...is everywhere. The downtown area of my town is busy as ever, but behind the bustle, stores had been vanishing quietly, something that had escaped my notice. The main row of buildings is as crowded as ever, but in the rear, only shells of stores remain. Small businesses have vanished, the instruments of their trade - manicure and pedicure stations, empty, velvet jewelry holders in a window - remain like dusty skeletons. Some tell me that the bigger players too are in trouble but are holding on. We shall see.
Yesterday, I stopped by the post office. It was a quick errand and, like a fool, I left my handbag on the front seat of my car outside. As I returned, a passerby - tall, lean, furrowed brow - peered in at it, with unusually longing eyes. I cursed my stupidity. Those accumulated survival skills, developed while growing up in India and then honed to razor sharp edge by 7 years of living in Chicago, have been softened and blurred by eight years of surburban life. I need to revive those instincts.
Friday, January 30, 2009
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
The Best Way...
...to witness an historic presidential inauguration is in a warm sun-splashed family room sitting beside loving husband/partner/friend while eating a celebratory Inauguration brunch of fried eggs and sausages washed down with Darjeeling tea (OK, OK, you can have coffee if you absolutely must).
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Getting to Know the Neighbors
"It's hard to appreciate the beauty of a place when you doubt its very validity."
------Nadeem Aslam, The Wasted Vigil (New York and London: Random House, 2008), 242.
I'm currently reading a bunch of Pakistani authors. I finished reading Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist early last year, followed it up with Mohammed Hanif's A Case of Exploding Mangoes (a biting satire that builds its plot around the 1988 death of the dictator General Zia ul-Haq), and rounded it off with Nadeem Aslam's The Wasted Vigil (OK, the last is about Afghanistan but Pakistan is ever-present in the narrative).
All three of the novels I read are attractive for different reasons. Their authors are ironic but (thankfully) not arch. They all explore the most pressing issues of the time - religious fanaticism, terrorism and the cult of the military in Pakistan. If I had to choose a favorite, I would (reluctantly, for they are all good) pick Nadeem Aslam's The Wasted Vigil. His portrayal of Afghanistan and Pakistan is profoundly disturbing (the stoning to death of women, the amputation of hands as punishment, the gruesome game of buzkashi with a Russian soldier) but his prose is elegant and haunting despite its density. I am looking forward to reading his other novel, Maps for Lost Lovers.
Growing up in India, I never knew any Pakistanis. Oh, I thought of them often but not in a very admiring way. In any case, as the daughter of an army officer a social relationship with a Pakistani, unless officially sanctioned, would have been tantamount to treason. Things did not change even when I left the shelter of my parents' home. There were no Pakistani exchange students at Lady Shri Ram College or at JNU. The only good to come out of Pakistan was Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan or so we believed. Later, when I moved to the United States for graduate studies, there were Pakistani students but we moved in different orbits, oblivious of each other.
This lack of socializing between Indians and Pakistanis even on the more neutral turf of American campuses can only partly be attributed to religious differences. The main obstacle to getting to know more Pakistanis was a straightforward class difference. The vast majority of Indians coming to the United States are from very middle class families. This is not middle class in the two-cars-and-three-color-televisions American sense. The Indian middle class is the old fashioned frugal, heavy-on-education-light-on-designer-clothes-and-sports-cars kind of middle class. Many (although not all) Pakistani students in the United States are from the upper middle or upper classes (as is the protagonist of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, for example). They tend to socialize with the frat pack and the beautiful people (as does the main character in The Reluctant Fundamentalist), unlike the geeky, poverty stricken Indian students, counting out their pennies at Walgreen's and wondering if they can get enough money together to buy a used Toyota Camry.
