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Literary Review
Mapping obsessions
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Kartography is about obsessions: with words, maps and, most of all, the idea of home. A home that is impossible either to love or exorcise.
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THERE is a map of Karachi in this book in which I spotted the exact location of a friend's house. My friend went to Karachi Grammar School, and at the time I met her I had no better coordinate for grammar schools than those gained from reading English novels: grammar schools had the earnest-bright but poor students, not chaps with plummy accents.
Karachi Grammar School however is the opposite, as I was to find out. Anyone who is anyone in Karachi goes there. Anyone who is anyone in Karachi lives "this side" of the river, and goes to Sind Club to play squash. There is a jet set in Karachi that would effortlessly make wallflowers of the Bina Ramanis of Delhi and the Parmeshwar Godrejs of Bombay. The characters in Kartography come from this set.
Karim and Raheen have been "spit-brothers" ("sputum being the liquid... we chose to mingle and ingest... ") since the time they reached out to each other in their cribs. Their parents form an odd quartet, close friends, who exchanged partners, yet remained friends. The children live with the knowledge that each could have had the others' mother or father — but then would they have existed as themselves at all? It's a conundrum that is amusing until the reasons for the swap begin to worry Raheen.
When the novel opens Karim ("Cream, Karimazov") and Raheen are 13, in a friendship where each can anticipate the other's thoughts. They delight in anagrams. (The book's title is a word that plays with Karim's obsession with cartography and Raheen's with Karachi.) The two are just beginning to discover the forbidden thrills of adulthood through adolescent crushes and their friend's illegal driving license. Despite other friendships and crushes, however, they know, even if unconsciously, that their love is fated, their friendship mythic.
Karachi is a city in trouble, troubles that are reminiscent of the Civil War of 1971 — what we know as the Bangladesh war. Karim's parents quarrel, and not just about whether they should migrate to England leaving a city consuming itself in violence. Yet as Karachi seethes over entitlements of muhajirs, sindhis and pathans, high society exhausts itself with ebullient parties, awash with bootlegged whiskey and gossip.
But in the novel, such isolation can only be a fragile illusion. The isolation is broken in small ways as when Raheen and a friend get shot at while joyriding in a red Mercedes — because the police in Karachi, much like their brothers in Delhi, have just had orders to shoot at all red cars on the off chance that one of them contains an absconding criminal.
Their isolation is porous in larger ways too.
Though Raheen and Karim trade insults in their adulthood of each being too self-obsessed to bother about the rest of Karachi, they discover that the world outside can choose to invade them at will. Why had their parents swapped partners? The answer to the central mystery of their childhood lies in Bangladesh 1971, a war that on the surface has been consigned to the ragbag of Karachi's party anecdotes. Raheen and Karim discover the potency of a supposedly dead old historical event when they find out why their parents did what they did. Their parents are reconciled, but can the children follow? Has ancient parental betrayal driven a chasm into their friendship, or has the betrayal occurred closer home?
In an otherwise well-written book, the narrative totters into melodrama when the mystery of the swap is laid bare in an ugly family quarrel. The sweat also shows through the ink when the writing tackles the question of a social conscience among the sequestered rich of Pakistan. With earnestness not Shamsie's natural way of being, the strain shows.
Kartography is about obsession: obsession with words, with maps (which can mean different things to different people in the book), obsession with friendship, with a friend. Most of all though, it is obsessed with the idea of home. Kamila Shamsie is described as a writer who "lives in London and Karachi." Many of the characters in the book do roughly the same, and like affluent Indians, debate endlessly about whether they should return to a place that is violent and corrupt, "that was feasting on its own blood...that bred monsters". Even so it is the only city in which Raheen can see not just the surface but "the blood running through and out of its veins." The novel is a paean to a home that is impossible either to love or exorcise.
And for those Indians who enquire of travellers returning from Pakistan, "Are They like Us?" I can say after reading this, Yes, amazingly. The novel has some memories of The God of Small Things in its depiction of childhood friendship turned to love; it remembers The Shadow Lines in its concern with maps, man-made borders, and in depicting the emotional geography of a city. And there are even people in the novel who blame the Foreign Hand for everything evil happening in the country.
Kartography, Kamila Shamsie, Bloomsbury, £9.99.
ANURADHA ROY
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