DWL is in Goa for the IV Annual Arts and Literary Festival. Our group has been invited to attend as a Festival Partner. Guest post by Omer Wahaj (Managing Editor – Papercuts) peppered with some local vernacular.

Goa, Goa, Gone!

A strange and hectic account of several different places at several different times. 

5th December, 3 am, Dubai Airport

On our way to Goa but still in Dubai.

We have miles to go before we reach Mumbai.

We started from Karachi, with our guests Nimra Bucha and Adnan Jaffar. Afia forgot her Indian immigration papers so she had to stay back. Adnan, Farheen, Nimra and I made it to the flight out of Karachi but we couldn’t make our flight out of Dubai. JetAirways, being the Jut Airways that it is, left us high and dry, even though we ran a 400 meter marathon and almost beat Usain Bolt’s record trying to reach the counter half way across the United Arab Emirates. We were waiting at the Emirates transfer desk to get our tickets sorted when Afia strolled in and said, “Hello guys…” like nothing to it.

This is us goofing around at the Dubai airport.

 

 

5th December, 1 pm, Mumbai Airport

After finally reaching Mumbai, we had to take a bus ride from the international terminal to the domestic terminal, which took so long that for a minute I thought that the domestic terminal might be in Goa only.

6th December, 1pm, Goa

Reached Goa last evening. Something went awry and Adnan and Nimra couldn’t perform as per schedule. They’re doing it today at 3pm itself. A sitar/tabla/drums band tore it up in the auditorium. Amazing music.

Will be live tweeting some events and seminars. Keep yourself posted with @desiwriters #DWLinGOA

 

Guest post by Zainab Kizilbash Agha

 

Panel: Amit Chaudhuri (author, Professor of literature at East Anglia) and Jeet Thayil (poet, author, musician)

Moderated by: Ted Hodgkinson (British Council Literature)

Date: November 1st, 2013

 

 

The South Asian Literature Festival ended its 2013 programme with an event interestingly titled as ‘Addictive Cities’. There are some cities – cities like Calcutta, Karachi and Bombay – that have drawn writers back repeatedly and that have helped writers tell the stories they want to tell, while in turn the writers have wound up telling the stories of the city.

Even though it was a particularly wet evening, and a Friday, the room was filled to capacity with people in welly boots, waterproof jackets and slightly wet green saris. In the session, a little longer than an hour, Ted Hodgkinson conversed with  two authors who have had particularly monogamous relationships with their cities: Amit Chaudhuri, author of various books set in Calcutta including The Immortals of Calcutta;  and Jeet Thayil, poet and author of Narcopolis, which is a story of Bombay experienced through opium addiction.

Ted cleverly used the mundane details of life in each author’s writing to engage with them on bigger ideas – identity, religion, modernity and Indian cosmopolitanism.

Both authors agreed that they liked to ‘flip’ reality in their writing and show readers a different perspective on things.  For example, both tended to show the urban, man-made landscape as more natural than the rural one. For Jeet, this battle between urban and rural was like a match between the writings of Baudelaire and Wordsworth. The city won, he said, because only it could make people truly anonymous, and therefore it was ‘the only place where freedom was possible’. Bombay, in particular, interested Jeet because of the way the city warmly accepted all kinds of people in a truly democratic way, rewarding nothing but talent.

To explain his fascination with Calcutta, Amit read a passage  that  praised the city’s essential modernity, talking about the sense of timelessness that Calcutta embodied – not in the grand, formal way of mausoleums, but embedded in the patina that covered the streets, in its ‘aura of decay’ and the ‘slated windows that have stood forever’. “True modernity is not anything new,” he pointed out.

Jeet also read part of the prologue to his book, which started with ‘Bombay, which obliterated its own history by changing its name […]’. He rejected the use of Mumbai, he explained later in response to a question, because it was a deliberate political construct by people ‘who don’t read books and never will’. Amit added to this by explaining that the word ‘Kolkata’ did not exist in English other than as a utopian literary term just like ‘Calcutta’ seemed to have no meaning in Bengali.

