Sunday Reading Followup

By John Ballard

This post is strictly recreational reading. Anyone looking for heavy, important stuff should move on to whatever is next on your list.
If you decide to stay, do yourself a favor and don't skim. I have no way of knowing how fast you read, but my best guess is that if you follow the links and read them as well, this post may take an hour or more of your time. That's if you don't stop and reflect.

This was for me the reading and writing equivalent of a box of cherry cordials. I don't want to be casting pearls before swine, if you catch my drift.

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Last weekend's reading was very satisfying. The Arabist is a challenging, erudite source and one of my guilty pleasures in retirement is unhurried reading time. While surfing or blogging my mind is too unsettled to pay careful attention. But along with that second cup of morning coffee, before my head becomes too cluttered, I can enjoy a ten or fifteen page printout at one sitting, followed by time for reflection before starting my day. Such were two or three mornings this past week.

If there is a theme to this week's reading it is Pakistani writing. Anyone following my posts already knows my affection for 3Quarks Daily, a wellspring of stimulating reading that happens to have a close-knit core of very smart young people, several of whom, including executive editor Abbas Raza, are from Pakistan. I forgot how I first came upon this site, but over the last four or five years I have come to think of these kids as my own. (One of the few satisfactions of aging is getting to call youner people "kids." I', only sixty-five, but I'm told that when you're eighty you can get away with almost anything.) I will never forget one of Abbas' "Monday Musings," a hair-raising story of mistaken identity at the hands of some of New York's finest. 

Amit Chaudhury, who teaches contemporary literature at the University of East Anglia, is also a contributor to the London Review of Books. (How's that for name dropping?)  Last week he had this to say about contemporary Pakistani writers.

What is Pakistani writing? Whatever it might be, it seems to have taken up newsprint lately. Things have been changing quickly and irrevocably over the last seven or eight years: a great symbol of American capitalism was destroyed by two aeroplanes; this was followed, some years later, by a crash in the market no less resounding and sudden; in South Asia, Pakistan (marginalised and nearly abandoned by post-Cold War politics) has been veering between being a frail democracy and becoming a basket case. In no obvious way connected to all this, a handful of Anglophone writers has recently been emerging from that country. Most of them are young, and have written one or two or three books; some, like Mohsin Hamid and Mohammed Hanif, have successful careers and lives elsewhere. Their work is not part of the long 20th century; they are not a necessary component of a post-colonial efflorescence, as Indian Anglophone writing appeared to be in the 1980s; they are not in any clear way a part of a national literature; they do not bring with them the promise of offering to the reader the �sights and sounds� of what used to be, in Kipling�s time, North-West India. They are a 21st-century phenomenon, appearing at a time when the new supposed fundamentals of this century � free-market dominance, the end of history, the clash of civilisations � suddenly seem frayed and ephemeral. Pakistani writers are interestingly poised: implicated in both the unfolding and the unravelling of our age.

I have decided he's correct. My limited personal experience with anything Pakistani includes encounters with students forty years ago and more recently being assigned two or three assistant managers of Pakistani origin. My dining room was staffed by an impressive group of young men from Bangladesh, formerly East Pakistan. Among them I observed a variety of personality types and backgrounds, the most impressive of which was an assistant manager who found his future wife several states distant via the Internet, married, brought her here and started a family. 

It's not easy to see the world through the eyes of another culture but it can be done. If there is a trick, it is shedding preconceptions and suspending judgment at least long enough to wade into different waters. Two years ago at the suggestion of an Egyptian man (an Oxford-educated architect living in America for the last thirty-five or forty years) I ordered an English translation of The Yacubian Building, a contemporary Egyptian novel by Alaa el-Aswany which was made into a movie a couple of years ago. It was not easy to plow through the opening chapters or allow the characters to behave in ways that seemed so culturally different. But after getting accustomed to things like bribery, police misconduct and a Byzantine social order I was able to go with the flow and follow the story to the end. 

Likewise, I was half way into the second of two short stories by Daniyal Mueenuddin before I was able to accept disagreeable realities over which I had no control and allow myself to follow the story undistracted. Make no mistake, these are not your father's O. Henry short stories. These are a couple of sketches that take place in modern Pakistan which shine a light on the culture and economic circumstances of another, very different society. American readers tempted to pass judgment, incidentally, are advised not to throw stones. 

