I am on a reading spree off and on and a lot of it depending on the state of my mind and my love affairs. If I am happy and in love I don’t read as much as I would if I was single. See there had to be something positive about my being the eternally single one.
A book I absolutely devoured in the recent times and one that utterly transported me to another world was Kartography by a Pakistani author called Kamila Shamsie. I have read quite a few of the subcontinental authors right from Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy to Kiran Desai’s Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard to the notably famous Salman Rushdie’s Midnight Children, and there is Bapsi Sidwa, Monica Ali and Mohsin Ahmed and the list goes on as Asian writers have evolved over a period of time to establish a uniquely different genre in English fiction altogether. You like some, you love a few, you tolerate the rest and some leave you feeling wistful and touch some place in your heart you didn’t even know existed and you want to read a little bit more even though the story came to a magnificent end yet you feel I wish the writer hadn’t finished the book.
Kartography was one such book. I felt I was walking down the streets of Karachi, and there I was Raheen, the female protagonist, desperately denying her love for Karim, who is such a complex character whose mixed Pakistani and Bengali roots came under fire in the mid eighties in Pakistan.
Being an Indian I have always been fascinated by Pakistan, more so because, due to security reasons, we do not get a chance to visit our neighbors ever, despite the fact that we share thousands of years of history and culture. My ancestors were originally from Bangladesh, and my grandparents migrated to India in 1947 when Bangladesh became East Pakistan. The country attained freedom from West Pakistan in 1971 after a long and bloody struggle.
This book revealed to me a completely different aspect of history which otherwise is a clinical account of the wars fought. That the war for freedom of Bangladesh was also about the keeping alive the Bengali identity was an eye-opener for me. Being a Bengali I took so much of my culture for granted because I have always had the freedom to read, write and speak my mother tongue and to embrace my unique cultural distinctiveness as India consists of a tapestry of different communities, cultures and languages. To imagine a world where I am not allowed to do so and I am compelled to deny my Bengaliness or not utter a single word in my mother tongue and to try and bury it under the dominating influence of some other culture terrifies me; and this book reflected how much of ethnic cleansing has happened in Pakistan in the last 50 years, and why the Bengalis of East Pakistan seceded from the nation to form a country of their own where they had the freedom to preserve their culture. Most importantly it demonstrated why Pakistan is the Pakistan of today, politically volatile and tumultuous.
