Fiction writers from Pakistan being such a rarity, it was refreshing to come across Kamila Shamsie at a reading event organized by the South Asian Journalist’s Association (SAJA) recently. Kamila, who has been described as one of Pakistan’s leading young writers, already has three successful novels to her credit at the age of 30.

So at an amiable evening in Manhattan, Kamila Shamsie spoke about ‘spider-plants’, the literary scene in Pakistan, an absence of ‘stone throwing fundamentalists’ in her work and inevitably about Karachi. Kamila read selected excerpts from her latest novel Kartograph, which is as a story about ‘ a boy who wants to make a map of Karachi and the girl who loves him but can’t understand his need to define the city in such logical terms’. Kartography’s first US edition has been recently published by Harcourt, Inc, which spans over 320 pages. It was first published it in the U.K by Bloomsbury Publishing in 2002. The intentional misspelling of the title Kartography with a ‘K’ alludes to the geographical setting of the book in Karachi.

‘Anyone who is familiar with Karachi knows that its impossible to find a decent map of the city’, Kamila said. She commented in her notes for Kartography that the idea for this book came to her when someone ‘pointed out that Karachi people don’t give directions by mentioning street names, but rather describe places in terms of landmarks’. She said, ‘It struck me as something that would have to be used in a novel- this idea of a city with rather whimsical techniques of navigation… Over and above all of this, I wanted to write simply about what it was like to grow up in Karachi in the 80s’and 90’s, a time of terrible violence in Karachi, and also of incredible resilience’.

Kamila’s writing, it seems has done its own bit in putting Karachi and Pakistan on the map of the literary world by earning profuse international acclaim. The Daily Mail has described Kartography as ‘a touching and frequently funny love story, with the city of Karachi beating at its heart’. The Times Literary Supplement said, ‘The city of Karachi is a vivid presence in Kamila Shamsie’s perceptive, funny and occasionally poignant novel…(She) brings its crowded streets to vivid, disconcerting life.’ Shamsie’s publisher in the US, Harcourt, Inc has also praised her work saying, ‘A young writer of astonishing maturity and exhilarating style, Kamila Shamsie transports us to a world we have not seen in fiction - vibrant, violent, utterly contemporary Pakistan’.

About the English literary activity in Pakistan, which she singularly described as ‘sparse’, Kamila mused, ‘There’s almost nothing going on now, especially in fiction writing. But the good news is that it’s growing’. She mentioned Uzma Aslam Khan among others, the author of The Story of Noble Rot and Trespassing which were published in 2001 and 2003 respectively. A number of other Pakistani authors with diverse but impressive work such as Zeeba Sadiq’s 38 Bahadurabad (1996), Maniza Naqvi’s On Air (2000) and Mass Transit (1998), Qaisra Shahraz Ahmad’s Typhoon (2003) and The Holy Woman (2002), Nadeem Aslam’s Seasons of the Rainbird’ (1991) and his upcoming Maps for Lost Lovers (2004) etc, who have made a distinctive place for Pakistani literature in English, substantiate Kamila’s somewhat optimistic assessment. Literature from Pakistan, Kamila also observed, was supposed to fall in line with certain preconceived notions and recalled a time when an American publishing agent once, after enthusiastically admiring her work said that there was not enough ‘culture’ in her book. ‘I suppose if I had written about stone throwing fundamentalists in my book, it would have been much more acceptable for them’, she said wryly.

Brushing aside assertions about her portrayal of Karachi and consequently Pakistan not being representative of all sections of the society, Kamila pointed out that she has written about ‘a very specific socio-economic class’. The characters in Kartography, like her previous two novels, In the City by the Sea and Salt and Saffron, mostly belong to the privileged Karachi elite who, as one of her characters contemplates, live on the ‘right side of the Clifton bridge’. Speaking of the influence of her own work she laughingly said, ‘I think my novels are not likely to have any effect on the culture of Karachi in anyway, whatsoever’. Nonetheless by romanticizing Karachi’s eccentricities and adeptly articulating the city’s concerns through her writing, Kamila has undoubtedly given Karachi a voice.

Aside from her fictional work Kamila speaks passionately about Karachi’s issues. ‘I write about Karachi with sorrow, about what’s happening there’, she said. She had said in an earlier interview that she only wanted to write about Karachi, saying, ‘ When you love a city, it is with its warts and problems. And its more than fair share of problems adds to the desire to love it more and learn more about it’. She recently wrote about the tragic oil spill on Karachi’s shore in The Guardian saying, ‘The ironic shrug with which Karachiites greet most evidence of negligence and betrayal by the authorities is starkly absent from their responses to this disaster… The devastation of Clifton beach itself is fairly low down the list of "disastrous consequences" of the spill - but as a metaphor for the failure of officialdom there can be nothing starker than thousands of Karachiites rushing to Clifton on August 14, Pakistan's independence day, to celebrate the birth of the nation, only to find paramilitary forces blocking the way and dead creatures thrown by black waters on to sludge that was once sand’.