‘Karachi, You’re Killing Me!’
By Saba Imtiaz
Publishers: Random House, India
Paperback: 272 Pages
As much as I despise the term “chick-lit”, with Saba Imtiaz’s debut novel, I had the undiluted “chick-lit” experience, which is an overwhelming sense of recognizing one’s own thoughts and traits reflected back from paper in a light novel’s spirited heroine.
I picked it up when my sense of self-worth was really taking a beating and couldn’t help but marvel at how much it spoke to me.
The novel is being touted as the Karachi version of Bridget Jones’s Diary, and aptly enough, it’s narrated by a young, professional, single woman in a big city, and is written in a zippy diary format. However, while there is plenty of sighing and hand-wringing about a certain good-looking man (or two), and finding the perfect dress to ensure a perfect date, many of the young narrator’s concerns are hardly gender-specific.
Ayesha, the protagonist, is a Karachi-based underpaid and overworked reporter of an English daily. And her default emotional state – a combination of constant trauma and tired resignation with the city’s violence, frustrating power cuts, exploitative employers, and boring superficial social life that centres around bootlegged alcohol – are familiar to the young, educated, urbanites across genders.
Ayesha is intelligent, driven and very professional – hardly what is commonly understood as chick-lit fodder.
The novel is an incredibly honest portrayal of a Pakistani woman who, mostly unabashedly, likes sex, cigarettes and drinking with her equally indulgent friends. Ayesha is ridden with compulsive self-scrutiny and self-imposed guilt regarding pretty much everything she does. She is determined to take control of her life that is all about smoking, drinking, unhealthy eating habits, a frustrating job, and not finding the right man, or indeed much of any man.
Saba Imtiaz decidedly nails the humour. The backbone of the novel are the staccato rhythms and sardonic wit of Ayesha’s inner life, whether she’s bemoaning her not-quite-toned arms, lusting after the resident good-looking gora, simultaneously indulging in contempt and feeling intimidated by the city’s moneyed fashionistas, raging against her boss, or enjoying a good wallowing.
Despite fluffy exterior, the novel highlights real anxieties and struggles of women like Ayesha, including her career rut, and yes, finding somebody to date who is both intelligent, attractive, genuinely progressive and not turned off by a woman with brain and opinion.
The author does not use the novel’s genre as a crutch to be unintelligent; the characters, while often uproariously funny, never lapse into caricature.
The narrative compels the reader to be drawn into Ayesha’s world, because the author simply refuses to cater to any type of reader, which usually entails appealing to the lowest common denominator, and plentiful disclaimers and explanation of references.
The novel itself is decidedly more than semi-autobiographical; the author’s own experience as a journalist in Karachi lends the narrative its organic quality.
The narrative is populated by characters that will resonate with Pakistani readers, notably Ayesha’s demanding exploitative boss who never pays her on time (though I may not be the only one who recognizes “Kamran”), as well as bantering, paternalistic police-wallahs, and Ayesha’s rich, controlling ex-boyfriend Hasan.
Ayesha inhabits the duality that is familiar to many educated, urban, 20-something Pakistani women: giving a nod to conservative social norms in most public spaces, but continuing to make their own decisions and carve out values behind closed doors.
The novel is by no means a sensationalized account of the contemporary life of women like us; our heroine is remarkably unglamorous, as is her life. The reader who finds this salacious is simply out of touch with contemporary Pakistan.
The author describes the narrator’s frequently dual life without boring the readers with how or why she has arrived at those choices, e.g. why she as ‘A Muslim woman in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan’ indulges in smoking, drinking and sex.
Not that Ayesha lacks introspection (quite the opposite, as she constantly analyses and over thinks), but because such an explanation is both redundant and beyond the scope of the genre the novel inhabits. The matter-of-fact approach is thoroughly refreshing, as it is a departure from the highly-sensationalized account of the urban elite (I’m looking at you, Beautiful from this angle by Maha Khan Phillips), or the painstakingly explained, cliché ridden, ‘poverty porn’ version of Pakistan that is peddled by most Pakistani English fiction writers.
The writer is a journalist based in Lahore.
