Pakistani writing in English has been in the news recently. The latest name is Ali Sethi whose novel, The Wish Maker, is in the news. Sethi, a Major in South Asian Studies from Harvard University, USA, began the novel while in his senior year there. It was written as a first-person narrative as a coming-of-age story of Zaki Shirazi and his aunt Samar Api who is more like his older sister to him. The first draft in 2006 did not quite satisfy him although there was good news from home about Pakistan rising out of the old political quagmire and of 8 per cent economic growth. The story lacked something, perhaps a larger resonance of the times.
The narrative moved from the first person to the third person, by which time Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, both former civilian heads of government, had returned to Pakistan from their respective exiles in Dubai and Saudi Arabia when the people of Pakistan were clamouring for General Pervez Musharraf’s ouster as president. He had pushed the endurance of the people to the limit.
The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court had been dismissed and the lawyers who had jumped to his defence had been sent packing. The military intervention in neighbouring Afghanistan by US and NATO forces to uproot the Taliban, and its fallout in Pakistan led to the army’s attack on Lal Masjid where pro-Taliban Pakistani militants had holed up, and resulted in the deaths of a hundred Taliban and their supporters. Benazir Bhutto was assasinated by retrograde forces. All these events found their way into the third and final draft of The Wish Maker. The result is a surprisingly engaging story that moves from the personal to the larger socio-political arena with ease and elegance. The publication of the book also marks the debut of Hamish Hamilton, yet another Penguin imprint, in India.
Meeting Ali Sethi is a pleasure. We sit in a tiny anteroom of the Penguin India office in the Panchsheel Community Centre in New Delhi and chat for well over the alloted 45 minutes, and are reminded that there are other engagements awaiting the tall, bearded, slim 25-year-old author in red kurta. We talk of many things, but especially of music, since he appears to have shaped his novel both in terms of structure — it has a circular movement similar to that of a composition in Hindustani music, be it vocal or instrumental. He tells me candidly that music and poetry have been his two loves since school.
“There was always music being played at home. My mother always played Iqbal Bano, Fareeda Khanam, Mehdi Hassan’s songs at home. Even while travelling in a car, there was light-classical music being played. My friends from school were often put off. They wanted to hear Western Pop instead!”
I am sruck by an intriguing reference to Roshanara Begum’s rendering of raga Shankara at a public concert in Lahore in the mid-1950s in the novel. He tells me that he heard about it from his grand parents. The explanation is insufficient. I probe further and he says, “You had asked me a little earlier if I was a writer by profession and I did not give you a precise answer. That is because I spend four hours every day doing my riaz under my teacher Ustad Naseeruddin Sami (a well-known name in India). Music is my passion.”
Ali Sethi says that he first discovered the poetry of Faiz Ahmed “Faiz” and Nasir Kazmi through their rendering of song by various celebrated singers in Pakistan. Their cumulative influence can be found in the novel. The leisurely unfolding of the narrative without loss of momentum or pace can be likened to treatment of each couplet in a ghazal by a singer who strives to bring out the hidden nuances that lie seemingly dormant.
The Wishmaker is a family saga and a mosaic of a society and a culture that is in flux and, unknown to itself, trying to acquire equipoise. It is, of course, about a family being pulled in conflicting directions by the blind dictates of tradition and the gravitational attraction of the equally blind unknown. Everyday conveniences of science cannot impinge sufficiently upon the beliefs of the characters, especially that of the elders, for them to give in to their finer inner responses when pitted against the demands of a rigid tradition. Sethi is able to weave in the contradictory impulses of his characters deftly into the larger fabric of his story that includes history in the making.
As it is time to say goodbye he tells me an amusing story about how
he, when all of seven, went with his journalist mother, Jugnu Mohsin, with twenty friends in tow, to see melody queen Noorjehan. “She was reclining on a chaise lounge with an empty wine glass in hand on which she was tapping with a spoon going ting,
ting, ting. She was surrounded by hangers-on. Amid all the talk I piped up, I want to ask you something’.” She graciously asked, ‘What is it?’ ‘Why do you sing so loudly? Why can’t you sing softly like Lata Mangeshkar?’ She changed the subject.”
I remind him of one of Noorjehan’s immortal melodies from a 1945 film, Dost, “Badnaam Mohabbat Kaun Karey”, composed by that cantankerous genius, Sajjad Husain who had said, “God created two women, Noorjehan and Lata Mangeshkar. Why did he bother after that?” Distinguished Pakistani journalist Najam Sethi and Jugnu Mohsin’s son Ali Sethi has come good. His first novel is an auspicious beginning. May The Wish Maker fulfill many wishes in the future.
— Partha is an art and literary critic. parthafm@gmail.com