Alice Albinia - Empires of the Indus

Publisher: Hachette
Author: Alice Albinia
Title: Empires of the Indus

I remember a time when I was momentarily seduced by the idea of following the Silk Route. It seemed like a glamorous idea, trudging in the wake of traders and adventurers who braved inclement weather, murderous dacoits, disease, illness, hunger, thirst to undertake seemingly foolhardy journeys into the unknown or nearly unknown far off lands. Men like Marco Polo, Hiuen Tsang, Ibn Batuta and many many more.

Seemingly, we are well connected with the world in these modern times. We can fly to the other side of the world, or encircle it, within a day or two. Or more, given the airline schedules. We can eat sandwiches everywhere, sip bottled water and be fairly safe. But this applies only to beaten paths. If you decide to go off the beaten paths, be prepared to live it down. Knock about in ramshackle buses, drink contaminated water, eat iffy food and miss your cozy home.

Alice Albinia undertakes an arduous journey along the banks of the mighty river Indus, starting from the Sindh delta where the river merges into the Arabian sea. She tracks the river up to its modest source in Tibet, Senge Khabab (Mouth of the Lion). The journey is daunting. It is often through dangerous parts of Afganistan, Pakistan, India and Tibet. As it is close to the borders of these countries often, the area is under military surveillance and not accessible. Alice has to take permission from the military of all these countries to be able to continue her journey.

The lower part of Indus is nearly abandoned and fisher folk living there are robbed of their fertile land and occupation because of damming on the river in upper areas. This region is populated by Sindhis who find themselves overshadowed by the rest of Pakistan. From here she moves on to the Sheedi's, African settlers who were brought here in the same manner as they were taken to America, for the purposes of slavery. She moved ahead, each stop more perilous than the last, under the shadows of the Kalashnikov and AK47. Her last journey is the most difficult of all. It is treacherous, changeable weather at high altitudes of Tibet, the most unmanned point of all.

All along the way we learn the fascinating history of the region she is in. The story is saddening and familiar. Where all was pure nature's bounty earlier, it is depletion and exploitation of natural resources by man now. The early civilisations respected nature and lived within its rules and enjoyed its bounties. Now man is in a hurry, he wants to extract the maximum out of the earth, its minerals, its flora, fauna and water. The deplorable effects of damming are seen everywhere. Politicians want to provide water for irrigation and puts up dams, harming the natural ecology of the region. Modernisation ignores the rules of nature and harms the earth in consequence.  Water becomes a weapon for negotiating with fractious neighbours.

Along with the author, we mourn for the lost glory of Indus. We shake our heads thinking of the heads of government who no longer care for nature, they care only to provide short term solutions to increase the longevity of their tenure.

I will pull out one quote from the book with the reminder that it was published in 2008.

As we move along the edges of the flooded fields, the village men talk of Kashmir, unburdening themselves of their disappointed life histories. They speak bitterly of the Pakistani Mujahideen. 'Nowdays we are not so deceived by their false promises of freedom,' one man says. Nor does the Indian state offer much hope, nobody in India, they say, wants to employ a Kashmiri Muslim. The only advantage that Kashmiris have is the law which forbids Indians from buying land in the valley: 'So even poor people here have a home and farmland.'

The subversion of Article 370 puts paid to this last tenuous link to self-subsistence the Kashmiris had.

So we can perhaps 'look forward' to the hell on earth that faces us as we kill the rich fauna and flora and dry up the bounties nature has heretofore offered us. And we offer no hope or reprieve to the people displaced by the hasty ill conceived actions of our politicians, no matter what their country or affiliation.

The books is excellently written, deeply researched and each region of the Indus personally visited by the author. I admire her tenacity and dedication to this project. It is a valuable book for someone wanting to know more about the East-Asian region. Alice Albinia joins the ranks of brave world travelers who suffered privations to add to the knowledge of people like us.

Kamila Shamsie - Salt and Saffron

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Author: Kamila Shamsie
Title: Salt and Saffron

Scribd threw up this book among a recommended reading shelf, based on my past choices. The name was intriguing and I picked up the book (i.e., opened the pages on the app) and dived right into the book. It was such a page turner that I was deep into the book before I realized that I had not saved it in my books. Easily remedied, as the name of the book was so catchy, I could not forget it if I wanted to.

Aliya is a compulsive teller of stories. She spends a long flight from USA to London captivating her fellow passengers with stories of her family. Her co-passenger Khaleel is impressed and just as they are getting to know each other better Aliya realizes he is from the wrong side of tracks.  She is a scion of a nawabi family that traces its roots back to Taimur the lame.  Also, she is drawn into the affairs of her family. Something terrible happened in her family because of which one of her aunts was ostracized.  Aliya had a falling out with her grandmother which is another issue that is rankling the family members.

Aliya finds herself confronting the history of her clan in a effort to understand the happenings of the present.  The story of Dard-e-dil, Aliya's nawabi family, has been handed down from generation to generation. They collaborated with Babur and later even tried to collaborate with the British, in order to maintain their independence. But Partition of India finally drove a wedge between the family and they were likewise divided. The how's and why's of this division form the backbone of this story.

