It was early in the process of working on my third novel that I moved back to Lahore, where I had grown up. The year was 2009. I had spent much of the 1990s in New York, writing about the Lahore of Moth Smoke. I had spent much of the 2000s in London, writing about the New York of The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Now, I thought, I would try my hand at living in a country and writing about it at the same time.
So, as I ruminate on the not-yet-four years I have spent in Pakistan, on how the country has changed and evolved over this time, I find myself questioning my impressions. How much, I wonder, is the Pakistan that I see actually a reflection of my own life? How much of what I imagine to be its changes are in reality merely echoes of my own moods, my emotions?
Pakistan has just seen the first elected civilian government in its history complete a full five-year term. Its raucous press is increasingly assertive, as is its rather idiosyncratic Supreme Court. The army has mostly stood back, choosing not to intervene (yet) as it has so many times in the past. These are all promising developments.
The economy, however, has deteriorated since I returned. The rupee has plunged against the dollar, inflation continues to tug the prices of foodstuffs ever higher, and power shortages have reached the point where often we have electricity for no more than one hour of every two.
Law and order is bad. An insurrection rages in Balochistan. Killings of Shias across the country are getting worse. Ahmadis, Hindus, Christians, and other religious minorities are frequently targeted by violent bigots. A liberal governor of my province, Punjab, was assassinated. The houses of hundreds of Christians in my home city of Lahore were burned by a mob. I meet more and more Pakistanis abroad who say the persecution has grown so bad they would never consider returning.
But on university campuses, I meet thousands — literally thousands — of students who are bright, keen, and eager to learn. They seem to be reading novels. At least half of them are — unprecedentedly for Pakistan — female. I was told last year that there are more students enrolled in universities in Pakistan today than the total number who graduated in the five decades following independence in 1947.
I’m amazed by the talent of young musicians I hear at underground jam sessions, of young artists I see displaying their work. I’m encouraged by the young writers I meet. And the young readers. At the first-ever Lahore Literary Festival, held in February, the turnout was said to be twenty-five thousand. It was breathtaking. I can think of perhaps no public occasion in my twenty years as a novelist that I have enjoyed more than the talk I gave there.
Things in the country around me these past few years have been mixed. Much is horrible, much is beautiful, and much is in between.
Whether I see things accurately, though, I do not know. My own life has had its share of highs and lows, and like a character in one of my books, it may well be that the environment I perceive around me is but an echo of what I feel within. (Or equally, perhaps, the reverse might be true.)
I have, after two decades of mono-generational London and New York living, been reintroduced to a multigenerational daily existence. My wife and I live with our two children in an apartment above my parents’ house. Three generations at one address, as was the case when I was a child.
There is wonder in this, at seeing, for example, my daughter playing with her grandfather in the garden each morning before he goes off to teach at his university and she goes off to study at her nursery school. There is melancholy, too, in watching a generation of my aunts and uncles age, their numbers exceeding those of my generation, the cousins still living in Lahore.
Ours is a large extended family: my mother is one of nine, my father one of four. Every so often one of us is robbed, or taken to hospital, or forced to depend on others for economic survival. And we are, by far, better off than most.
Yet there is wisdom here, and love, and a measure of peace that descends between the times of upheaval. I have been planting trees along the perimeter of our house. For shade, and to keep the crowding city somewhat at bay.
(2013)
ART
5
Pereira Transforms
I AM SOMETIMES ASKED to name my favorite books. The list changes, depending on my mood, the year, tricks played by memory. I might mention novels by Nabokov and Calvino and Tolkien on one occasion, by Fitzgerald and Baldwin and E. B. White on another. Camus often features, as do Tolstoy, Borges, Morrison, and Manto. And then I have my wild card, the one I tend to show last and with most pleasure, because it feels like revealing a secret.
Sostiene Pereira, I say, by Antonio Tabucchi.
These words are usually greeted with one of two reactions: bewilderment, which is far more common, or otherwise a delighted and conspiratorial grin. It seems to me that Pereira is not yet widely read in English, but holds a heroin-like attraction for those few who have tried it.
My own Pereira habit began a decade ago, in San Francisco’s City Lights bookstore, where an Italian girlfriend suggested I give it a try. San Francisco was the perfect place for my first read: its hills and cable cars and seaside melancholy were reminiscent of Pereira’s Lisbon setting; its Italian heritage, from the Ghirardelli chocolate factory at its heart to the wine valleys surrounding it, evoked Pereira’s Italian author; and its associations with sixties progressivism and forties film noir went perfectly with Pereira’s politics and pace.
I have always had a thing for slender novels, and I liked the way Pereira looked, the way it felt in my hands. I took it back to my hotel, and straight to bed, at that unadventurous age still my preferred place for a read. It lay elegantly on the sheets beside me. I ran my thumb along its fore edge, narrow and sharp against my skin. I lifted it, opened it, and plunged in.
That first reading spanned a single afternoon and evening. I made it from cover to cover, pulled along relentlessly.
I was transfixed by Pereira’s beauty. In its compression it approached perfection. It swept me off to Lisbon in the thirties, to a “beauteous summer day, with the sun beaming away and the sea-breeze off the Atlantic kissing the treetops, and a city glittering, literally glittering” beneath a window. I developed a crush on the character of Marta, so briefly sketched, who in her “straw hat” and “dress with straps crossing at the back” asks Pereira to dance, a waltz he performs “almost in rapture, as if his paunch and all his fat had vanished by magic.”
Despite its economy, Pereira was never perfunctory. It conjured out of its small hat a vast and touching sense of the humane. When the eponymous protagonist, an elderly and overweight journalist, confides each day in the photograph of his dead wife, I experienced their relationship as a living thing. When he tells her the young man Rossi is “about the age of our son if we’d had a son,” I understood why Pereira risks paying him for articles he knows cannot be published because of their implicit critique of Portugal’s authoritarian regime.
I have never agreed with the claim that art must be kept separate from politics. In Pereira I found the definitive rejection of that position. I was captivated by the protagonist’s reluctant political awakening, by his final act of rebellion, so quiet and so reckless at the same time. Here was a novel with the courage to be a book about art, a book about politics, and a book about the politics of art — and the skill to achieve emotional resonances that were devastating.