Review: The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn by Usman T Malik

5 stars

The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn was a hauntingly beautiful speculative fiction short story. It's not a romance, although it does include two love stories; one has a HEA, and one does not. 

It starts with Salman Ali Zaidi, a young boy in America, whose grandfather tells him stories of the pauper princess he knew during his youth in Lahore, Pakistan. A descendant of the last Mughal Emperor, Zeenat Begum ran a small tea stall. She told people that a jinn had protected her royal ancestors, and now watched over her from the Eucalyptus tree that shaded her little stall. 

After Sal grows up, he discovers evidence in his deceased grandfather's possessions that his family have a much greater link to the Mughal princess than his grandfather ever let on. He travels to Pakistan for the first time to investigate and is caught up in the same eternal and otherworldly mystery his grandfather had stumbled upon half a century before. 

The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn drew in ontology of the creation of human and jinn, and philoshopy about myth and history. From reading Goodreads reviews, I gather the philosophy was a turn-off for some people, but as Sal's grandfather told him as a boy, "all good stories leave questions". Just as with much speculative fiction, especially the shorter formats, I don't feel like one is meant to get bogged down in the hows and the whys of it all. I certainly felt like everything was explained, in a lyrical way that befitted the story, and that nothing got overly complicated, unless you were trying to connect every dot. And this was the thing - the reader couldn't connect every dot, because Sal didn't even have that ability, and he was the narrator. 

Sal's voice - and the writing in general - was so lyrical and strong, and Malik has woven so many different things into such a short story and made them fit together seamlessly. It shouldn't have worked, but it does. However, if I was to critique the story for anything - and it's a such a very small thing, hardly worth bringing up  - it would be the story's reliance on a unbroken male line for five generations, given that the whole story hinged on a Mughal princess. 

Non-Fiction Review: Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi by Steve Inskeep

Recommended

At a basic level, I don’t really need to provide a synopsis for Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi, because the title does it for me. As the name conveys, it is the biography of a city that has undergone rapid and haphazard expansion, and of its citizens. But it’s more than that, because Inskeep has used Karachi as a microcosm to to explore many broader phenomena. Firstly, there's the history. Just like the country as a whole, Karachi's physical and social landcape has been shaped by Jinnah and the Partition, by military coups and the Bhuttos, by growing Islamisation and conservatism. However, as much as the story of Karachi is linked to its national context, it's also a remarkably universal one, of refugee crises, housing insecurity and unchecked and uneven development, of division along ethnic lines and of partisanship and corruption.

Inskeep tells these tales with unerring compassion and insight, which is why the trigger-happy quote given pride of place on the dust cover makes me so angry. It says:

[This book] will interest anybody who wants to understand the wars the United States is fighting, as well as anyone worried about the future of Pakistan, which may be the most important question facing the world today. Impressively structured and briskly told, Instant City is the Friday Night Lights of terrorism.

I’m sorry, but that guy did not read the same book I did. The book I read mentioned the US’ military entanglements maybe twice, and while Islamic extremism is woven throughout the book, Inskeep handles it very judiciously. His treatment of it is an exercise in perspective, a reminder that only tiny percentage of terrorism spills over into the West. Like the 2009 Ashura bombing that opens the book, or the bombings that happened in Lahore over Easter, the vast majority of terrorism is citizens of a country killing citizens of the same country who are ideologically, ethnically and/or religiously different (or sometimes people who aren't, but who simply get caught in the fray). 

In the Note on Sources that concludes the book, Inskeep writes: if this book succeeds at all, it lets the city speak for itself and be judged on its own terms. And it does. It doesn't buy into the problematic discourses that the West constructs around Pakistan, the Muslim world and the Global South, but neither does it pull its punches. Inskeep is present throughout as a narrator, but he makes few judgements or conclusions, prefering instead to let his interviewees speak for themselves. Where things are contentious, he provides all interested parties a chance to give their side of the story.

Ultimately, it's these traits that take Instant City out of the realm of simple biography, and make it into a discerning analysis of the complexities and contradictions of Karachi, and Pakistan as a whole. I have a policy of not rating non-fiction, but if I did, Instant City would be a definite 5 stars.

Review: Haveli by Zeenat Mahal

5 stars

Haveli is the most exciting thing I've stumbled across since I started making an effort to read literature from/featuring different countries. I have never read anything like it, and I'm not sure I ever will again, since I've gone on to read some of Mahal's other novellas and, while they are all good, none of them has the X-factor found here. 

Set in the early 1970s, Haveli is the story of Chandni (or C., as she calls herself), who has been raised by her grandmother, the widow of the last Nawab of Jalalabad. The begum subjected her spunky granddaughter to strict and antiquated home-schooling, but nothing has prepared her for Taimur (aka Alpha Male). He's the son of family friends, and C.'s grandmother is pushing for a union between them. When C.'s long-absent father returns, offering another marriage prospect, she has decisions to make, and growing up to do. 

Haveli a novella, but it's masterful. There's the spoilt, naive, headstrong heroine with whom one can still sympathise, the Alpha Male hero, who really isn't such an Alpha Male stereotype after all, the family entanglements, the mix of the traditional and the modern, the practical and the quaint, the Western and the--I want to find a less loaded word than 'Eastern', but nothing's coming to me. Subcontinental? South Asian? Desi, maybe. Somehow, Pakistani seems too small; the protagonist twice refers to herself and her family as being Punjabi, and the familiar context once again reminds me that the Partition is more a religio-political division than a cultural one.

The 1970s setting wasn't very tangible, but it was still integral. Without the political talk about Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and the possibility of "civil war" between West Pakistan and East Pakistan (aka Bangladesh), I would have been hard-pressed to guess at a decade, except to say that C. could not have been so unworldly in the internet age. I also assume that the nawab-without-a-title lifestyle that C. and her grandmother live is a product of its time, the 1970s being much closer to the days when the princely states retained technical independence under the British. 

For me, C.'s naivete was one of the things that made her narrative voice so strong and enjoyable, as was her irreverence, which was shown through in her banter with Taimur. The strength of C.'s personality means we only really see Taimur through her eyes, as Alpha Male. The nickname and the marriage-talk initially made me uneasy about C.'s future with him, but this was more the result of unchallenged prejudices than anything else. Once I started looking at the evidence on the page, it becomes clear that Taimur is a sweet bloke under all his bluster, and a good match for the headstrong C.

Towards the end of the story, C. makes an error in judgement, and attempts to fix it by dictating a plan to everyone, assuming that they will play the role she has allotted them. The lack of apologies and consultation means that she that it's only time that her strong-willed nature eclipses her likability, but the responsibility she takes for her actions also demonstrate her growth as a character, so I wasn't really put off by it at all. 

It's C.'s dynamic narration of the people and places around her that makes Haveli what it is. Mahal has managed to cram the characterisation and world-building of a full-length novel into her novella, and there really is no greater praise than that. 

However, as a final aside, I would also like to give her props for her name, which I suppose could either be an awesome pen name or a kick-ass actual name. The original Zeenat (or Zinat) Mahal - the last Mughal Empress of India - was the strong and politically astute wife of the last Mughal Emperor of India, and she basically ruled on his behalf until his deposition following the Sepoy Mutiny/First War of Independence. Seriously though, go and look her up.