The conversation continued on many different themes, one of them being the defining characteristics of good writers. According to Jeet, romantic poets were particularly to blame for making writers believe that they had to live a certain lifestyle – full of blistering relationships, drugs, alcohol and an assortment of other addictions – to be able to write, with the result that they become too busy leading that life to actually write. He read out a poem he wrote as a letter to Baudelaire after he won over his twenty-year drug addiction, admonishing the French poet for pushing him towards drugs. Ted offered him the poem on a paper to read out. Jeet declined and read it from memory and the audience got to see the performance poet at his best. There were laughs as Amit checked his recitation against a copy of the poem on a page in front of him.

The evening ended with a question about Calcutta and what the city meant for the Bengali identity. Amit said that as a child, Calcutta would speak to him about his Bengali identity through children’s fiction. He went on to explain how many serious writers of adult Bengali fiction, including Tagore, wrote a quota of children stories. This project to invest in Bengali children’s literature began in the 19th century and stretched ‘till today. Indeed, what better wayto help a child’s identity develop than through good stories? A future DWL project perhaps, I thought, as the evening and the Festival closed with promises of more to come next year.

 

Zainab Kizilbash Agha works in the public sector trying to improve how governments spend money and the choices they make. She has worked  with governments in Pakistan, Namibia, Ghana and now works in the UK. She writes for therapy. Some of her rants are here:

http://zhkizilbash.wordpress.com

By Fatima Hafsa Malik, DWL Events Coordinator, Lahore

 

When I decided to attend Khayaal Network’s literature and art festival a couple of weeks ago, I expected to enjoy myself.

What I didn’t expect was to be blown away.

A two-day event at Al-Hamra Theatre, it lived up to its promise, at least for me.

Regrettably, I could not attend on Sunday but the four sessions that I did attend were nothing short of brilliant. I could only make it to the afternoon sessions after work and so when I walked into Hall 1 at 2.30 or so, Mira Sethi’s session with Mohsin Hamid was already underway.

Mohsin is one of my favourite Pakistani authors and his was a talk that I had been looking forward to the most when I saw the schedule. And he did not disappoint. He was supposed to talk about English fiction and the Pakistani imagination, but he and Mira covered so much more. When asked which one of his three novels was his personal favourite, he said they were like his children but perhaps the latest one was the closest to his heart, although Moth Smoke being his first work of fiction would always be special. Talking about How to Get Rich in Rising Asia, he said that it was his attempt at a ghazal. And that he wanted to write about love like it has been written about in Sufi poetry, referring to the beloved in the ‘you’ form and lifelong love affairs. He said he wanted to explore what a non-transactional love would be like, what it would be like when you say to somebody that you love them and instead of meaning that they make you less lonely, if you meant that you would like them to be less lonely whether or not that includes you. When wrapping up before the Q and A portion, Mira asked Mohsin what his hopes and dreams were for Pakistan as a writer and a Pakistani. He said quite simply, ‘I don’t need much actually. I would be happy if Pakistan became a place where people stopped killing each other so much.’ Enough said, wouldn’t you agree?

The next session was ‘Main Manto’ with readings by Sarmad Khoosat and Salman Shahid. How does one even begin to talk about Manto and the sheer impact of his genius? And how does one appreciate the talent of the two speakers who chose such different pieces and transported you to another world altogether? Suffice to say that I had goose bumps by the end of both readings. Salman Shahid read a short story by the name of ‘Thanda Gosht’ and if you haven’t read it yet, you must. A punch to the gut in typical Manto style, it was a very powerful

reading. And Sarmad Khoosat simply stole the show. He read a letter of Manto’s and the resounding applaud he received after the reading was an honest testimony to the effect he had on the listeners. After the two readings this session also included the screening of a short teleplay by the name of Main Manto. And let me tell you, the audience was mesmerized. There was a hushed silence throughout the hall while we watched the life story of Manto play out before our eyes. It had a star studded cast including Sarmad Khoosat as Manto himself, Saniya Saeed as his wife and Arjumand Rahim, Mahira Khan, Faisal Qureshi among others. I think it deserved a standing ovation. And when it ended, I realized for the hundredth time how lucky we are to have such amazing talent amongst us.

The session after that was ‘Literature and Culture – a Discussion between Khaled Ahmed and Intizar Hussain’ and it was great listening to these two veteran writers talk at length about the Urdu language and the effect literature has had on our culture. They were both of the opinion that literature has suffered at the hands of politics and extremism. Intizar Hussain remarked that the beauty of the Urdu language lies in that it has been born from many languages and we must acknowledge that fact to appreciate it.

