Anis Shivani’s Karachi Raj is so believable that it’s unconvincing. Soon as I flipped over the last page and finished the book I asked myself: Is this about Mumbai, about Delhi, or about KarachiIJ And if it is indeed about Karachi, then are we really so alikeIJ
Of course, in this sense Shivani’s debut novel can be located as part of an established canon of literature on the mega-cities of the world. It offers glimpses of the many socio-economic layers which have constituted urban life for the past 200 years or so: The poor, the middling, and the rich, with all their dreams and aspirations jumbled in a confused, searing, almost undecipherable mix. Shivani’s Karachi is a city of the desperately poor aspirationally rubbing shoulders with the uber rich; liberal bourgeoisies holding a semblance of civic rationality against the increasingly unmasked clout of religious fundamentalists; and welfarist expatriates wooing industrialists and politicians to bring hope to urban squatters. It is a city where ghosts of a bloody past hint at a violent future, a city whose aspiration to globality are constantly undercut by its own schizophrenic self-destruction.
As such, then, it is much like any other mega-city in the Indian subcontinent, if not the so-called developing world. Seema, Claire, Hafiz, Ashiq, Majid, Hina, and Tipu are all characters familiar from our own lives on this side of the tumultuous border. Their life-journeys, the manner in which their existences entangle with each other’s, all of these are mirrored in the pages of our own life-stories. Seema’s curiously platonic relationship with Ashiq, Majid’s meteoric rise to fame and success, Claire’s search for the variegated truth of life in the basti, and Hafiz’s dalliances with various forms of employment and employers, all of these are tropes which for long have attended writing on cities and their denizens. Images of deprivation and decrepitude too have been increasingly familiar with the success of Slumdog Millionaire, and the many tribulations of life in the basti and Seema, Hafiz, and Claire’s struggles with, for, and against them seem part of the larger narrative of urban inequity all across the world.
What makes Karachi Raj significant and interesting, then, is the incidence of its topicality, that it is about Karachi. It not just adds to the growing corpus of literature on Pakistan in the English language, but also performs a vital exercise in similitude. It brings the reader to the human heart of Karachi, to hope and despair of a people whose existence in the larger, global imagination seems a factor only of militancy and mullahs. Shivani’s Karachi is a city like any other, with grim, gun-toting men threatening civic life only from the peripheries of daily life. When bomb blasts happen, as in Saddar, it serves only as reminder of the cataclysmic violence which threatens the very basis of civic life. Otherwise, life goes on in the city and particularly in the basti with an unconcern which is indicative, to refer to Huma Yusuf’s provocative postulation, of a planned productivity of habitation working to make a violent, dangerous city healthily liveable.
Importantly, Shivani’s narrative trope, practices, and aesthetics enable the generation of this tactical productivity of habitation. Hina’s world of films and television, for instance, goes at its own pace and direction regardless of the bloodshed frequently unleashed by militants. Similarly, the mystics and fakirs of Tipu’s Sufi dargahs evoke an age and space which violence cannot touch. Ferhana and Rehana, Ashiq’s well-placed and well-heeled sisters, live a life of luxury and privilege which neither fundamentalism nor political unrest seems to touch, and even Claire, sequestered in the basti, is exposed more to the vagaries of the elements and unsanitary living conditions than to the machinations of jihadis and of conservatives in a heavily sexist society.
This is where Karachi Raj seems a particularly dexterous novel. By presenting and linking vignettes of Karachi’s various socio-economic spheres, it shows Karachi and Karachiites producing conditions of habitation, over and against the devastation regularly unleashed by terrorism. Divided into 12 months of the year from the calendar of the American anthropologist Claire, the narrative evokes well the linked fragmentation which constitutes the varied experiences of everyday Karachi. However, at times this fragmentation seems a little forced, it seems apparent that the effort to delink linkages has been made too strenuously. Yet, the last chapter is satisfyingly disappointing: There is no conclusion, not even a closure. The narrative simply stops, refusing to conjure the illusion of a happily ever-after for either the city or its citizens and making-up for the less satisfactory disappointments of narrative fragmentation elsewhere in the novel
The reviewer is a Senior Marketing Editor with Primus Books. Views expressed here are his own