Daddy’s Boy is Shandana Minhas’ third book, featuring a young Lahori man who finds himself dispatched to the other end of the country, to Karachi, by his secretive and domineering mother, to bury a father he thought was long dead. Sounds like a simple enough premise, and in the hands of a less creative author, this idea would have morphed into a coming-of-age story - the kind that includes wide-eyed exploration of a mysterious place and belated spiritual guidance from the ghost of a dervish of a father. Through Minhas, we get a complex narrative concerning the meaning of loss, the value of hatred and the increasingly ebbing need for truth in a beast of a city that cannot even recall its own true face - let alone help others achieve a constant, stagnant identity.
Before discussing the plot, let’s clear up a few things immediately: the main character Asfandyar Ikram - the Lahori son come to bury Anis Nabi, his Karachiite father - is not a “Daddy’s Boy” in any sense of the term. He hardly knew his father in life, on account of his parents’ early separation. In death, this lack of knowing morphs violently and rapidly into a complex web of lies, cunningly constructed by Anis’ three friends - Shaukoo, Gullo and Ifty - who have been appointed by the dead patriarch to help Asfandyar with the last rites. Infused with a sardonic, unequal wit, the trio that swoops down upon Asfandyar as soon as he gets to Karachi offers more riddles and half-truths to solve the puzzle that was Anis Nabi. This is something Asfandyar - and the reader - is mystified by in the beginning, mildly annoyed by in the middle and completely repulsed by as the end approaches. The second most important thing to consider about Daddy’s Boy is the fact that despite receiving the most direct attention in the narrative, Asfandyar is not the protagonist of the book. The real protagonist is the mercurial city of Karachi. And lastly, it would be too naive to assume Karachi is solely presented in this book as the protagonist; it is also the story’s antagonist. The human characters that Asfandyar allows to lead him astray, whether knowingly or unknowingly, are mere projections of its duplicitous existence as both an all-inclusive nurturer and an equally non-discriminatory destroyer.
The real protagonist is the mercurial city of Karachi
As the story unfolds, Asfandyar - in order to silence the constant barrage of clever insults that Shaukoo, Ifty and Gullo toss at him for being nothing like his adventurous, outgoing, bold and charismatic father - drinks to his father’s memory with the three men despite his moral aversion to alcohol. That becomes his first step towards letting his mother-made guard down and essentially stepping into a slow-burning firestorm that strips him of all of his redeeming qualities (according to his own moral code), little by little. The day of the burial arrives with a city-wide protest and shutdown in progress (a common event in Karachi), which pushes the funeral party from the graveyard into a vehicle which contains an attractive woman named Alina, introduced as Shaukoo’s daughter. Bearing fake press credentials, she helps the funeral party navigate through the crowds to end up on a boat in the sea, where the ‘real’ burial takes place. Asfandyar is horrified and appalled to find out that the man they earlier buried was a ‘borrowed’ corpse from a charity’s morgue and that Anis wished to be buried at sea, which wasn’t the socially acceptable ‘Muslim’ way to go. Asfandyar seeks an escape from the boat but finds none, and much to his own embarrassment, he finds himself increasingly drawn to the free-spirited Alina despite her father’s obvious and vehement anti-Punjabi bias. Shaukoo pulls no punches when berating Asfandyar’s social and political naïveté as a typically Punjabi regressive trait.
The writer, Shandana Minhas
The story loses its pace in the second half, but comes to a sudden explosive end -shocking, yet satisfying
“Politics doesn’t touch you,” he says. “It doesn’t kill your children, and it doesn’t blow up your schools. And when it’s done doing that in the rest of Pakistan, it crawls back into your yard, under your charpoy, and goes to sleep. And if anyone comes calling and says your dog ate my life, you say this dog? No. This is a nice dog. It would never hurt anybody. Good dog. Good, good dog.”
The story, however, doesn’t spiral up into a more explosive provincial dispute. Instead, Asfandyar finds himself helplessly and unwittingly entwined with Alina, with their one night of emotionally charged, alcohol-fueled passion setting the stage for the utter destruction of whatever is left of Asfandyar’s resolve as a ‘good man’.
Minhas is a gifted writer and in-between Asfandyar’s meanderings, the book is filled with insightful commentary about the absurdity of being a Pakistani. Her description of Pakistani electronic media is on point:
“In the morning they’ll run programmes telling you how to live your life, and in the evening they’ll run talk shows telling you nobody has the right to tell you how to live your life. And in between they’ll do their best to give you a heart attack.”
She is just as incisive when she writes about how law enforcement works in Karachi:
“A ranking Rangers Official, who had probably just been publicly humiliated by a ranking army officer, had probably just publicly humiliated the DSP and he wanted to feel like a man again. Police work in Karachi was no longer about passing the buck but passing the pain in the ass down the ranks.”
Minhas evokes much of Karachi's turmoil in her story
The story loses its pace in the second half, but comes to a sudden and explosive end that is shocking, yet satisfying. Some of the characters in the book aren’t as fleshed out as the reader feels they should have been and we are introduced to them only from the perspective of Asfandyar. Asfandyar himself proves to be somewhat of an infuriatingly simplistic mule of a man who drones on internally about fortifying his mediocre and unadventurous life, even as he violently diverges from all he believes in. The author does not revisit the wildly amusing Shaukoo, Ifty and Gullo in the second half after their abandonment of Asfandyar. However, it is the thoughts of these very men that haunt him as he blames the city by the sea for his personal failure to cope with the fact that reality is harsh outside his comfort zone and beliefs. His downward spiral, which began as soon as he landed in his father’s flat and met Shaukoo, Gullo and Ifty, is culminated in a beleaguered final confrontation with Alina. Asfandyar becomes yet another living casualty of the merciless machinations that are the part and parcel of Karachi life.
Nuzhat Saadia Siddiqi is a freelance journalist based in Lahore. She tweets at @guldaar