The last session for the day in Hall 1 was ‘Lights Camera Action’ and it had a few members from the teams of both ‘Waar’ and ‘Mai hoon Shahid Afridi’ who were interviewed by Shahnaz Sheikh. I haven’t watched either movie and so it was an interesting session for me as I had no opinion about them. And as proud as I am of the effort that has gone into both these films, the session seemed a bit ‘promotional’ to me. Maybe that was intentional, who knows. The audience seemed divided about the movies as well, some completely thrilled with them and others not so much. When asked why Waar was in English, Bilal Lashari said it was easier to promote at an international level and that it had subtitles. ‘But a large percentage of the population cannot read, Bilal,’ someone said, to which he replied that people still seemed to connect to the movie in spite of the language barrier and it had had a lot re-watchers in theatres. My take? Why not have English subtitles? Aren’t a lot of international movies in their local languages? Is it a reflection of the gora complex that seems to have ingrained itself inside us? Or am I reading too much into this?

All in all, it was a very intellectually appeasing day for me and I had a foot wide grin when I walked out of the complex to head home. There were a few technical glitches during the teleplay screening but it was worth the disruption. The attendance could have been better in my opinion but it was still heartening to see Lahoris of all ages turn out for a literary adventure. I am sure everyone who attended it had a great time and to all those who didn’t, mark your calendars for next time. It wasn’t an event to be missed!

 

Fatima Hafsa Malik alternates between medicine and writing. She can be found at www.fatimahafsamalik.blogspot.com and @fhafsamalik

Guest post by Sonal Tarneja

 

Panel: New York Times correspondent Declan Walsh, Executive President of the Times Group in India Rahul Kansal, and lawyer and journalist Farooq Bajwa.

Moderated by: Shreela Ghosh, South Asian Arts Director at the British Council.

Date: October 26th, 2013

 

Starting off as a discussion on the state of reporting across the Indo-Pak border, this session delivered much more than it promised – it offered an insight into what’s going on on both sides of the border, the relevance of Partition today, and a contrast of attitudes, perceptions and ground realities.

Reporting, like most other exchanges across the border, is not easy. With just four Indian journalists – from across all publications – in Pakistan, and an unsaid number of Pakistani journalists in India, cross-border reporting is stifled and poor. What gets reported in India, then, is what sells – a reiteration of young India’s view of Pakistan as an imploding country – “trouble for India”. Whereas until the 1980s one got to see a positive glimpse of Pakistan, especially with television shows like Dhoop Kinarey, which were beyond their times compared to Indian offerings (or lack thereof), more recently news from across the border is unidimensionally and progressively about terrorism. Pakistan, on the other hand, is so absorbed with its own internal problems and near turmoil, and the threat from neighbouring Afghanistan, that India has slid down the list of top news items and priorities over the last 10 years.

So is Partition even relevant today, or have both sides moved on? With 60% of the Indian population less than 30 years old, Partition isn’t very relevant in India today. It’s a part of history. In Pakistan, however, the Partition is about the unfinished business of Kashmir, though not in the top of the current national agenda. With the focus of animosity shifting towards the US since 2001, India is considered far less “bogey” than it used to be. Pakistanis now don’t see India as a threat, and in fact 60-70% want better relations with India.

That said, certain establishments – reportedly the military – are still holding firm. The latest Pakistani film ‘Waar’ reveals an interesting insight. It’s interesting that for a country torn by war, Pakistan’s first attempt at a “Bollywood style blockbuster” portrays India as the trouble maker, when, as a matter of proportion, the issue lies elsewhere.

Overall, on a people to people level, cultural exchanges such as open access to Bollywood films in Pakistan, and consumption of Pakistani music and performances in India, is giving birth to a positive attitude on both sides.

So what is the solution for long-lasting peace? Increased trade can improve things, and is bound to eventually, but the question is when. Even under existing agreements, trade can almost be quadrupled. But with artificial barriers (or “silly bottlenecks”) such as requiring the other side to park its trucks half a kilometer from the border because ‘the road conditions don’t allow for heavy trucks’, a lot more needs to be done. Elimination of tit for tat barriers, easier and less stringent visa requirements, and even helping the other side overcome onion shortages (!) are a great place to start. In the meantime, ‘Aman Ki Asha’, a peace initiative between the Jang Group of Pakistan and the Times of India, is trying to make a small difference.