Of the two stories I read from The New Yorker,  A Spoiled Man appeared first. The main character is a singular individual, proud and hard-working, but alone in the world having left his family and community long ago.

Several decades before, in his early twenties, he had fallen out with his step-brothers over shared property up in the mountains, a few acres of land on which they grew wheat and potatoes, bordered by apricot trees. Outmaneuvered, dispossessed, he had come down to the plains, vowing never to see his family again.

Aging and past that time of life when one might have hope for a brighter future, we follow Rezak as in his own way he swims against the current to make a better life. Within the social and economic constraints over which no one, it seems, has much control, he is able to have a wife and inch his way in a limited fashion up the social ladder. It is a poignant biography of a man both remembered and forgotten, perhaps fictional but maybe not, described in the title as spoiled.

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders introduces Husna, a young woman alone in the world seekng security by presenting herself, letter of recommendation in hand, to serve in some capacity a wealthy man in a position to help anyone he chooses. In the first scene we get a glimpse of an elaborate social hierarchy in which everyone knows his or her place -- and stays there.

A car drove up the circular driveway. A few minutes later, an elderly couple entered the room. Kissing Harouni on the cheek, the woman said in a smoky voice, �Hello, darling.� The man, gray beside his brightly dressed companion, his mustache trimmed, waited to one side.

�Hello, Riffat,� Harouni said, kissing her on the top of her head and then going over to the wall and pressing a bell. �Will you have a drink, Husky?�

The man glanced at his wife. �I�ll have a small whiskey.�

The visitor wore a pinkish kurta, too young for her but certainly very expensive, finely printed with a silver design. She eyed Husna, as if pricing her.

�This is Husna,� K.K. said to the woman, who had taken a seat on the sofa beside the girl. �Husna has recently graduated and is looking to find some useful work.�

�How interesting,� the woman said.

They had been speaking in English, and Husna exposed her poor accent, saying, �It is very good to meet you.�

Two servants carried in a tea trolley and placed it before the newcomer. The butler, Rafik, brought two whiskeys on a small silver tray.

As in the other story, we follow this young woman as she pursues what passes for upward mobility in an embedded, fairly calcified social structure. Again, the American reader is advised not to throw stones. Anyone who thinks that we (or any society) is free of such constraints is in denial of one of a truth as universal as gravity. The story is not to be rushed. Over the course of ten or fifteen pages we cover several years and at the end the reader should not have to go back and catch anything missed earlier. This is a story for slow, soaking reading.

I'm deliberately making no comment about these two stories, but I can assure the reader that they both had an impact on my thinking, not only about Pakistan but society in general, how the world is changing (and how it also is not), and both the differences and similarities of East and West. Enough of that.

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Before ending this post, thanks to a tweet I point to a story that appeared in Friday's NY Times about a tragic encounter between two Nepalese immigrants resulting in the death of one and serious injury to the other.

Pema Sherpa was opening the door of his rented yellow cab when the first blow came. A meat cleaver sliced open the back of his head and everything flashed white. The sun had not yet risen over the stretch of attached brick two-story houses on 62nd Street in Woodside, Queens; it was 5 a.m.

The cleaver came down again, this time on Mr. Sherpa�s chest, chopping through the layers of clothing he had donned against the early-morning chill. And again, slicing gashes into the rubber soles of his sneakers.

Bleeding on the pavement, Mr. Sherpa beheld his attacker: Debindra Chhantyal, his mild-mannered partner and countryman.

Each man had come from Nepal over the past decade, and attended the same taxi-training school in Jackson Heights. For a year, they had split the $1,400-per-week leasing fee on a yellow cab, Medallion 6M83, trading 12-hour shifts behind the wheel, seven days a week.

With that opening how can anyone not go to the link and read the rest? This is not a blaming story. This is a story underscoring an unappreciated side effect of immigration, the toll it can take on someone usually presumed to be beneficiary of the world's greatest opportunity, a chance to come to America and start a new life.

Somehow relevant to these reflections is a line I heard on Bob Edwards Sunday this afternoon. In his This I Believe essays, Norman Cousins made reference to a great description of how free will and determinism can best be understood. "Free will and determinism, I was told, are like a game of cards. The hand that is dealt you represents determinism. The way you play your hand represents free will."

Thanks for reading. We'll meet again when time permits.