The world through your eyes

In her latest novel, Pakistani-British writer Kamila Shamsie takes us into the homes of London's immigrant elite and pens a moving portrait of a lifelong friendship.

As I read Kamila Shamsie’s latest novel, Best of Friends, I was forced to consider how many childhood friends I actually keep in touch with three decades after leaving school. The answer, unfortunately, is not many.

Maryam and Zahra, the two women who are the titular best friends and classmates in one of Karachi’s exclusive private schools, shouldn’t, at first glance, have much in common to build a decades-long friendship. Maryam belongs to one of Karachi’s moneyed elite and as the book opens in 1988, she’s just returned from a summer spent in England with her parents. She’s the heir apparent to her grandfather’s leather goods business (her father is considered a lightweight and thus not a worthy successor).

Zahra is also from the upper strata of society — although some rungs lower on the social and wealth ladder than Maryam. Her father is a cricket journalist and her mother is a school principal. She’s an academic overachiever, a scholarship student on track to be a head girl; she is all set to take off to Oxford or Cambridge, determined to escape Karachi to build a better life abroad. Maryam is more tied to her Karachi roots than her best friend. Her incredible wealth protects her from the trials and tribulations of ordinary people, enabling her to over-romanticise the life she leads in Pakistan.

Fateful decisions

The year 1988 was significant for Pakistan — it’s the last year of Zia Ul-Haq’s authoritarian regime and the year in which Benazir Bhutto returns to the country and is elected its first female prime minister. For Maryam and Zahra, it’s the year they have gone through the transformation of puberty in different ways. Maryam is experiencing growing discomfort with her changing body while Zahra is being pulled in various directions by adolescent desires. Benazir’s election proves to be a moment of great promise — for Zahra, it means that there’s hope for a democratic future in her country. However, the day after the new prime minister’s inauguration, at a schoolmate’s party, the two friends make a fateful decision that has far-reaching ramifications for their future and the lives of those around them.

Though it is Zahra’s impulsive decision that brings trouble, it’s Maryam who takes the blame to protect her friend. But Maryam’s grandfather is angered by her recklessness and he decrees that the family business is to be sold after his death and Maryam will have to live her life outside her beloved Karachi. She’s taken to England where she continues her schooling and loses her close proximity to Zahra.

When we meet our friends again, it’s 2019. Zahra is also in England — she’s one of the country’s leading civil rights campaigners and a constant media presence. Maryam heads a venture capital fund. Their friendship, we find, has endured.

But something has to disrupt a bond that has stayed strong for so long. Ghosts from the past spring up. Their professional spheres as adults — Zahra’s passion for freedom and civil liberties and Maryam’s support for technology that could compromise on individual rights — also come into conflict.

A narrower canvas?

Best of Friends is Kamila Shamsie’s eighth novel — Home Fire, her last novel, a reworking of Antigone in the context of Muslim identity and lives in Britain, wove in the political and personal to great effect. The same is true of her earlier works, especially the intense and luminous Burnt Shadows.

This book though doesn’t have quite the same impact as those earlier novels. Maybe it’s because the two protagonists, while sympathetic and flawed in their own ways, don’t afford Shamsie a wider social canvas. Like most rich British South Asian emigres and expats — and Zahra too counts among them even though she might not be as wealthy as Maryam — their worldviews are constricted by the extraordinary privileges their money affords them. While they do have self-awareness, their class means they can, to a large extent, sand off the unique cultural inheritances that have made them what they are. In the end, their cosmopolitanism, while being an advantage, can also be an act of erasure.

The friendship that is the beating heart of the story when the girls are teenagers doesn’t quite convince the reader in the same way when they are in their forties. The adult Maryam and Zahra seem almost bewilderingly tolerant of each other’s obvious faults, making the second part of the novel much weaker as a narrative.

But any Kamila Shamsie book is a gift to the reader eager to see the world through another’s gaze and Best of Friends lets you do exactly that.