Visiting Pakistan with Kartography

I’m a new parent, and so, by definition, I’m tired. When others sleep, I’m awake. I lie in bed listening for the sounds of Finnegan stirring. I do 5am feedings in a trance. Knowing it won’t happen any other time, I (sometimes) summon the will to exercise before the sun comes up. The opposite is true too. When others are awake, I sleep. My head bobs on the subway. On airplanes, I’m out before the cabin doors close. Sometimes, I even “rest my eyes” when I’m walking home.

In addition to being a bit dangerous, all this sleep catchup is really messing with my reading routine. I used to plow through books on public transit, in flight, or on route from one place to another. Now I nod off. In this new world, the books I read take on a surrealist quality. As my eyelids dip, the stories on the page merge with my dreams. I read the same passages over and over again, the words bobbing and undulating before my eyes.

The opening chapters of this month’s Vicarious Reading pick, Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography, exacerbated that effect. Named for one of the character’s obsession with maps, it follows two childhood best friends as they grow into young adults in Karachi, Pakistan. When Karim and Raheen are young, the book is too – written in a strange rhythm replete with random observations, inscrutable anagrams, and invented words. The children speak in inside jokes and imported cultural references, as when they visit a novelty shop in a nearby neighborhood:

“Look, he’d said once, holding up a five-rupee mask of Sly Stallone in Rambo headband looking peculiarly Pakistani, it’s the face of my wit. He slipped it over my head. Stay sullen in it. I dare you! Rambo Rehman. Rambunctious. Ram Boloo Pehlvan.”

After 30 pages of this, of literally holding my eyes open as I tried to simultaneously fight sleep and make sense of Shamsie’s topsy turvy paragraphs, I was ready to throw in the towel. But I’m so glad I didn’t, because Kartography has so much to say about two of my favorite topics – love and location. I enjoyed it so much that, on my way home from Chicago a few days ago, I actually recommended this book to a stranger on a plane. Instead of sleeping! (I’m amazed too).

Kartography is a book packed with clever parallelisms. In early 70s Pakistan, two engaged couples switch partners in what they call the “fiancé swap,” and the resulting couples each go on to marry and have a child. Those children grow up as best friends who seem destined to be together, until events among their own group of four friends (which includes the flatly angelic Sonia and unconvincingly blasé Zia) complicate a once-certain fate. One generation of romantically complicated pairings begets another.

There are also socio-political parallels at work here. The “fiancé swap” occurs amid a civil war, when not even two couples in love can withstand the tumult of discrimination, anger, and betrayal. Decades later, Raheen and Karim’s own nascent romance is buffeted by a country seemingly intent on devouring itself. History repeats itself as love asserts itself.

In Kartography, love of person and love of place are bound inextricably. The relationship at the heart of this book is really a love triangle – Raheen, Karim, and Karachi. Raheen and Karim’s feelings for each other are strong but often go unsaid. Their feelings for the city, meanwhile, ebb and flow, functioning as a proxy for their relationship. For much of the book, Raheen lives in the city but doesn’t engage with it, moving through its warring streets beneath the protective layer that privilege affords. Karim, meanwhile, is absent – living halfway across the world in England – but feels deeply invested in the city’s uncertain fate. It’s all a giant metaphor – the city as stand-in for a love story, a love story swirling around the city, and Raheen over-analyzing it all:

“How can selfishness and love coexist? Karachi at its worst is a Karachi unconcerned with people who exist outside the storyteller’s circle, a Karachi oblivious to people and places who aren’t familiar enough for nicknames. What I’ve sometimes mistaken for intimacy is really just exclusion. But Karachi is always dual. Houses are alleys; car thieves are the people who help you when your car won’t start; pollution simultaneously chokes you and makes you gasp at the beauty of unnatural sunsets; a violent, fractured place dismissive of everyone outside its boundaries is vibrant, embracing, accepting of outsiders; and, yes, selfishness is the consequence of love. No simple answers in Karachi.”

 "It hits you in unexpected moments, this city's romance; everywhere, air pockets of loveliness just when your lungs can't take anymore congestion or pollution or stifling newspaper headlines … I knew that there were so many reasons to fail to love it, to cease to love it, to be unable to love it, that it made love a fierce and unfathomable thing."

And when Raheen finally declares her love, it’s to Karachi and Karim equally:  

 “I love this place, Karim, for all its madness and complications. It’s not that I didn’t love it before, but I loved it with a child’s kind of love, the kind that either ends or strengthens as understanding grows. I can see you, out there, reading between the lines. Come home, stranger. Come home, untangler of my thoughts. Come home and tell me, what do I do with this breaking heart of mine?”

Two weeks ago, I met up with my fellow book clubbers to find out if this book moved them as much as it moved me. Long story short – it did. Over panipuri and cardamom-infused bourbon at Badshah, we traded favorite passages and chapters. One club member was deeply affected by an anecdote about the book’s traveling massage therapist, Naila, who serves as a gauge for violence levels of the city. If Naila hasn’t shown up to the homes of her wealthy customers by a certain time on Saturday morning, they take it as a sign that Karachi is in chaos. Another loved this quote: “her definition of romance was absent-minded intimacy, the way someone else’s hands stray to your plate of food.” Top marks from the group as a whole went to correspondence between Raheen and Karim in the form of shared term papers, early scenes set on vacation in “ruralistan,” and the chaste descriptions of midriffs and hand-holding that somehow managed to rival any harlequin on the sexiness scale.

But what we loved most of all, beyond Raheen and Karim’s will-they-or-won’t-they relationship, was how much Kartography taught us. Pakistan was (and remains) a big blind spot in my geographic and historical knowledge. But thanks to this book and the patience of one Pakistani member of my book club, I now know infinitely more about partition, civil war, quota systems, Muhajirs, Bengalis, and Pathams than I imagined possible a month ago. We live in strange times, not just here or in New Zealand or Syria, but everywhere. Even if it doesn’t help, it feels good to understand, at least a little bit.

So, as Karim and Raheen would say, “adobe risk tho.” Also known as – read this book. You’ll get a little less sleep, but you’ll be a lot more entertained and enriched.