 

 

Sonal lives in London and has a deep interest in South Asian history, with specific focus on the Partition. Her personal blog can be found on sonaltarneja.blogspot.com.

 

(This is independent coverage of an event at the South Asian Literature Festival in London. DWL is not responsible for the views expressed or relayed in it.)

 

 

Guest post by Saira Haqqi

 

I have a confession to make.

I judge books by their covers.

To be more exact, I judge them based on how they are made.

This probably seems inexplicable. Whereas books were originally luxury items, created for the enjoyment of a wealthy few, they are now so common that we hardly give their binding a second thought. After all, they’re just churned out by machines, aren’t they? Isn’t their content more important, at the end of the day?

And yet, we are all aware of books that have been profoundly unsatisfying to read. That obese textbook that lurched out of its covers within a few weeks, that ornate tome that refused to open far enough to allow one to actually read it, or that paperback that disintegrated into a pile of loose papers before it had been read once – we’re all familiar with books that just didn’t succeed as books.

I’ve had occasion to think about all of these things this year, since I am spending my summer binding books the old-fashioned way – by hand.

***

The best – and worst – thing about bookbinding is that it feeds into relentless perfectionism. A friend and mentor once warned me that when making a book, you have to get everything just right from the beginning or the book will be a complete flop. Her words were, unfortunately, quite true, and become positively intimidating when you think of all the steps involved in making a book.

Since I’m making blank books, I (thankfully) don’t have to worry about printing anything. I start by cutting and folding large sheets of paper into what are called ‘gatherings’ – a group of pages folded together. These are pressed in a contraption called a “book press” for several hours, if not overnight, to squish them as flat as possible. Then the gatherings are cut – one by one – more exactly to size using a “board shear” – a lovely little machine that could easily slice off a finger, if not an entire hand. For the books I’m making these days (twenty gatherings, eight pages per gathering) this takes about an hour and a half per book.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then, each of the gatherings is marked with a series of holes through the center fold, which are then used to sew the book together, a gathering at a time.

 

Then the pages can be trimmed again; the edges decorated with paint or gold; the spine left flat or rounded (a process that involves a hammer and muscles you did not know you had); covering material prepared (and therein lies a tale); hard-cover boards cut; innumerable things measured, re-measured, mis-measured, and re-measured again; and the whole thing put together, usually with an air of washing one’s hands entirely of the wretched thing.

 

To say that the affair is an exercise in frustration is putting it mildly. It’s physically exhausting – I’ve spent almost every day these past few weeks standing and applying some kind of pressure with my hands and arms. The whole thing involves innumerable pointy, dangerous tools that result in all kinds of fun scars to show one’s friends, and results in a wonderfully expanded vocabulary of a type that unfortunately cannot be printed in these august pages due to the fear of ruining the innocence of young eyes.

 

And yet! There is a certain joy to creating something all by oneself that can be explained by any five-year-old who has had a drawing stuck up on the fridge. And there is a sense of accomplishment to mastering skills that, no matter how easy they may sound, take years of practice to accomplish successfully. Simply cutting paper can be difficult when you have to cut it to an exact dimension – not a millimeter more, not a millimeter less.

 

***

So the next time you go into a bookshop – or simply glance across your bookshelf – take a moment to think about the way in which the books have been made. Think about the miracle that brought them to you in this format – that history of people who, like me, poured their body and muscles into creating this object to further the spread of knowledge. And marvel that we ever got this far.

 

Saira is currently enrolled in the New York University graduate program in art conservation, where she is specializing in the conservation of library materials. You can follow her personal blog at sairarias.wordpress.com.

 

Guest post by Qurratulain Zaman

 

“Pakistan ek aisi jagah hai jahaan gale katne wale usture bante haiN,” an inmate in the hospital tells Bashan Singh when he asks, “What is Pakistan?”

Toba Tek Singh is one of the most celebrated works of Saadat Hasan Manto. Set in post-partition Lahore’s Central Mental Hospital, it is the story of an asylum inmate called Bashan Singh, whom everyone calls ‘Toba Tek Singh’ after the town he hails from.