So, to cut a long story short, I knew no Pakistanis socially even on the campus of my American university where there were more Pakistanis than in all the schools and neighborhoods of India. I still don't know any Pakistanis here in Fairfield County, Connecticut, although I know there are many who live here. I am now getting to know my neighbors through literature. Here too, it seems one step removed. I don't read the Urdu script, the language of Pakistan and the medium through which much of its culture is transmitted. But, through these three novels written in English, I have some sort of a window into the world of its people. I still can't claim that I am enamored of Pakistan's militarized politics or its very unapologetically feudal social structure (this is not to say that India is the beacon of egalitarianism but feudalism is at least questioned politically, if not socially). But now I have a better appreciation of the talent of Pakistan's people and the nation's ability to endure and to create good literature, comedy and satire, even in the midst of a rising tide of fundamentalism and political turbulence.
------Nadeem Aslam, The Wasted Vigil (New York and London: Random House, 2008), 242.
I'm currently reading a bunch of Pakistani authors. I finished reading Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist early last year, followed it up with Mohammed Hanif's A Case of Exploding Mangoes (a biting satire that builds its plot around the 1988 death of the dictator General Zia ul-Haq), and rounded it off with Nadeem Aslam's The Wasted Vigil (OK, the last is about Afghanistan but Pakistan is ever-present in the narrative).
All three of the novels I read are attractive for different reasons. Their authors are ironic but (thankfully) not arch. They all explore the most pressing issues of the time - religious fanaticism, terrorism and the cult of the military in Pakistan. If I had to choose a favorite, I would (reluctantly, for they are all good) pick Nadeem Aslam's The Wasted Vigil. His portrayal of Afghanistan and Pakistan is profoundly disturbing (the stoning to death of women, the amputation of hands as punishment, the gruesome game of buzkashi with a Russian soldier) but his prose is elegant and haunting despite its density. I am looking forward to reading his other novel, Maps for Lost Lovers.
Growing up in India, I never knew any Pakistanis. Oh, I thought of them often but not in a very admiring way. In any case, as the daughter of an army officer a social relationship with a Pakistani, unless officially sanctioned, would have been tantamount to treason. Things did not change even when I left the shelter of my parents' home. There were no Pakistani exchange students at Lady Shri Ram College or at JNU. The only good to come out of Pakistan was Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan or so we believed. Later, when I moved to the United States for graduate studies, there were Pakistani students but we moved in different orbits, oblivious of each other.
This lack of socializing between Indians and Pakistanis even on the more neutral turf of American campuses can only partly be attributed to religious differences. The main obstacle to getting to know more Pakistanis was a straightforward class difference. The vast majority of Indians coming to the United States are from very middle class families. This is not middle class in the two-cars-and-three-color-televisions American sense. The Indian middle class is the old fashioned frugal, heavy-on-education-light-on-designer-clothes-and-sports-cars kind of middle class. Many (although not all) Pakistani students in the United States are from the upper middle or upper classes (as is the protagonist of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, for example). They tend to socialize with the frat pack and the beautiful people (as does the main character in The Reluctant Fundamentalist), unlike the geeky, poverty stricken Indian students, counting out their pennies at Walgreen's and wondering if they can get enough money together to buy a used Toyota Camry.
So, to cut a long story short, I knew no Pakistanis socially even on the campus of my American university where there were more Pakistanis than in all the schools and neighborhoods of India. I still don't know any Pakistanis here in Fairfield County, Connecticut, although I know there are many who live here. I am now getting to know my neighbors through literature. Here too, it seems one step removed. I don't read the Urdu script, the language of Pakistan and the medium through which much of its culture is transmitted. But, through these three novels written in English, I have some sort of a window into the world of its people. I still can't claim that I am enamored of Pakistan's militarized politics or its very unapologetically feudal social structure (this is not to say that India is the beacon of egalitarianism but feudalism is at least questioned politically, if not socially). But now I have a better appreciation of the talent of Pakistan's people and the nation's ability to endure and to create good literature, comedy and satire, even in the midst of a rising tide of fundamentalism and political turbulence.
Tuesday, January 06, 2009
New Year's Resolution
This year I will read Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy right through to the very end. I've been trying to read it for three years and always give up - mainly because I run out of library renewals. Hmmm...perhaps my resolution should be to buy the book?
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