I loved the easy telling of all the clannish tales.  All big families have stories that ultimately become legends, some embellished as they go along. It is all a part of our past when we had no other means of entertainment but telling of things. Here too there were numerous stories regarding encounters of various family members with household lizards. The story of the rift between three brothers who headed the family at the time of partition was likewise distorted and embellished in retelling.

The language finds the right balance between being faultless and mixed with just the right amount of vernacular to give it a desi feel. The exchanges between various characters are witty and replete with humor. It is like a more serious Moni Mohsin. Despite the light touch, the book addresses class divide which is the bane of all societies. Any book that harks back to the 1940s has to deal with the trauma of partition in this subcontinent.  As the migrants here were Nawabs, they did not steal across the border hiding in trains, having lost all their worldly possessions; they were taken across with an army convoy guarding them.

There are several reveals at strategic places in the novel. The problem of the ostracized aunt, Miriam is explained soon enough. The problem between Aliya and her Grandmother is also described in due time. The piece de resistance is the story of the triplet brothers in the 1940s. The story is good enough, but I was slightly disappointed that the story came from the lips of some characters. Surely a story that was so distorted needed to be found with more difficulty.  However, it is a minor dissonance, most of it in my mind, my opinion as a reader. The rest of the book is a delight and Kamila Shamsie is a find for me. An author whose works I will read with pleasure from now on.

Mohammed Hanif - A Case of Exploding Mangoes

"Why keep reading it when you already know that the hero is going to die." asks Ali
"To see how he dies.  What were his last words. That kind of a thing" replies Obaid

We know right from the start about the people who are going to die, and the manner of their death. The death of Gen Zia, then President of Pakistan, and the US Ambassador along with a clutch of his Generals , is common knowledge. We know his plane had a mysterious crash that was subsequently put down to some technical fault in the aircraft.  This novel is a fictionalised account of the events leading to Zia's death.

An Air Force cadet, Ali Shigri is on the scene of Zia's death with some inside knowledge of the proceedings. He narrates his side of the story in the first person.  There is a further account of the goings on in Zia's cabinet in the third person. The devout Gen. Zia is in the habit of opening the Koran at a random page each day and taking the words inscribed therein as a kind of message from the Allah. He is disturbed when he finds himself opening the page describing Jonah again and again. He feels it is a bad omen of some kind and orders his security tightened.

Gradually, we find that Zia's suspicions are not far from the mark.  There are several people who are conspiring to kill him. Ali Shigri's father, General Shigri, committed suicide in mysterious circumstances years ago.  Ali suspects the hand of his fellow officers in the 'suicide'. The CIA is always loitering around, wanting to swing things in its favor by yet another kill. Zia's Generals have agendas of their own. The leader of the gutter cleaning association wants him dead. So does Zainab, the blind rape victim, who has been awarded a sentance for fornicating and is to be publically stoned to death. Will her curses be powerful enough to kill the President?

The novel has a very good start. The motives of the characters are revealed slowly. In the meantime,
we get a good look at the life inside a military training camp. We get a good look at things in Pakistan as
they were after the coup pulled by Gen. Zia.

The novel keeps us in the confines of the upper strata of the rulers of Pakistan. We do not stray beyond that. Hanif creates a closed space where his characters exist.  Like a spotlight in a circus the light seems to fall in and around his characters and keeps all else in darkness.  So we live in a pool of light in the Army House where Zia has sequestered himself, with Zia at the center of it.  Or we move to the pool of light (and at times, darkness) where Ali Shigri is, in the jail or in the Air Force Campus.  At times the spotlight moves and falls on common people going about their lives, but that happens only now and then.  At no time do we lose sight of our main characters and what they are up to.

I particularly liked all the passages that deal with Gen. Zia.  He is seen as a devout, canny, foolish, foolhardy, cunning, perceptive, trusting and a suspicious person all at once.  In short, he is a bundle of contradictions.  All the passages dealing with him are so humourous, so darkly humourous that I wanted to read them again and again.  In fact, the novel is replete with black humour. You find yourself smiling and chuckling even as a character hurtles to his death.

Mohammad Hanif pulls no punches in describing the political scene in Pakistan.  There is no leeway given to politicians or the religious heads.  You can see that they are being blamed for the mess that Pakistan is. He writes as if he feels for his country, even as he exposes its warts. He writes as if he wants to heal, and not maim his country.  I felt quite envious, I must say.  I wish we had such a writer for India as well.

His book is mostly crisp, the language terse. As is usual with books, the middle sags at times, mostly because the motives of Ali Shigri are revealed to us with excrutiating slowness. Once we know what Ali is up to, the book regains its pace and clip clops smartly to the grand finale.

Hanif does like to end his books with a bang. And we are left to scramble back to look at the chain of
cause-and-effect that led to the final blast. This is similar to the situation in his second book, "Our Lady of Alice Bhatti" , which I happened to read first.