A city is a secret map to the inner life of its inhabitants — the handful it marshalled to greater glory; the ones it lulled into a life of mediocrity, and, those whom it browbeat into bitter submission. Her childhood in Karachi might have been shorn of drama — “no beatings, no abuse, no bullying.how boring!” she says — but it prepared Sabyn Javeri to recognise the city for what it is: an unequal battlefield. “I grew up in a very peaceful neighbourhood of Karachi on the wrong side of the bridge (There is a bridge that separates the city’s elite from the rest). Now, I live on the so-called right side of the bridge — by the sea — which is like a different city altogether, it’s such a bubble. Here, everyone knows everyone and it’s almost like being in an incestuous Victorian society, where material pleasure and gross class inequality overrule everything else,” says the 39-year-old author. It is these faultlines in a nameless “metro city” that nourish and mark Rani Shah and Nazo, the protagonists of Javeri’s debut novel, Nobody Killed Her (4th/Harper Collins), one of 2017’s most anticipated releases from the subcontinent. The result is a thriller-meets-courtroom-drama that taps into the idea of female leaders negotiating power in patriarchal societies. “I was sick of the saccharine-sweet, submissive heroines and the rich, lyrical style of writing that the subcontinent had become associated with. I wanted something staccato, snappy, a page-turner about a gutsy, kickass heroine who was not a cultural or a gender stereotype,” says Javeri, an assistant professor at Karachi’s Habib University. Javeri’s feisty protagonists fuel a powerful novel. It also gains traction from the fact that the life of Rani Shah has close resonance with that of Pakistan’s first woman head of state, Benazir Bhutto. Like Bhutto, Shah is the exiled scion of a political dynasty who dreams of returning to Pakistan to serve its people, and like her, she becomes mired in corruption and controversy once she returns and achieves a historic electoral majority. Javeri leaves all particulars out, but the similarities — from the thin, white veil casually wrapped around her head to the acquisition of a property reminiscent of Bhutto’s infamous Rockwood Estate in England, from her run-in with the country’s nuclear head down to the assassination — are hard to overlook. Javeri, however, steadfastly refutes the claim that she modelled Shah on Bhutto. “All the events are made-up and I relied pretty much on my imagination. The events in the book about corruption and exploitation resonate with people because they are very common. Someone said to me recently, in a very accusatory way, that ‘You have mixed up the histories of India and Pakistan.’ I said, I never set out to write a historical novel.What I have tried to show in my novel is that there are many backstage agents who influence the decisions of our politicians. That’s bad enough as it is, but for a female leader even more tough,” she says. For a novel that was meant to be a “fictional exploration of real events”, a style similar to Monica Ali’s last novel, Untold Story, about a character resembling the late Lady Diana, or Curtis Steinfield’s American Wife, “an inventive tale about the life of First Lady Laura Bush and what it must have been like living with George Bush”, seemed appropriate. Javeri began writing in London, where she had moved in 2000, when she was on a break from her job after the birth of her second child. Politics had never been of particular interest, but even though she was very young when Bhutto first came to power, she remembered being impressed by her charisma. “…she was one female leader who was totally unapologetic about being a woman first. She took her children to work, on state visits, and was sharp and focussed as a leader. She was a shining example that women can have it all,” she says. As Javeri began writing, she found herself caught up in the constantly shifting universe she had wanted to capture. “I looked at the rise of the underdog in Indian and Bangladeshi politics, how female politicians from underprivileged backgrounds have upset the hierarchy of powerful political dynasties to enter mainstream politics. In Pakistan, I found no such example of women like Mayawati or Jayalalithaa who broke the glass ceiling without any political pedigree,” she says. It’s possibly why, even though the character of Shah has come under close scrutiny, Javeri holds her other character, Nazo, the woman whom the city could not tame or break, closer to heart. “Power and ambition are dirty words when it comes to women, be it in showbiz, politics or even ‘safe’ professions like banking. Women are supposed to be maternal, self-sacrificing creatures who put themselves last. But Nazo doesn’t give a damn. She’s a go-getter, and will do anything to get what she wants. She’s a user, cunning and clever, quick and detached. In many ways, she’s like a man,” she says. The gendered reaction of a city to its residents could just as well be a mirror of New Delhi, Dhaka or any metropolis in the subcontinent. A woman on the wrong side of the class and gender divide has to fight twice as hard for survival. If Karachi is the default setting for her novel, it is only because of its familiarity. “It’s is not just limited to the parliament here. The politics of gender and class inequality are far more apparent here than the global terrorism that some novels address as the main culprit. My novel is not just about politics, but about the people to whom the politics happen,” she says. Javeri, who is working on a collection of interlinked stories titled Hijabistan, on the theme of the veil, has recently moved back to Pakistan to care for her ageing parents. It’s a good time to be home, but Karachi continues to befuddle her. “I have come back after 17 long years and, strangely, everything is different, and yet, feels just the same. It still has the same potholes, the same garbage stink, it's still unsafe for women to walk on the streets, yet the sleek flyovers, super malls and skyscrapers give it an urban feel. It’s very much in keeping with the country’s philosophy of glossing over the actual problems,” she says. Her book had a difficult passage to publication, but the writer says she was always clear in her mind that all she wanted to do was set her story free. “I didn’t set out to change the face of history, nor did I have any illusions about the power of writers to change society. I just tried to tell a good story about feminism and class struggle. And, at the end of the day, that’s what it is — an entertaining, fast-paced story about the lives of two women and their fight for the right to be who they want to be,” she says.
