Taha Kehar was born nearly 44 years after Partition but he revisited that era tracing Pakistan's personal trajectory through war and uncertainty to come out with his debut novel.
"Of Rift and Rivalry" is Hanif Khan's journey through life subsuming the history of Pakistan, the country whose creation he as a young man had passionately believed in.
His tempestuous marriage to Anita Waterhouse, daughter of a wealthy Englishman in Karachi, ahead of Partition and the creation of Pakistan, their attempts to deceive and hurt each other, and the consequences of all this for the next two generations - this is what the book, published by Palimpsest, talks about.
"Be it a story of love or an allegorical representation of the past, 'Of Rift and Rivalry' is essentially about a family's struggle to survive the onslaught of history. The outcome isn't entirely favourable, but it resonates through time and leaves an imprint on relationships," Kehar told PTI.
Asked if it was difficult for him to re-construct the pre-Partition days going by the fact that he was born much later, he says, "I was born nearly 44 years after Partition. In those four decades, two generations had come and gone since Pakistan's creation. My generation was far more detached from the prejudice and insecurities surrounding Indo-Pak relations.
"The cricket pitch was the only place where the rivalry between both countries emerged. Otherwise, the Line of Control didn't prevent Bollywood, Star Plus and other phenomena from seeping into our side of the border."
Kehar says Partition, for him, wasn't just the division of a country, but an "experience that shaped the course of people's lives".
"Of Rift and Rivalry began" its journey in 2009 at a creative writing workshop in Karachi.
"Participants were asked to describe a conversation between two siblings at a restaurant. During that session, I found the perfect take-off point for the narrative and spent the next three years spinning a yarn around this interaction between the two brothers," the author says.
