The hunger games of power

Shiva

The Great Sindhi Novel — When a novel boasts of such a weighty subtitle, it is not unusual to have high expectations from that work. In that event, if the last chapter, last sentence, last punctuation leaves you uneasy and perturbed, you know the novel has lived up to its name. With such enormous potency, Bina Shah sings of Sindh, blending past with present, history with myth, and fantastic with real. The book quite robustly and with utmost zeal, resurrects Sindh as ‘the soul of Pakistan’.

The novel traces the life of Ali Sikander, a young urban Sindhi journalist, from October 18, 2007 to December 27, 2007. Incidentally, these were the last three months of Benazir Bhutto’s life; these months marked her return to an angst-ridden Pakistan that was craving for democracy. Amidst political turmoil, terrorist attacks, stark divergence in public opinion on Bhutto, Ali is mired in his personal struggles: His love for a Hindu girl in a conservative society, his difficult relationship with an absent, estranged father who has deserted Ali’s mother for a new family, his dilemma about leaving behind his family for a degree in the United States. Owing to these predicaments, despite the political activism that surrounds him, Ali is unapologetically apathetic toward politics, in general, and Bhutto, in particular.

However, during the course of the novel, paving the way for a political bildungsroman, the plot finds Ali vigorously involved in national politics as he joins the People’s Resistance Movement, a civil group opposing the Musharraf regime. It is during Ali’s journey to political awakening that we get a glimpse of a nation besieged by uncertainty and indecision, a nation thrown into utter confusion. ‘America told them they needed democracy. China said they needed military cooperation and warm-water ports. India said they needed to leave Kashmir alone. Afganistan wanted Pakistan to leave Kashmir alone but take in all their refugees. Was it any wonder that the nation had become completely schizophrenic?’

To ‘save’ the nation from this mayhem, Benazir Bhutto sets foot on the nation’s soil. Since the book cover shows a female leader addressing a crowd, the air of expectancy is quite unsurprising. Notwithstanding Bhutto’s larger-than-life aura, the fire of her character is understated by substituting fierce fervour with subtle poise. Benazir we find is young ‘Pinky-bibi’ who sneaks out of the house to know her future from the parrot master, ‘chador-clad figure’ who has lost her father, a loving mother who lives to see the aspirations of her children fulfilled, a poet who breathes the land she was born on: She is the ‘Eighth Queen’.

Shah punctuates this contemporary plot with stories of Sindh’s ‘glorious spiritual, cultural and political heritage’. She gives accounts of the seven queens, Hur rebellion and other stories dipped in both myth and history. These historical/ mythical vignettes when juxtaposed with the modern story render completeness to the fragmentary frame of land of martyrs.

Jeandal Shah’s desperate effort to save his life from his master’s pet cheetah, Kwaja Khizr’s unrelenting pursuit to protect the region — all these arresting stories meld in the main narrative, creating Sindh that Ali is fighting for and that Benazir dreams of.

It is to Shah’s credit that she allows Benazir to cast a long shadow on the plot but doesn’t permit her to overshadow the main narrative. Fusing politics, power, and poetry, Shah mourns and celebrates in the same breath — celebrating the magnificent past and mourning the distraught present. This blend of emotions with her simple prose makes the reading both an engaging and a fulfilling experience.