On the second day of the Jaipur Literature Festival I talked to Ali Sethi, a young author from Lahore. In the baking hot sun amongst the chattering crowds, he told me about his upbringing and his first novel The Wishmaker, which came out in the UK earlier this year.

Born in Pakistan in 1984, his father was arrested when Ali was only one month old. He was accused of publishing a pro democracy book at a time of martial law: inevitably Ali Sethi was always going to be acutely aware of the political events unfolding in his country. Again, when Ali was fifteen the police broke into their home, beat both of his parents and arrested his father; this time for allegedly making an anti Pakistan speech in India; Ali and his mother protested outside the Supreme Court. Eventually their act of civil intervention paid off and Ali’s father was released. I ask him if he was aware of the significance of these events at the time. Smoking furiously and talking with an animated urgency, he replies;

"If you had asked me when I was fifteen, what I remembered, I would say that it was a hot day when we protested and the mosquitoes were swirling above my head… how strangely sympathetic the policeman looked the second before he lifted his baton and began to beat us…”

Ali’s debut novel follows the childhood of two cousins growing up together in Lahore in the 1990’s, a time of great turbulence and instability in the government due to insidious military intervention. The book, however, is more a personal than a political venture. The presence of the political within the private sphere is an ambiguity explored and toyed with throughout the novel. Within the household the many ‘Pakistans’ converge. The family of educated upper middle class Lahorians and the staff from rural and feudal Pakistan; the Grandmother who had lived through partition, had once been Indian and whose identity was itself reformed in the forge of the new nation; and finally, the great divide of Pakistan, the two worlds of men and women.

“One of the main themes of Pakistani life is the division between men and women….as much a topical issue as Islamicisation or militancy… in every household, if you look carefully enough, you will find these things interacting with one another.” Ali tells me.

At the age of seventeen he left Lahore to study at Harvard, it was a year after 9/11 and the people in the US had a heated interest in his background. They were asking him questions he had not previously felt the need to ask himself.

“Religion and culture and our world view were not really discussed in Pakistan… it was an American crisis about Islam.”

But now he found himself forced to ask:

“Is Pakistan an Islamic country, a South Asian country or an Indian country with a new name?”

This led him to major in South Asian History at Harvard, whilst also studying creative writing (under Zadie Smith among others). Moving away from home, gaining a new perspective, he had to accommodate new truths and one way of processing this information was to write.

“As a child your immediate experience determines your perception of the world. I had to write from my own perspective, but then juxtapose that innocence or ignorance with all the other stories of the household.”

He compares this shift of viewpoint to an adult returning to their childhood home to find that the bed is not so high, or the fridge so vast and looming. The emphasis or weight of importance tips and readjusts as you absorb new horizons. Through researching and writing the novel he has placed his memories of Lahore into the wider historical context and saw the significance of the events of his own life on a national and global scale.  Has he found answers to the many questions posed to him when he moved to the states?

“The most important thing that I have come to understand is that everything has a context… and if you remove that context…then events only exist in so far as one’s own temporary crisis, which…” he adds “…is how America views the world.”

It seems there is a new generation of informed, outspoken creativity emerging from Pakistan at this time, in literature, art and journalism. Ali testifies to this and attributes it in part, the revolution in Pakistan’s media.

“Until eight years ago there was only one state controlled TVchannel…now there are dozens…there has been a revolution in TV, everything we never talked about in Pakistan is now being discussed…”

A distinct quality of contemporary Pakistani art and literature is a dark and subversive sense of humour.

“ When you have to contemplate going to the market place or on a date and you also have to accommodate the possibility of a bomb in those situations, that’s when a dark humour surfaces.”

The book is also suffused with the potential subversive power of the individual. Mixed influences percolate into a suppressed society…Bollywood movies, Hollywood movies, Western literature and alcohol; all these censored acts and thoughts.

“Your fantasy is always potentially objectionable at some level,” Ali explains, “…your parents can clamp down or the police can arrest you, or the state can prosecute you…and yet everybody you know is something of a culprit and something of a sinner.”

Resistance, the potential to disrupt the flow of history, is the point which writing this book has bought Ali to. He feels those gaps he became so starkly aware of when he was far away from home have, in an intellectual sense, been bridged. He is able to place himself once again, in the context of his own home, with an eye remaining on the wider horizon of history.

 

The Wishmaker is published by Penguin and is available in hardback.