Kamila Shamsie--Karthography and my thoughts

I love Kamila Shamshie. She is my current favorite desi. The freshness of her style, the humor in all her lines makes me feel like I am reading a life update from my very own pathaka girl. A pathaka girl is what I call a smart funny witty Pakistani girl who has a knack of telling you about sad incidents with just as much wit and humor as the happy ones. The life of a pathaka girl seems like a stream of stories with little in it that can't be laughed about.

Kartography which I am reading right now is Shamshie's first novel but the second one I am reading. It is about the lives of two childhood friends, their parents, and their city Karachi in their teenage years and beyond. I am at a juncture of the novel where the narrator Raheen is in her junior year of college in the US and her friend Karim calls her after years of separation in which Karim moves to London, his parents get divorced, his mother remarries, and their letter contact comes to a halt after both feel misunderstood by the other.

Karim calls because he thinks Raheen finally is trying to understand the city and themselves in light of the larger happenings of the city nature, all those things that were hard to face earlier. Raheen who obviously wasn't at that place replies with anger that he misread the paper she wrote that started this conversation. While she was trying to talk about their separation and how she wished it never happened and how he was ignoring the stories of their shared past. But Karim was speaking of how their understanding and themselves was imperfect due to the isolation in which it lived without knowing and thinking of sorrows that belong to the rest of the world. The difference was of perspective.

I haven't been back to Pakistan in many years and the green card situation makes it likely that I won't be going back for many more. I wonder if this is something I have chosen so that I forget the nuances of my own story of being a child born in Kuwait to Pakistani parents returning to learn of the ethnic and class tensions that divided my life as I knew it in Karachi in so many ways. The backdrop of sectarian and ethnic violence that marked my teenage years. The ethnic and class differences that bound different parts of my family or the conscious effort to ignore it all as I continued to live my life focusing on the smaller dramas of romance, heart break and grades. Is it that even today after having a career and financial independence I'd like to forget those stories. Perhaps its time I accepted them and build with them the reality I want.