Manto’s story was recently adapted for the London stage in a production called Tales of 1947 – a play in Urdu, Punjabi and English performed by students of the School of Oriental Arts and Sciences (SOAS). Directed by Marta Schmidt, a Polish student in her final year of BA Politics and South Asia, the production combined music, dance and shadow play. The play premiered in March this year and due to its tremendous success it was performed again recently to a jam-packed audience.

The narrative begins a few days after the partition of the subcontinent. Indian and Pakistani authorities have decided to divide among themselves, like many other things, the lunatics living in the Lahore asylum on the basis of their religion.

Toba Tek Singh and his fellow inmates are not happy with the decision. Wanting to stay together in Lahore, they cry and fight with each other and call their Gods names for dividing them. A Sikh lunatic asks another Sikh, “Sardarji, why are we being deported to India? We don’t even know their language.”

Bashan Singh of Toba Tek Singh escapes the asylum with a sense of confusion and displacement. He asks everyone he meets, “Where is Toba Tek Singh? In Pakistan or in India?” He encounters different people on his way and witnesses the turmoil faced by them during the partition. One of these people is Bahadur Singh, who shares his memory of honour killings of women from his village. The narrative here is very touching. Bahadur recounts how the women of his village aged between 10 and 40 were killed by their own brothers or fathers to save their honour. The families feared that the Muslims would rape them or force them to convert.

This particular scene as enacted on stage was powerful and very emotional. As background music, Schmidt decided to use the song ‘Saada Chirya Da Chamba’, a famous Punjabi folk song popularized by the late Surinder Kaur and Prakash Kaur, which is traditionally sung during the formal departure of a bride from her parents’ home. In the play it was employed to depict the departure of the women of Punjab to another world. The version sung for stage in Raag Churaksi by twin sisters Hernoor and Sukhman Grewal was very moving and highlighted the wider displacement and suffering of women during the partition of 1947.

Similarly, ‘Aj Akhan Waris Shah Nu’ a poem written by Amrita Pritam (1919-2005) was recreated by Amrit Kaur Lohia for a rape scene in the play. Amrit Kaur, the singer and music director of the play, is definitely a gifted young musician. Her pure, deep voice seemed to take the listener back in time.

Further into the play, Bashan meets Javed who has lost his lover Husna during the partition. Javed longs for her and cries day and night. Marta Schmidt re-enacted this scene on stage with a breathtaking semi-classical dance on ‘Husna’, a song by Piyush Mishra sung in Coke Studio India.

All the actors in the play were amateurs but their performance was exceptional. It was obvious that the subject really touched them. Like the characters of the story, they too were of different backgrounds: Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs. Zain Haider, a British-Pakistani who played a Hindu, expressed the troupe’s wish to travel with the play to India and Pakistan. “We would like to go to the colleges and schools in Pakistan with Tales of 1947,” he said.

At a time when Manto’s work is being rediscovered in Pakistan, this innovative interpretation by an excellent British student troupe could definitely serve as an inspiration.

 

Q. Zaman is a Pakistani journalist. She divides her time between Bonn and London. She tweets @natrani.

by Farheen Zehra

 

Reading is a solitary activity, whether you’re doing it on a crowded beach, in an airplane, on a train, in a queue or curled up on your sofa at home. It’s only once you’ve pored over the book that you get the itch to share your excitement, disappointment or frustrations about the story. And for book aficionados, there is a certain high in having an intelligent conversation about a piece of literature.

Enter the DWL Readers’ Club. This is no ordinary book club – consider it a sort of reading movement. We’re coming across too many people who want to be great writers and barely any who want to be better readers. We’ve noticed that more and more people (including us) are falling back on the “I don’t have time to read” excuse. We’re fed up of hearing hours of detailed analysis of TV shows but scattered conversation on books. Don’t believe us? Next time you go to a regular social gathering, ask someone what they are reading these days, then ask them what they’re watching these days.

Our manifesto is simple – read more, read widely, read better, and learn from it. We want to become more critical readers and we want to use this to become better writers. If you’re an aspiring writer, then this will be especially useful for you because many of us practice the craft too. Many new writers search high and low for creative writing courses, not realizing that books are one of the best sources of both inspiration and technique. If you’re in Karachi, come over to the Readers’ Club meet and dissect plots, characters, writing styles, voice, pace, themes and more.

