Pieces of the Zia Legacy

Through Aasmaani’s mirage-seeing eyes, Kamila Shamsie weaves her rich fourth novel that explores relationships on many levels and takes us through three decades of Pakistani history. As Aasmaani unravels her mother’s life, we are allowed a peek into the past, filled with passion and poetry and lofty ideas.

She had a remarkable capacity to make people imagine change, writes Aasmaani of her mother Samina, whose lover was a craftsman in whose hands language was plastic. She a fiery feminist. He a prolific poet. Together, they could make the people — living difficult lives under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and then Zia-ul Haq — swoon to their rhetoric. The pair would have their share of protest and violence and upheaval and exile, till the Poet — haven’t we heard this before? — would be found murdered one day, leading the Muse to disarray.

Aasmaani lives in relatively easier times — despite it being a world after 9/11 when people “stopped being an individual and started being an entire religion” — and amid a Cable TV boom, but nothing seems to stir the youth — the elite, that is — anymore. Even a discussion on politics is reduced to the haven’t-we-been-down-this-road America bashing. While working for one such private channel, Aasmaani chances upon this conversation: “You really planning to boycott American goods when they attack Iraq?”; “Hanh, we have to feel like we’re doing something, right?”; “OK, but does that mean boycotting movies and music as well?”; “No, no… We get pirated videos.”

Of all the layered stories, one that lingers is the relationship between her Samina and her lover, the Poet Nazim or Aashiq. And Shamsie’s words. With all their many-layered meanings. When Aasmaani’s mother is arrested for a “breach of law”, the Poet sends the young girl in search of the dictionary to look up “breach”. “Beneath ‘to fail to obey or preserve something, for example, the law or trust’ I found ‘to leap above the surface of the water (refers to whales)’.” The new meaning of breach helped bring order to Aasmaani’s fragile world. Another time, the little girl goes round and round and tells her mother she is feeling ‘diggy’. The word is ‘giddy’, she is told. “So I say, no, it’s diggy. That’s when you’re so giddy even the letters in giddy turn topsy-turvy.”

Aasmaani will have to decode secret messages and poems if she wants to know why her mother disappeared. That settled, she will go on to make a documentary on her mother and her feminist movement. The problem, if you can call it that, in Shamsie’s novel is that the characters have their eyes fixed on the past. And that doesn’t quite live up to the grand ideas of politics and poetry. In the end, it’s as if Aasmaani is caught in an eddy — so taken up with ‘history’ she can’t find her voice in the present.

Unlike in The City by the Sea and Salt and Saffron where Karachi is more a moveable feast (remember the syrupy jalebis in Salt), the city in Broken Verses is tinged with tragedy — here’s where a mother walks off into the sea and a Poet is found dead in Nazimabad (ironically in a place which should have been an abode of the Poets).