‘‘The accusations set off a storm of reactions in Aatish, from hurt and defensiveness, to confusion and curiosity. How was his father who (as he was to recount in his book) "drank Scotch every evening, never fasted and prayed, even ate pork and once said: 'It was only when I was in jail and all they gave me to read was the Koran—and I read it back to front several times—that I realised that there was nothing in it for me'," offended, as a Muslim, by his writings?’’
Does this story appearing in the Outlook magazine tells something about a ‘suave, well read and wealthy Muslim’s mind.
Excerpts to mull over
Briefly, the story is this: a short, intense relationship between a Pakistani politician, Salmaan Taseer, and an Indian journalist, Tavleen Singh, produces a child. As the relationship founders, the father (by his son's account) abandons the mother and infant in London. They move to Delhi, where the boy, Aatish, grows up in an elite Sikh family but with an awareness of being 'different' because of his Muslim and Pakistani ancestry. Twice in his childhood, he makes long-distance overtures to his father, but is rebuffed.
In 2002, at the age of 21, he tries again, by simply landing up in Lahore, and meets with greater success. Salmaan's political career has waned—the military rules; his party's boss, Benazir Bhutto, is in exile—but he is, by now, a wealthy businessman and a media tycoon with an elegant third wife and other six children. Relatives and family friends, who have known about Aatish for years, help him find a way into Salmaan's life. So begins a father-son relationship that is by no means easy. And so dies a novel. "There is this extraordinary story, but what do es it mean? It's not everybody else's," Aatish says, looking back on his struggles five years ago to write that novel.
‘Hey, you, the ‘anti…, Muslim’’
Then came a turning point. In 2005, Aatish, now a journalist living in London, wrote for a UK magazine on the radicalisation of second-generation British Pakistanis, making the unexceptionable liberal argument that it was linked to failures of identity on different fronts. Chuffed by his first cover story, he sent it to his father—and was shocked to receive a furious reply, accusing him, among other things, of blackening the family name by spreading "invidious anti-Muslim propaganda".
Now he felt there was a book in his life story, a journey through the worlds of political and religious Islam, with a personal memoir on the father-son relationship coursing through it. Both the political journey (through Turkey, Syria, Iran, Mecca and Pakistan), and the personal memoir, would end in Lahore, at his father's doorstep. Defending his controversial decision to lay bare personal relationships and conversations, Aatish says it came from his conviction, after the letter incident, that "the personal circumstances contained a bigger story". However, he acknowledges that the writing of the book was also a way to overcome the despair he felt at having his relationship with his father suddenly run aground again—"a way to make my peace with that personal history."
The elitist aunt said, "Oh I'm so glad you weren't a little black Hindu".
Four years later, his book, Stranger to History, is ready to roll, and when I meet Aatish, he is on the brink of entering a heady world of book launches and international book tours.
His decision to lay bare the personal, says Aatish, came from the conviction that in it lay a bigger story.
The book's slightly cheesy subtitle, 'A son's journey through Islamic lands', has a whiff of opportunistic publisher-speak about it, but there is nothing within its covers to make readers cringe, except perhaps those who find their outrageous utterances reproduced here, like Aatish's dad, or the half-sister who memorably tells him.
He is wounded by reflexive anti-Indianism, which he encounters widely in Pakistan, and particularly among the young. ("The people I felt closest to," he told Outlook, "was that older generation who had an idea of a mixed society.") He laments the rejection he finds everywhere of a pluralist subcontinental past, and is dismayed by the growing spread of a narrow version of Islam. The anti-Indianism, he confesses, "made it very difficult to be both Indian and Pakistani." And while stressing that he received great warmth from Pakistanis, he adds: "They would have liked me to turn my back on India and then be theirs. To keep the two was something that was strange and difficult for them."
But even after writing a book that quite clearly rejects the idea of Pakistan (while tacitly endorsing the idea of India), Aatish still seems to be trying to keep the two. "I hope for this to be a book for Pakistan (though) I know that is a very naive thing to say.... Neither with my father, nor with Pakistan, was it written to settle any scores. I hope that despite what looks like a bleak look at Pakistan, it is possible to see a genuine concern and affection for the place."
The difference between a person educated in Pakistan and the one who earned it in India.
Aatish received a cushioned international education, in Delhi and Kodaikanal, and went on to university in America. Then he worked in the West, and tasted tabloid fame, thanks to a relationship, now over, with a minor British royal, Gabriella Windsor. It even got him on to the cover of Hello magazine, which hands out cheques for celebrity interviews. (Embarrassedly, he says the cheque went to his girlfriend, not to him.)
(Courtesy - Outlook, March 23, 2009) |
