too. In the telling of this dark tale,  there is a singular voice, a vision and a beautiful way with words. There is also light at the end of the tunnel. Attempts will be made to reclaim a city by citizen activists. A mother will find comfort in faith again. Darkness will be pushed back and love regained.