Intizar Husain's Basti details the life of one Zakir, as he grows up amid the birth and first crises of the new nation of Pakistan. Sometimes a third person protagonist, sometimes a narrator, Zakir begins as a small child in the town of Rupnagar, pestering both the Muslim and Hindu sages of his town with a child's questions and receiving different kinds of wisdom in return. This flashback turns out to be just that, a vision of a former life that vanished with the Partition that separated, with great violence, a Hindu India and a Muslim Pakistan. Zakir's small town seems to be emerging into the twentieth century--there's a great bit about the monkeys who can't seem to learn that the new electric wires mean certain death--but then they're whisked away, to a new city, and then to another, into a Pakistan where Zakir never seems to be able to find certainty or stability.
Basti isn't really a book about the Partition, but another great crisis of Pakistan: the war that led to the independence of East Pakistan as Bangladesh. Zakir and his friends are largely aloof from the war and from the political upheavals that rock Pakistan; they spend most of their time at a tea bar called the Shiraz, while huge demonstrations swell and bombs fall outside the windows. Going to visit his father's grave, Zakir finds himself caught up in one such demonstration, caught in the forward movement of the crowd, and threatened by the Indian soldiers who seek to put down such demonstrations on behalf of Bangladesh. I'm only partly sure I'm describing any of this correctly; Basti is a book deeply steeped in Muslim and Middle Eastern history and literature, and many of the minutiae and the multitudinous references, to the Quran, to various ghazal poets, to historical figures of India and Pakistan, were obscure to me, even with the generous appendix. But the overall arch of the book is clear: a man who leaves a childhood of promise and emerges into the false promise of a nationalism that leaves him adrift, endangered, and alienated.
The best parts of Basti, I thought, were the dreamlike passages in which Zakir walks through the city to find it destroyed or deserted. Sometimes these really are dreams, sometimes they only resemble dreams, but in each case Husain writes in a kind of modernist style that seems familiar in the wake of other moments of 20th century crisis throughout the world. Zakir's alienation is so deep that, as he walks around the city, he wonders how it is that people can even go on walking, and if he, too, can walk: "When he observed his own non-human walk, the strange thought came to him that it was not he who was walking, but someone else in his place. But who? He fell into perplexity." Far from giving him a sense of nationalist identity and homeland, the birth pangs of modern Pakistan have ruptured Zakir's identity. He spends much of the novel trying to contact his cousin and former crush, Subirah, who is in Delhi, beyond the border that now separates them forever. What kind of life might Zakir have had if the forces of nationalism and political upheaval and not separated them? Or had not separated him from himself?
With the addition of Pakistan, my "Countries Read" list is up to 108!
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