The Readers’ Club officially started as an offline DWL activity on 6^th June 2013. A few of us met at The Second Floor (T2F) and talked about Nabokov, sci-fi novels and movie adaptations over tea and brownies. After throwing a few names around the table we finally decided to read ‘American Gods’, an award-winning novel by Neil Gaiman. Most of us had not read Gaiman before, so we welcomed this chance to push ourselves out of our reading comfort zones.

Besides making reading ‘fashionable’ again, we are using this platform to raise funds for Desi Writers Lounge. We will charge a small fee of Rs.200 per session which will go towards DWL’s various online and offline activities.

Our next meet is on 21^st June, at the Roadside Café behind Boat Basin, at 7:00 pm. Come over and join us over a cup of tea for an hour or two of literary catharsis.

Guest post by Hareem Atif Khan

 

‘Out beyond ideas

Of wrongdoing and right doing,

There is a field.

I’ll meet you there.’

 

‘And the Mountains Echoed’ begins with a Rumi quote. Khaled Hosseini keeps this promise and does indeed usher the reader into a field where there is no right and no wrong, where ‘cruelty and benevolence are but shades of the same color.’ Many readers want to know: “How is this third novel different from his previous two?” Well, one big difference is that unlike the ‘Kite Runner’ and ‘A Thousand Splendid Suns’ there is no untarnished hero, no irredeemable villain. There is only life, and circumstance, and the reader is set up to ponder over rather than judge each character.

Part of Hosseini’s brilliance lies in the firmness with which he pulls together the strings of the Mashreq and Maghreb until, in flat defiance of Kipling’s prophecy, that twain finally meets. He uses English as the deft medium but the novel defies the classical western tradition of the ‘story arc’. That is, there is no simple “exposition, conflict and resolution”. Instead, from his very first chapter, Hosseini proceeds in the timbre of the ancient storytellers of the east, spinning many different tales, sometimes leaving the listener at the clutching throes of one before tumbling headlong into a totally different other. Of course the tales are connected. A character from one tale sometimes appears in another (as in the Ramayana or the Arabian Nights). And they all emerge from a common womb.

That womb is Afghanistan. Protagonists may spill in from Greece or spill out into France and America, but a merciless Kandahari wind blows through their lives wherever they are. Though it is about Afghanistan, this is not a book about war. In the voice of one of his characters, Hosseini explains: “I need not rehash for you the those dark days. I tire at the mere thought of writing it, and, besides, the suffering of this country has already been sufficiently chronicled…” The war may thunder on in the background but the real stories are of separation and pain, of sibling rivalry and forbidden love, of duty, identity and complicated parent-child relationships that span a lifetime.

The reader will meet leg-revealing, cigarette-smoking Nila, who rebelliously scratches down erotic poems with her pen and also Parwana, who bears none of the lightness that her name implies. The reader will meet humanitarians who rush in to heal Afghans from the war and watch how they manage, in the process, to heal themselves. Above all, the reader will question, whether a little girl whisked off to Paris or a little boy pampered in an ivory tower were better off than children who faced the poverty and war. As we can expect from life, and from the great literature that mimics it, there is never an easy answer.

Yes, it is possible to find flaws in ‘And the Mountains Echoed’ starting with the clumsiness of the book-title itself. Readers who are used to plots that provide instant gratification or satisfying resolutions will have a bone to pick with Husseini’s refusal to create neat little endings to the wounds he gashes open. The multiple sub-plots can feel distracting, especially to readers who prefer to finish their novels in one sitting. And of-course readers who dislike crying will be downright mortified. By the time she reached the last sentence, this reviewer had raw eyes.

How many stars for this book? As many as shine down on the deserts of Afghanistan.

 

(Hareem Atif Khan is a teacher and a curriculum expert who lives in Islamabad. She blogs at moonshine-scribbler.blogspot.com/. Follow her at @overtaketrucks.)

Written by Mariam Saleem Farooqi

 

The Islamabad Literature Festival sort of snuck up on the good people of the capital. After a brief announcement in a few newspapers, ILF withered away with no website or social media presence to speak of, leading to the suspicion it had been abandoned. And then, lo and behold, a week before the event the KLF website unveiled a little Islamabad tab showing a program of events, and so ILF came shuddering back to life.

