By IPS Correspondents
LAHORE, May 11 1999 (IPS)

This is the first novel in English of a generation growing up in the late-70s Pakistan. The book is about a boy coming of age, martial law crashing into his puberty. It is a novel about the end of idealism.

Hasan, the protagonist, is eleven years old and goes to Karachi Grammar School — which means that he belongs to a well off family that lives in posh Defence Colony.

Mother is a painter, and a good one at that with a developed sense of poetry (passionate about Nazim Hikmat). Father is a successful but honourable lawyer.

Hasan’s Salman ‘mamoo’ (uncle), his favourite adult, is an ideal(istic) politician: well bred, Oxbridge-type liberal and has a constituency from the other (poorer) side of the Clifton Bridge — dividing Karachi — so that when the General arrests him the city rises in revolt.

Urban Pakistanis in their thirties, from Karachi and Lahore’s professional families, who were young teenagers in the late 70s, have not recovered from dictatorship, segregation and Islamisation.

They are the children of men and women who were young in very optimistic times — the late 50s and early 60s, the era of nation-building under General Ayub Khan.

Their children, were expected to experience optimism, but all hell broke loose as they grew up. It was a time of prime minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s ugly fall from grace at the hands of his protege, General Ziaul Haq, and military rule.

Kamila Shamsie’s novel ‘The City By The Sea’ concerns the extra-judicial killing of the optimism of a whole generation.

Both Hasan the character and the author, in the raison d’etre of her book, attempt at recovering optimism from the dark forces. Hasan’s world of a wise and painter mother, kind and wordsmith father, and a ‘Sufi’ of an uncle politician crashes against ugliness when the General imprisons the uncle.

Hasan recovers fantastically. Provocative though the subject of the novel, has the author presented us with a salve, a balm, or an ultimately unbelievable story?

Perhaps not in the grand scheme of things, but in bits and pieces, in the reimagination of the Karachi Grammar School life for one, some burdens have lifted.

This first Karachi Grammar School novel has given its alumni some cathartic moments. Hasan, at an elocution contest at school one morning, waits his turn to recite. He is contemplating reciting the usual suspects, Wordsworth, Scott et al, and at the same time he is overcome by the fact that his Salman ‘mamoo’ has been arrested and in detention:

“Nargis Lotia tip-toed circles on the stage, wandering lonely as a cloud, as she had done for the last four oratory competitions.

Hasan bent over and placed his head between his knees … The thought of young Lochinvar coming out of the west had no interest for Hasan … There was a poem Ami had book-marked in a magazine on her studio shelf. Each morning this last month Hasan had opened to the poem and found a new water-coloured fingerprint on the page.

“Go on,” Javed nudged Hasan, “Your turn.”

Hasan gripped the chair in front of him and rose to his feet. It was an English translation of a Turkish poem. Hasan formed an image of the fingerprinted page in his mind and scanned it as he walked towards the stage past row after row of grey and white uniforms … Lochinvar rode all alone and rode all unarmed clear out of Hasan’s head. Hasan faced the crowd.

“Some Advice to Those Who Will Serve Time in Prison,” by Nazim Hikmat. In the audience teachers exchanged concerned looks and students nudged each other, but it was too late to backtrack.

If you had spent years and years at Speech Days and Elocution Contests and in English classes exposed to a sometimes sanctified, deodorised, or phenyled but always decontextualised English you would share this pleasure at Shamsie’s re-imagining a school elocution contest.

Another bold experiment is the use of language in the novel in the speech of the adults. At first I thought nobody speaks like that but then the charm of the wordplay took hold. The wordplay of the adults has a use: through fantasy they communicate difficult concepts and harsh realities to the children. Hasan’s imagination is allowed a wonderful playground of emotion and

interpretation.

The structure and lyricism of the novel are the strengths of Shamsie, the novelist (and one can see the shadow of her ‘ustaad’ or mentor the poet Agha Shahid Ali: his most recent breathtaking collection is called ‘A Country Without A Post Office’).

Critics may call the optimism of ‘The City By The Sea’ balmy. Karachi is too violently class-divided for the air-brushing of class in a novel about Karachi.

This may be the hubris of a Grammarian: Shamsie invents a sweet strategy of recovery, from the terror of coming of age, in the era of the General.

Excerpt: