Web of Lust

Review by Mahim Mather

Published in August 2004

When Islam and IT meet in Karachi, the result is the 786 Cybercafe

Literature in English by Pakistani women writers has perhaps yet to capture an enthusiastic following. With the exception of Qaisra Shahraz, who has been churning out saccharine Islamist romances, few other women seem intent on writing blockbuster sellers. They have instead taken upon themselves the Herculean and less financially rewarding task of articulating what Pakistan is today. Bina Shah's third literary effort, The 786 Cyber cafe, is the latest of such endeavors.

Deciding the merit of such work is agonizing. I can't trash the book: I recognize the effort it takes to publish one, and a tiny part of me is shamed because I can hardly lay claim to a similar achievement. But when it took me only one day to read The 786 Cybercafe I had to sit back and wonder what went wrong; why did it read so fast, and why it did not linger in my mind for its language, plot or social comment?

But first things first. The 786 Cybercafe is a fantastic title for a book, which, as readers may have guessed, is a study of the effect that ugly word "Information Technology " (IT) has had on Pakistan. The title brilliantly combines the popular religion ('786' is a common abbreviation for 'In the name of Allah') and science that make for strange bedfellows in our society. It is the story of Jamal, Shah's rough-edged protagonist and his dream to make a quick buck by jumping on the IT bandwagon. Shah uses a classic, but perhaps rather weak formula for a beginning: "few people would have known it, but as Jamal Tunio walked down Tariq road, he was a man possessed by a dream" (Some readers may find this sentence slightly reminiscent of Franz Kafka's "Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K" from the beginning of The trail).

Jamal, his nerdy brother Abdul who has the computer expertise, and his friend Yasir who provides the financial backing, form a team and open up The 786 Cybercafe on Tariq Road. It is against this backdrop that Shah considers an important topic of contemporary debate.

As I wrote this review, a subcommittee of the NWFP provincial assembly met to discuss the regularization of Internet cafes because of a recent scandal invoking pornography and heavy petting in the computer booths. Thus the timing of the book is impeccable, and Shah has chosen to explore an aspect of the morality of the Internet that is nothing if not contentious. How do Jamal, Abdul and Yasir handle the paradox of their cafe's name and the pornography that customers come in to surf? Jamul simply turns a blind eye to such goings-on, because he is busy adding up the profits. Yasir, however, goes apoplectic with indignation when he finds out.

To complicate matters, the maddeningly beautiful Nadia makes an entry onto the scene. She wants to learn about computers and the Internet, and hey Presto! We have a love quadrangle - Jamal, Yasir and Abdul, with Nadia in the middle. Nadia is by far Shah's most complex characters simply because she is loaded with literary connotations. She is the one who challenges the masculinities of the three men, which is a feat considering her constricted and heavily policed position in society. As the youngest sibling and women, Nadia, as an individual is not meant to demonstrate agency.

Nadia’s entry marks the turning point of the novel, and is clearly marked as the moment things promise to get very interesting indeed. The implications are delicious. Nadia becomes a source of fascination, revulsion and attraction for the three men. Could we be looking at the human embodiment of pornography or at least some flirtation with the theme of homoerotics in Pakistani man? Sadly, Shah shines from that dangerous edge, and fails to flesh out the potential themes Nadia’s introduction could explore. I was left wanting just that one scene that would link the exasperation of debating the morality of pornographic with Nadia’s presence at the café.

There are other matters that Shah explores in unusual depth. Such as father-son tension, some thing which has so far (to my knowledge) been a rare undertaking for Pakistani woman writers. After years of loafing around, Jamal struggles to win his father's approval with the establishment of the cafe. Yasir deliberately goes fundo on his simple businessman father by wearing a green turban, hiking up his shalwar and embracing conservative Islam.

Once again, the dynamics are all there for a great drama, but Shah doesn’t follow through. Indeed, she does herself great injustice by diluting her own writing. An example:

If Hameed Mandvi had ever read any thing about teenage psychology, he would have realized that [his son] Yasir was simply acting out the healthy instincts of all boys his age to rise up in fury against whoever was in authority above them, and be the opposite of whatever it was they were, or be full-bloodedly the things they were not.

There was no need, I feel, for Shah to explain this to her readers - it makes a muck of any hard work Shah has put into showing the tension between the father and son rather than simply telling us it’s there. This happens several times during the course of the novel: Shah deciphers every move her characters make and discusses their ramification, to the extent that it began to irritate me. So much could have been left to the imagination.

This is one of the reasons my eyes glazed over in many places; I knew exactly what Shah was going to explain and it didn’t help that her writing style is simple, even mundane. Some writers have established beautiful, rich prose styles (Sara Suleri, Salman Rushdie, VS Naipaul) whose diction lingers on the tongue. Any faults in Shah’s handling of the novel could have been easily redeemed by the mellifluous styles of such writers.

But this is only Shah’s third book, and a distinct voice can take a long time to develop. Certainly, she has a deft touch for humour. There were some incredibly funny bits: Jamal, for instance, went to a school where “three hundred boys… mumbled the words of the national anthem led by a hysterical head boy on a loud speaker” The scene this evokes is hilarious: it is in a sentence like this that Shah delights and amuses.

My final complaint (not criticism) is a simple one. Why could Shah have not made Karachi a more aesthetically pleasing city? By now I’m tired of books, which, in their scramble to be as possible, present a miserable view of the metropolis. Shah joins Maniza Naqvi and Uzma Aslam Khan and to a degree, Kamila Shamsie, in a little group of writers, and Shah is included among them, are always at pains to drive home that Karachi is a vicious dog-eat-dog city: “Afghans, dressed in filthy, stained clothes,... [who] replaced their guns and knives with pickaxes and colour charts” and “riots and shooting and bombs that convulsed [it] regularly”, New York and London also have their share of crime, mendicancy, unemployment and filth, but their chroniclers recognize that they also possess a certain unique beauty.

Is it a coincidence that all the four writers mentioned - Shah, Naqvi, Khan and Shamsie - have felt compelled to pay a token tribute to Bushra Zaidi? This was the young Mohajir college student whose death in 1985 at the hands of a reckless Pathan bus driver brought on massive MQM agitation and bloodshed in Karachi. Perhaps it is necessary to mention the Sindhi-Punjabi tension, and I don’t deny that ethnic, sectarian and religious strains bear down heavily on Karachi. But I question why she makes a passing comment that as a Sindhi, Jamal’s father was felt he had been cheated in his own province: “In Ahmed Tunio’s mind, the Sindhi man in Karachi had been born at a permanent disadvantage”. The rest of the novel has already taken on meaty enough issues: pornography, public spaces, morality, sexuality and Islam. Sectarian hatred is such a vast topic in itself, that here it feels as though Shah simply took a shortcut in her quest to give Jamal’s father depth.

Despite my complaints, though, I would still recommend The 786 Cybercafe. It successfully grapples with a very current controversy that is developing in our midst. Shah carefully opens up and bounces around the moral and ethical positions our people take on issues of sweaty, naked women in latex, religious highhandedness and the right to decide for ourselves. The more debate on this the better.