One immediate bone of contention with the festival was the timing. Why the middle of the week and not a weekend? As expected, Day One of the ILF saw many half-empty halls and a general absence of the throng one expects at festivals of any sort because people could not get out of school/work on a busy Tuesday afternoon.

Walking inside the venue, I couldn’t help envying Lahore. They got their litfest in Al-Hamra, while we have to settle for a small hotel best known as the torture cell where CIE examinations and aptitude tests are suffered through. Nonetheless, the presence of books everywhere lifted the mood considerably. Festival spearhead Oxford University Press had a massive stall up and running, as did Liberty Books, Sang-e-Meel Publications and a number of other national and local publishers.

At 2:50 p.m. I slipped inside auditorium hall to find that the talk scheduled for 2:45 p.m. was actually already underway. Colour me surprised. Since when did we start doing things on time?! With that decidedly positive turn of events, I settled in to listen to Aasim Sajjad, Hamida Khuhro, Ashraf Jehangir Qazi and Humayun Gauhar battle it out on the sensitive issue of ‘Dynastic Politics in Pakistan’.

Colour me further surprised when the ramblings of audience members with an inability to understand the term ‘keep it brief’, were smoothly cut short and the session concluded on time, leaving plenty of time for a quick browse through the book stalls before heading to the next talk. ‘YouTube: Supporting the Electronic Media’ boasted a diverse panel – Taimur Rahman (academic, writer and musician), Raza Rumi (journalist and political analyst), Osman Khalid Butt (writer, director, blogger, actor and entertainer) and Ali Aftab Saeed (musician and journalist). They discussed the impact the YouTube ban has had on their respective fields, as well as the possible implications of the alleged order by the government for ‘selective unblocking’. Overzealous moderating was the only weak link in an otherwise interesting discussion.

There was much chatter about Shehzad Roy’s session but unfortunately he was a no-show. Other sessions generated a lot of interest too, with Aamer Hussein’s talk being the most popular. Topics such as child labour, English novels in the new millennium and Sufi classical poetry were addressed by a host of prominent panelists.

So Day One had been pleasant but not earth shattering. It definitely failed to make the kind of impact previously made by KLF and LLF, not even being able to trend on Twitter. Of course, that might have had something to do with the fact that those inclined to tweet about it could not seem to agree on whether #IsbLF or #ILF was the way to go. #ConfusionsAbound

Day Two began with low expectations and a mad rush to make it to the morning Kamila Shamsie session on time, because whoah, it had ALSO started on time. More points for ILF right there. Shamsie was in conversation with Shehryar Fazli. “A novel is an intimate thing,” said Shamsie when asked about how much current events influence an author’s choice of topics. “It has the pressures of time, so it doesn’t make sense to worry too much about expectations. Stick to a topic you are ok with being totally obsessed with for years, one you can let your imagination be consumed by,” she said. Afterwards, the lovely lady gamely allowed a hoard of undisciplined fans to mob her as she signed book after book.

A quick coin toss decided the next session would be the ‘Afghanistan & Pakistan: Conflict and Extremism’ panel discussion by Riaz Khokar, Zahid Hussain, Mohammad Amir Rana and Ashraf Jehangir Qazi. Learned and astute though these gentlemen undoubtedly are, something in the air right then was making it impossible to captivate much of their audience. Many in the back were sporting a dull, glazed look in their eyes – which made it all the more unpleasant when jerked out of their stupor as your friendly neighborhood earthquake came calling. Unperturbed, the panel powered through the brief power outage and odd panicked scream, and continued waxing eloquent on the fragile state of Pak-Afghan relations. The session on ‘Afsanay ki Nayee Awazain’ by Nilofar Iqbal, Asim Butt and Mubashir Zaidi happening simultaneously seemed to be more engaging as the audience could be heard laughing from even behind closed doors, and were reluctant to let it end.

