Divided loyalties, betrayed love Jackie Kabir reflects on a complex tale of 1971

Kartography is a book about Karachi, the spider plant city where you might find, according to the narrator, fossilized footprints of Alexander the Great. It is a heartbreaking love story, depicts the ethnic conflict which pervades Pakistani society and yet at the same time the resilience of its people. The story revolves around four friends and their lives in Karachi during 1971, which they call the 'Civil War'. The couples Zafar and Maheen, Yasmin and Ali swap their partners. While they handle the situation somehow, it is their children who can't accept the fact that one of their parents had betrayed the other.

Karim and Raheen were friends from the time they were born. Karim's parents get separated and somehow he can never get over the situation. His main aim in life is to become a cartographer and give names to the places in Karachi 'where the streets have no name'. Both Karim and Raheen are fascinated by the city of their birth and they keep coming back to it, abandoning the luxuries of the West. Maybe that is why the author has titled the book 'Kartography', with a K.

To me though, this book is about a beautiful Bengali girl growing up in Karachi and her plight in 1971. Maheen, who didn't know any other city as her hometown, was humiliated and tortured verbally as things went from bad to worse during the war of independence of Bangladesh. She was alienated, ostracized from the very society she grew up in. It was a nightmare she was going through when her fiancé declined to go through with their marriage and chose to marry her best friend instead. Maheen was a Bengali, who grew up in another language. In 1971 Zafar's friend Shafiq asked him:

“How can you do it? You are going to marry one of them. You are going to let her have your children. How?”

Shafiq's baby brother's body was found in erstwhile East Pakistan and could not even be identified. So he thought Zafar was being a traitor by marrying a Bengali woman.

With that and the pressure of society he had to let go of Maheen. But when he had a girl he called her Raheen, the suffix borrowed from his ex fiancée's name. He wanted Raheen to be friends with Karim, Maheen and Ali's son.

Half of the book describes Karachi in 1971, while the other half focuses on Raheen and Karim's friendship.

A waiter spilt a drink on Laila, another friend. Her husband stood up and cracked a slap cross the waiter's cheek and screamed, 'Halfwit Bingo! Go back to your jungle.' Maheen was present there and witnessed the whole scene. There was an incident where a beggar woman spat on Maheen in public. Even Zafar was hated by most people for being a 'Bingo lover'.

The war of independence in Bangladesh is something around which the novel revolves.

“71 was madness”, says a friend.

After the war was over Zafar said:

“Happy? Why should I be happy?…… Three days ago we surrendered to the Indian army. Of course we are not happy. We've lost half the country and most of our souls.”

Karim, Maheen's son, who had always thought of himself as a Bengali and thus a minority like the Muhajirs from the Muhajir Qaumi Movement, said to Raheen and her friends:

“ We didn't learn anything, did we, from '71?”

The generation of children born after 1971 hardly know anything about the war, as evident from a letter Raheen writes:

“ We are nearly forty-eight years old as a nation, young enough that there are people who have lived through our entire history and more, but too old to put our worries down to teething problems. Between our birth in 1947 and 1995, dead bang between our beginning and our present, is 1971, of which I know next to nothing except that there was a war and East Pakistan became Bangladesh, and terrible things we must have done then to remain so silent about it. Is it shame at losing the war, or guilt about what we did try to win that mutes us?”

Towards the end of the novel there is a letter from Zafar to Maheen explaining what made him betray her after the war, what made him decide not to marry her. At one point he says:

“Pakistan died in 1971. Pakistan was a country with two wings. I have never before thought of the war in terms of that image: a wing tearing away from the body it once helped keep afloat --- it was a country with a majority Bengali population and its attendant richness of culture, clothing…. Oh, everything. How can Pakistan still be when all of that, everything that East Pakistan added to the country?….. How can Pakistan still be when we so abused that image --- first by ensuring that the Bengalis were minimized and marginalized both politically and economically, and then by reacting to their demands for greater rights and representation with acts of savagery?”

Zafar's confession does make one wonder who Kamila Shamsie had in mind while describing the events. Maheen could grow out of her character to become the pervasive national identity that was so abused, humiliated at the hands of the Pakistani military. Born in 1973 Shamsie may represent the post-71 Pakistan generation's view. The parallel story is about Karim and Raheen, describes their love for a complex and violent city, a death city, according to Newsline. The suffering of city dwellers, the atrocities of communal riots, explosions. All of which make the book very exciting and hard to put down once begun.

It is a highly recommended book for people of all ages, especially those of us who think that the injustices done to us by Pakistanis is unpardonable. It will help us to understand that there are people in Pakistan who feel that they have lost more than just a part of their country. It may help bridge the gap between the two nations.