Ali Sethi writes a coming of age saga but hopes for a revival of the region's progressive culture.
We’re supposed to have breakfast together, but even though I’m in good time, Ali Sethi is at the end of his meal, the plate a mess of wedges of cheese, slices of mango and baked beans. For a moment things are awkward — repeated calls on his mobile to locate him had gone unattended, and there is a rude lack of hospitality — so to make conversation while he continues to eat, I ask him about his much-touted, much-feted US book tour in June.
Sethi, when he’s not eating with a great deal of absorption, articulates his perspective with a confidence difficult to imagine in a 25-year-old. The Wish Maker, his debut — and probably his only, he jokes — novel has been off to a flying start in the West, which finds it difficult to reconcile education and erudition with its views on Talibanised Pakistan. “They expected the book to be aligned with what’s in the news, with what they see on television, about bombs going off,” he says. “I’ve had to explain to them about how Punjab is different from the North West Frontier, about the great diversities in the country, about the urban-rural divide.”
Ali’s Wish Maker is simultaneously simple and sophisticated if somewhat predictable, “a coming of age novel that develops into a family saga”, he says, something he sat down to write over a ten-day break, running five chapters off his computer. That was in his senior year in Harvard, in 2006, triggered by his need, he felt, to document and archive a phase in Pakistan’s history that had been extremely turbulent and had had far-reaching consequences. “There was my curiosity,” he says now of his growing up years in Lahore in the nineties, “neither Nawaz Sharif nor Benazir Bhutto were in the media, Musharraf was everyone’s darling, and I wanted to trace that period.”
That drive may have more to do with genes than he’s willing to concede. Sethi’s father ran a publishing firm before he decided to launch and edit the newspaper, Dawn, while his mother Jugnu Mohsin survived not just by her humour and wit but as a chronicler of events. Is his fiction, similarly, more journalism than imagination? “At the time of writing, I was not conscious of being journalistic,” he concedes, “but now that I think about it, it is probable.”
The Wish Maker is Zaki’s story, a young boy growing up in a household of women — his mother, grandmother, aunts, a resident cousin, Samar Api — not known to mince their words. The stories within are layered, so though the first-person account is Zaki’s, the story is probably more Samar’s, with Daadi and her daughter-in-law refusing to share the other’s views on either the country’s politics or the absence of Zaki’s father.
Like Zaki, Ali went to school in Lahore and then to college in America where he majored in South Asian studies. “In Pakistan,” he says, “humanities are not encouraged”, a subject he found himself “enthralled by”. In 2002, though, being Pakistani in the US was not without its pitfalls. “They were intrigued, curious,” he says, polite about what was probably suspicion about both his country and his religion, “and I became conscious of my national and cultural identity.” It was then he felt that the greatest loss of Pakistan was “the loss of diversity”.
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Strangely enough, his thesis was on Anarkali, the fictional but celebrated slave girl who Prince Salim falls in love with, and who is banished to martyrdom. “My advisor asked me to look at Indian art from 1857 to 1947,” recalls Ali, “during which period I saw so much articulation of Muslim identity around women.” This included not just Anarkali’s story but also another fictional character, Umrao Jaan Ada, and included Chugtai’s paintings. “In the 1920s, there was a whole industry around Anarkali in the Punjab,” followed in the next decade by the evil presence of the Anglicised, cigar-smoking, Western-clothed woman. “After Partition, the role of women in Pakistani society became contentious,” made worse perhaps “in the 1980s with Islamisation”.
In the book Zaki is embarrassed by his mother because “she’s not conventional”, which pretty much reflected Ali’s parents’ “status as outsiders” — in school, a teacher even once referred to him as a gaddar’s — traitor’s — son. At home, there were conversations centring around how religious fanatics were hounding them, and the presence of police protection was only too real. For Zaki to be Ali felt natural at most times. “I was writing from within the memories of these characters, from within their consciousness.”
Who is the wish maker? I tell Ali I found Zaki weak, Samar stronger, and so was perturbed that she should accept her exile so meekly, without rebellion. “Samar’s options are simply more limited,” he explains, “Zaki, being a boy, has many more options even though she’s the one who is more determined.” But he agrees, “She’s more the wish maker than Zaki.” He explains that after her tribulations, when both Daadi and Zakia unite to bring her back, she is quick to heal, even ready to marry. “You love him?” Zaki asks her. Samar’s reply hints at acceptances and reconciliations. “‘He loves me’, she said, ‘and I am happy.’”
Ali, firmly back in Pakistan now, is on a changed trajectory, wanting to involve himself with “some journalism, reportage, to go on TV and say things that have not before been said on TV”, charged by the idea of a “Pakistani renaissance” (even, he says, an “Islamic renaissance”), to make connections with “progressive writing and culture” again. “I want more ideas,” he says, expanding these to include “travelling, working, teaching, maybe going back to school, learning music” — he’s a trained Hindustani vocalist, and points out that Faiz’s ideas reached the masses not through textbooks but through the medium of his music. “Secular,” he shares enthusiastically — an idea many in India and even perhaps the US might not entirely agree with — “is no longer a bad word in Pakistan.”
His parents, he winds up, played no role in shaping the book — they’ve only recently read it in published form, having not seen the drafts. “My father hasn’t said anything yet,” Ali says. And his mother? “Only that the dialogue is interesting.” In America, the criticism has more to do with the background of political events that haven’t been referenced enough. “I didn’t want to keep explaining things Pakistani and Indian readers already knew,” Ali makes his loyalties abundantly clear. Here’s hoping he’ll survive the parental — and subcontinental — encomiums.
THE WISH MAKER Author: Ali Sethi
Publisher: Hamish Hamilton
Pages: 406
Price: Rs 499
