The opening pages of Shandana Minhas’s latest novel generate a frisson of excitement: a mock newspaper clipping from a fictitious Pakistani daily reports a terrorist attack in Karachi. In the hodgepodge style typical of a news story, this prologue conveys the mood of the city — there are bomb blasts and banned outfits, angry protestors and unidentified bodies, power outages and political activists. All in a 300-word report of questionable grammar.

Having worked in a newsroom in Karachi, I am mindful of the potency of these reports; their lexical license is not just poor grammar, but the inevitable outcome of a facile transmutation of reality, a necessary cobbling and scrunching. Positioned in the city pages, this news story is an act of faith, the very writing of it presuming a trust in the logic and rationality of a world which is constantly upending it. But as the prologue to a novel, this mundane report can be a portal to a richly explored reality, a universe so articulate it does not push us to commit grammatical errors.

Minhas’s first sentence is impressive in its control and impact: “It was that rarest of Karachi deaths,” she writes. “Expected.”

The death in question is of Anis Nabi, the “Daddy” in the title of the novel, and it is this hook which sets us up for a revelatory narrative, keeping us scanning for clues. The titular “Boy” is consummate Lahori, Asfandyar Ikram, who learns that he had not been an orphan only when his mother tells him of his father’s funeral, with ins­tructions to meet his three close friends.

A mystery set in Karachi … and a key question that remains oddly unanswered

We land, as does Asfandyar, smack in the middle of things, hoping to acquaint ourselves with a father who is no longer there. But the three “Uncles” — Shaukoo, Gullo and Ifty — are not what Asfandyar expects. Far from providing him with closure, they instigate a series of strange requests which raise his hackles. Minhas pointedly tells us that Asfandyar is 30 years old and it is just as well she does, because there is no other way we could have figured that out. For much of the novel our hero acts like a delicate Gothic heroine always on the verge of fainting and falling sick, as uncertain and naive as the tween protagonists of Minhas’ last book. This is untenable, even as a comment on Lahoris. The Uncles, never fully differentiated, talk and work in tandem, constantly, and for no discernible reason, deriding him with the nickname “Baby Nabi”.

Asfandyar succumbs to the manipulations of these men, travelling to unknown places, acquiescing to alarming requests, all the while experiencing acute cognitive dissonance. Anything that he does not understand becomes a foible of Karachiwallas — along with the MQM and the sea — alien and anathema to upcountry people. As he chafes under the Uncles’ demands, too courteous not to play along, he simply repeats the mantra that he will soon be back in Lahore while reflecting on how awful Karachi really is.

Readers (even those from Karachi) are just as much in the dark. Who was Anis Nabi? What will Asfandyar learn about his parentage? What do the swirling currents of Karachi’s halaat have to do with this “expected death”? With these elements in place, Minhas could have been as playful or as dramatic, as intense or as facetious as she wanted. But, although she flirts with many provocations, the promise of her intriguing beginning is carelessly squandered.

Minhas excels in giving the reader bursts of images and slick dialogue, the casual crassness of which, in many places, is resonant of Mohammed Hanif, whose dutiful approval of this novel appears on the jacket. The dialogue in Minhas’s novel serves mainly as a distraction, as circular and pointless as an Absurdist exchange, intersecting with the characters’ internal monologues to highlight tangential concerns. In one place, she writes, “Khwaja Salman had probably buried more pirs than the Hazara.” Surely, I am not being prudish in finding this disrespectful?

In all the smart-talking and quick comebacks, Minhas forgets to formulate a compelling answer to the most interesting question: who was Anis Nabi? It would not have been out of place, with the menace and mystery of the beginning, were he to turn out to be a kingpin or a politico. I would certainly be up for reading crime fiction about a Karachi gang leader. All of that promise peters out, though, and what we are left with is a mildly scandalous sexual encounter. It feels strange to call this slim, 200-page book ‘rambling’, but that is exactly what it is. Asfandyar is buffeted by mildly interesting events, rendered instantly forgettable by the febrile narrative arc. The problem, of course, is the characters. The Uncles are the sidekicks to a father who never appears. The hero’s character has no continuity: when Asfandyar returns to Karachi, he is barely recognisable as a vengeful lover. About that — yes, there is a romance, and a female character, if she can be called such. Minhas is not terribly good at female characters, which is why the dimensionless ‘romance’ between Asfandyar and Alina is propelled solely by the word “breast”. And as for Karachi, it is neither a place nor a character — it is simply atmospherics. Minhas reneges on her promise and it turns out that the story she is telling has nothing essential to do with this city after all. Half-heartedly plotted, it comes together — if indeed you think it does — hastily towards the end. In the way of the stories on our city pages, it requires further explanation, more story­­telling.

The book ends with an epilogue: another newspaper clipping; a crime roundup of the robberies, murders and kidnappings in the city. Between the first newspaper clipping and the last is sandwiched a novel that could have added so much to how we think of Karachi, perhaps even of ourselves — but didn’t.

The reviewer is a Karachi-based freelance writer and critic.

Daddy’s Boy
(NOVEL)
By Shandana Minhas
HarperCollins, India
ISBN: 978-9351777144
232pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, September 25th, 2016