The Basti and the City

Anis Shivani, despite his award-winning short stories and poetry, is probably best known in the US, where he lives, for his scabrous literary polemics. The windmill at which he tilts with such vim is the ‘program writer’, a product of creative writing workshops. ‘The writing programs,’ wrote Shivani in the The Huffington Post, ‘embody a philosophy of neutered multiculturalism/political correctness; as long as writers play by the rules (no threatening history or politics), there’s no incentive to call them out.’ The effect is a literary scene peopled by milquetoasts and jobsworths. Now that Karachi Raj, Shivani’s own first novel, is out we can see in practice what he has advocated in theory: literature that is not desiccated and trivial, but argumentative, laying waste to our most closely held precepts.

This is a 19th-century novel spilling over with la comédie humaine, set in Karachi, that city by the sea, cosmopolitan, cut-throat, savvy, a place to dream in, get rich in, to be swallowed up and spat out by. More specifically it is set in the ‘basti’, a fiction based on a real project in Pakistan, a self-reliant slum focused on generating its own money and improving living conditions without government handouts. Living in the basti are the three protagonists: Hafiz, who we meet as a labourer in a godown; his sister, Seema, the pride of the basti as the recipient of a full scholarship to Karachi University; and Claire, an anthropology professor at Boston University studying the basti for a year. The book is organised around Claire’s year, each chapter representing a month, as she immerses herself, Katherine Boo style, in the lives of her poor neighbours.

Around Hafiz, Seema and Claire are arrayed a city’s worth of secondary characters. There’s Hafiz’s childhood friend, Majid, brought up in an atmosphere of penury and violence who has made himself into a billionaire with the requisite creamy, bosomy wife. It is in Majid’s godown that we are first introduced to Hafiz, soon to have his romantic, naive illusions shattered by the sexy wife of an injured colleague. There’s Ashiq, an ironically named college professor, tall and handsome even in middle age, carrying on a serious if chaste relationship with Seema but incapable of commitment. Ashiq’s family, his formidable sisters, their prosperous husbands, and ageing parents also get significant airtime. The stories of Claire’s colleagues in the basti—economists and sociologists doubling as fundraisers and accountants, Pakistani and foreign alike—are also told as the narrative stretches thin but tight, like the skin on a large drum.

Claire is the empathetic visitor, infected by the basti’s energy and optimism, a sort of surrogate for the reader. Seema, bright and beautiful, is one of those success stories trotted out when cruel, uncaring societies want to show themselves as meritocracies. Hafiz is not as blessed. But, chameleon-like, he adapts himself to whatever role he stumbles upon: a servile labourer, a servile but pious clerk in a religious bookshop, or a primped but equally servile personal assistant to a glamorous movie star. His servility is the common thread.

Karachi Raj is not so reductive a novel as to suggest the siblings’ paths are the only two available to the million or so people packed into the basti. Most will find work in small, neighbourhood factories, like the one specialising in hand- stitched leather wallets where Claire works for a full month undercover. The basti is Pakistan’s ‘forgotten promise’, a place of energy, enterprise and optimism, of community, of children who go to school. But Shivani doesn’t shrink from the basti’s poverty, of poor people are forced to build and rebuild their lives always on the edge of calamity.

This is, as it has to be, a capacious novel. Shivani is ambitious, attempting not so much to untangle the knotted skein of life in Karachi as to show us the full extent of the entanglement. As one character says, scornfully, about the city: “Wherever I look, there are people from around the country and the world… There are more Pathans here than in Peshawar. There are Baluchis here than in Quetta… In Lahore, everyone looks like a Punjabi, but what is the Karachi look? You can’t tell me because there isn’t one.” Like the city, Shivani’s novel is a compelling muddle, because it tries to cram in too much—why, for instance, take a detour into drugs, homosexuality and prostitution in Data Durbar, a venerable shrine in Lahore, in the form of a tourist’s florid letters? Better, though, to err on the side of having too much to say. This is a riposte to the apolitical, morally stunted workshop novel Shivani so abjures.

Anis ShivanibastibooksFourth EstateKarachi RajPunjabi