Kartography

By Kamila Shamsie

Published by Oxford University Press, Pakistan

Karachi with all its open manholes, Karachi with its broken roads, polluted air, overly decorated buses, beggars, crazy traffic, Karachi with its night life, parties, social class stratification, Karachi with its breathtaking but dirty beach, Karachi with its ethnic differences, political unrest- that is the background for this saga of love and friendship, life and politics written so artfully by Kamila Shamsie, author of three other books and winner of several literary awards.

For someone born and bred in this city of uncertainty, the novel holds a special meaning although the fact remains that the author has focused primarily on the handful elite of the city. People, who remain unaffected by the everyday problems of the middle and lower classes, people whose lives revolve around parties and drinks and social clubs. Nonetheless, the city remains the same and the place it holds is the same and the human relationships too, are as delicate as in any other class.

The story revolves around two best friends, Karim and Raheen. It’s a story of how far two people can get (“people just grow apart, that’s it!”) despite being so close that they know that “If I wasn't me, you wouldn't be you”, and it’s a story of betrayal, of love affected by politics and ethnic differences and of relationships so fragile that they could have been of crystal.

Although superficially it’s just another love story with the usual triangles and heartbreaks, but read carefully and you’ll find a superb plot unwinding through the years of political turmoil and its affect on lives of people, a plot rich with subtleties of language, and a greater theme at work.

The story begins with Karim and Raheen as 13-year-old kids living in Karachi at a time when it’s once again in grip of violence and ethnic battles. Even as kids they know the internal workings of politics and people and assess the situation only in a way smart kids can. And they wondered, “Did differing ethnicities mean that there was something fundamentally disparate about us at the core?”

Raheen has always regarded Karim, her one-time crib-companion and blood-brother, as her best friend and as someone who knows her so well he can complete her sentences. “Sometimes I think, if you put his brain into mine and mine into his, we won’t know the difference!” Their parents, too, are closest of friends, and as the story evolves, we learn that Raheen's father was once engaged to marry Karim's mother, and that Raheen's mother once pledged to marry Karim's father.

The fiancé-swap, as they call it in the story, had always intrigued the young minds of the kids but not even in their wildest imaginations could they have guessed the reasons behind it. And once they do, Raheen’s world comes crashing down as all she ever stood for becomes meaningless.

Although it’s just a change of partners as the ‘music changed’, but it serves to highlight something graver, something which has deep rooted implications on all of them. The fiancé-swap is tied to the ethnic unrest of Pakistan in early seventies and then civil war broke out and Bangladesh was formed. And as the breaking and paring of countries takes place, human relationships too are affected and the insidious prejudices seep into minds and ruin the already fragile bonds.

Years later, with Karachi in grip of chaos again, Karim’s father decides to leave the city and Raheen loses her alter-ego, her best friend and partner in everything. Time passes and they both grow into adults in their own different worlds but the past still lingers and only when they accept the horror of what happened decades earlier, are they able to move ahead.

It’s amazing how one can relate to the story years later and it’s equally amazing that after all these years Karachi is still the same. “…..Karachi with its colorful buses maniacally racing one another, men selling fruit and vegetables from wooden carts on the side of the road, deformed beggars dexterously making their way through traffic, laundry flapping from washing lines on the latticed balconies of low rise apartment buildings.”

I could very easily identify myself with the nonchalant youth in the novel, the way they have become desensitized to the death and chaos around them and the way they move ahead with life despite all its horrors. “This is Karachi. We have a good time while we can, ‘cause tomorrow we might not be so lucky.” This one sentence so simply wraps up the attitude in a few words.

The language employed by the author and the nuances of words are so tactfully placed that one cannot help but awe at the subtlety of it all. The name Kartography too, is heavy in symbolism as it is a cross between Cartography coupled with the fact that it’s based in Karachi. The novel, by going into depths of love and bonding is an attempt to create maps of the human hearts. And Karim too is a professional Cartographer, and hence the name Kartography.

Not everyone can coin terms like ‘idioddity’ and ‘arrafaction’, the former being a cross between ‘odd’ and ‘idiot’ and the later being a cross between ‘arranged’ and ‘affection’. These are only but two examples of many such witty terms in the novel. Even the nicknames used for people are unique; Karim being referred to as ‘Karimazov’ and ‘Cream’ and Raheen being referred to as ‘Ra’. Or the very unusual term of ‘Ghutnas’ being used for social wannabes in the Karachi social scene.

The wonder of the rich language Shamsie uses throughout, so very beautifully transmits the message of everyday day emotions we can feel but cannot find words to express. For instance, Raheen’s thoughts about how same people can behave so differently at times is so artfully described in her thoughts, “Sometimes you hear voices of people whose very cadence you think you know by heart. By heart. But then sounds emerge from their throats, sounds that you want to believe cannot belong to them, but its worse than that because you know they do; you hear the sound and you know that this grating cacophony belongs to them as much as does the music in their voices…”

Although not very deep and with no apparent message, the novel didn’t fail to evoke some dead memories attached with the city and with its people. Karachi with all its failings is still the bearer of our memories, the place we grew up in, and our home. Likewise, the people we grow up with, no matter how different they become, deep down the person you loved is still there, hidden underneath the debris of time and broken dreams.

The author so beautifully sums it up, “I love this place, Karim, for all its madness and complications. It’s not that I didn’t love it before, but I loved it with a child’s kind of love, the kind that either ends or strengthens as understanding grows.

I can see you, out there, reading between the lines.

Come home, stranger.

Come home, untangler of my thoughts.

Come home and tell me, what do I do with this breaking heart of mine?”