Mohammad Hanif, journalist and author of ‘A Case of Exploding Mangoes’ and ‘Our Lady of Alice Bhatti’, in conversation with the enigmatic Naveed Shahzad was the highlight of the morning. Hanif sat slumped in his chair and, in his relaxed, sardonic manner, let Naveed Shahzad question and poke fun at him. “A writer’s responsibility is to the page. Mocking a dictator is not a social responsibility, it’s fun. Journalists are the ones who actually have this responsibility,” he said. His reading of excerpts from his books was powerful and injected new depth into his writing. Hanif also talked about his recent collection of stories of missing people from Balochistan. “It’s the State that’s responsible. They know they can’t get away with that kind of stuff in other provinces. But when it comes to Balochistan, nobody cares for too long. So they can get away with it.” He said he hoped the publication might shame fellow journalists into taking some action.

The afternoon sessions on Day Two were all packed to capacity. Shehzad Roy was once again absent – caught up in projects in Dubai apparently – much to everyone’s disappointment. Nevertheless, the session on ‘Common System of Education’ proved quite interesting. Speaking on the panel was Baela Jamil, Hamida Khuhro, Nargis Sultana, and A.H. Nayyar, with Ameena Saiyid as the moderator. Each speaker spoke crisply about the complications of establishing a viable common system of education in Pakistan, and managed to keep the audience engaged despite being seated in an outdoor venue at midday in hot April weather.

Strolling from one session to the next was becoming increasingly cumbersome as the number of people kept increasing. Now would have been time for festival organizers to take heed and later disasters could have been avoided. More on that later. Any hopes of snagging a good seat for Zia Mohyeddin’s reading fizzled away as roughly one-third of Islamabad’s total population was already crammed into the medium sized hall. All ages, shapes and sizes of people possible were present. Sitting crammed into six inches of floor space, with an elbow in my side and a little kid poking into my back, all became worth it the minute Zia Mohyeddin climbed up on stage. Dressed in a gray suit that was just the right amount of baggy, and a maroon tie, the dapper gentleman quite literally had the audience at hello. He read aloud from a selection of stories in English. It did not matter what the words were, or what they were trying to say. All that mattered was the way they leapt to life under the influence of Zia Mohyeddin’s gentle yet powerful voice. For just the quarter of an hour that he spoke, the world was truly a better place. Ending to thunderous applause, he patiently allowed fans, well-wishers and reporters to swarm around him.

After all the sessions of the day were over, a brief closing ceremony was to be followed by a showing of ‘The Dictator’s Wife’, a monologue written by Mohammad Hanif and performed by Nimra Bucha. Fifteen minutes before the scheduled time, the hall outside the auditorium was already teeming with people. Considering the intense punctuality demonstrated for two days, there was no reason to expect any different from the last event of the festival. Famous last words. Seven fifteen came and went, with no sign of life from within the closed doors. Suddenly one set of doors was thrown open and the crowd surged forward, only to be met with hysterical crew members who shooed them back out, claiming ‘not time yet!’ Disgruntled and miffed, the crowd was not amused. As the sweaty, stifling wait stretched on, even I stopped judging the folks pounding on doors to be let in and began to wonder if I should just join in. Finally, after over an hour, the doors were thrown open and a mass of humanity burst forth.

After several frenzied minutes with people here, people there, people every where – during which the harassed organizers tried to convince audience members it would be a good idea to watch  on screens outside the auditorium – the play finally began, with Nimra Bucha snaking her way through a throng of people sitting near the stage to get to her place onstage. But wait, it gets better. Many in the audience seemed to think that a one-woman play meant they should help her out with answers and suggestions to her dialogue. Worse were the folks in the back who kept shouting about not being able to hear her even as she tried to deliver her lines. In the midst of this cacophony, an elderly gentleman decided to stroll up onstage and plop himself down on the bed that served as part of the set. To give credit to Bucha, she continued unperturbed despite this series of interruptions, even managing to coax the loud, boorish gentleman to pipe down eventually. Hanif’s writing and Bucha’s performance made quite the dynamic combination, and had it not been for the unfortunate events leading up to it, the play would have been quite a thrill to watch.

All in all, the first ever Islamabad Literature Festival was a better experience than I had expected it to be. With OUP’s Children’s Literature Festival also scheduled to be held in the city at the end of the month, it seems that Islamabad is finally going to get a chance to play in the big leagues. About time, too. The city needs more than just political showdowns and long marches to keep it occupied. Well done, ILF. Come back bigger and better next year!

 

(The views expressed in this blogpost are the writer’s own. Desi Writers Lounge does not take responsibility for any opinions or factual inaccuracies in this post.)