OPINION:
By Fatima Bhutto
Penguin Press, $25.95, 231 pages
As memories of the British Raj fade, a literary legacy abides. By the late-19th century, English had become the second language of millions of intelligent, articulate natives of the Subcontinent. Even today, it is one of only two official national languages in India — Hindi is the other — and is spoken by most educated Pakistanis and Bangladeshis as well. This has led to a whole new genre of English language literature — Indglish, if you will — that includes some of the best novelists of the 20th century and beyond, from R.K. Narayan and Vikram Seth to Amit Chaudhuri and Salman Rushdie, not to mention outstanding woman novelists like Monica Ali (“Brick Lane”) and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (“The Unknown Errors of Our Lives”).
Even when their content is at its most contemporary and gritty, English-language novels by authors from the Subcontinent tend to be beautifully worded, possibly because many upper-class Indians and Pakistanis are still exposed to the works of English masters like Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Dickens, Thackeray and Trollope, all names fast disappearing from American reading lists.
The latest addition to the list of promising “Indglish” novelists is 32 year-old Fatima Bhutto, granddaughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the flamboyant, corrupt Pakistani prime minister ultimately hanged for murder, and niece of his daughter, Benazir Bhutto, another controversial Pakistani prime minister who died before her time. Fatima’s own father, Mir Murtaza Bhutto, who espoused armed revolution, was gunned down in 1996, possibly with the connivance of Benazir Bhutto supporters. So when Fatima Bhutto set out to create a novel with a backdrop of political violence and treachery, she knew whereof she wrote.
A lot can happen in a single morning and in “The Shadow of the Crescent Moon” Ms. Bhutto proves it in trumps. Set in a fictionalized version of Mir Ali, a real provincial town in Waziristan, one of her country’s backward Tribal Areas along the border with Afghanistan, the story makes several generations of family life, political tensions and external pressure from Western superpowers and Islamic jihadists alike come to a head in a single day between 8 in the morning and high noon — in this case in the wild, wild east. What begins as the seemingly simple story of three brothers with three different approaches to life is quickly subsumed by the surge of events around them.
By the time the noon hour strikes, all three brothers — opportunistic, commercially minded elder brother Aman Erum, middle brother Sikander, a diffident, apolitical doctor, and youngest brother Hayat, a seemingly committed revolutionary — will be diminished by compromise, cowardice or betrayal while the novel’s two main female characters will emerge as stronger and more resolute, even in the face of defeat and tragic loss.
The underlying grievance that drives the narrative, and is developed by many — arguably too many — flashbacks, lies in the origins of Pakistan as a nation. When Clement Atlee’s postwar Labor government rushed to dismantle the British Indian Empire, the resulting partition reserved the vast central bulk of the Subcontinent for what is now the Republic of India with an overwhelmingly Hindu population. Predominantly Muslim Pakistan was patched together from the leftovers: what would later become Bangladesh, southeast of India, and present day Pakistan to the north, including part of the prosperous, populous Punjab, the old province of Sind with its teeming port city, Karachi, scraps of Kashmir and the primitive “tribal” territories bordering on Afghanistan, an area where British infrastructure, civil administration and rule of law had never really taken root.
In those parts, local Afridis, Pathans and other tribal types often feel more kinship with fellow tribesmen in Afghanistan than with the central Pakistani government dominated by Punjabis and, to a lesser extent, people from the Sind. The result has been a lingering guerrilla war aggravated by the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, American counter-offensives and the rise of armed jihadist forces on both sides of the Khyber Pass.
While some of Ms. Bhutto’s fictitious characters are overdrawn or underdeveloped — especially those representing her bete noir, the Pakistani military — her gripping descriptions of conditions on the ground are powerfully convincing, even allowing for a little artistic license on her part, as in this description of a local hospital targeted by terrorists: “The explosion destroyed the blood bank, significant parts of the ER, and the processing lab. Scrawny cats now prowl the hospital corridors, sneaking in through holes in the damaged walls to scour for food. They make do with discarded placentas, which they eat out of half-open medical waste bins.”
As for the Sunni jihadists themselves: “In Quetta they attacked [Shia] religious processions, killing the faithful in their mosques on their most holy and sorrowful of days. In Multan they planted bombs in the parks and alleyways near people’s homes. They pulled children out of school buses and slit their throats on the roadsides … .”
“The Shadow of the Crescent Moon” is an imperfect but promising first novel by a gifted writer. If Fatima Bhutto’s grandfather and aunt had been half as good at politics as she is at writing, Pakistan today would be in much better shape.
• Aram Bakshian Jr., a former aide to Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, has written widely on politics, history, gastronomy and the arts.
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