Like Alexander McCall Smith in KarachiBlame it on the blurb. A claim is made for Musharraf Ali Farooqis first novel The Story of a Widow that he is bound to fall short of,and he does. Mohammed Hanif,author of the well-acclaimed A Case of Exploding Mangoes,writes: If Jane Austen had grown up in a Karachi suburb,this is what she would have written. This is arguably a book of manners,and perhaps that invited the Austen comparison. But this is not a telling of private lives that contains the seeds of subversive interpretations of a particular class in a particular society at a particular point in time. But to combat the comparison is not to spurn the book. It only provokes the reader to join the sport and offer a more apt one. So here it is. If Alexander McCall Smith had grown up in a Karachi suburb indeed given his gift for bringing alive distant lands,even if he had wandered through a Karachi suburb this is what he may have written.Mona Ahmad bears great affinity with Precious Ramotswe and Isabel Dalhousie,most prominently because she is of a mindful bent,comfortable in her self,and disposed towards asserting her individuality not by confrontation but by thinking through the paces of the days of her life by weighing the repercussion of each step. That disposition finds utterance when her husband of thirty years passes away. To her astonishment,Mona finds that she is now extremely well provided for and need not adhere to the frugality that defined their years together. A woman of comfortable means must,of course,be in need of a hobby (there goes Austen) and Mona discovers her inner gardener. Such a woman,of means and of gentle accommodation with her surrounding,must also be wooed. And she is,suddenly having to fall back on her capacity for talking herself through the paces of her day,just to be sure that in being wooed she herself did not compromise her extremely strong sense of propriety. The Karachi that Mona inhabits is not the restive place of news reports. Monas city by the sea is a location for softer social observations,a city that quiets down enough for the interior preoccupations of an average family to play out unhurried. But this Karachi is still different from McCall Smiths Gaborone or Edinburgh. This is the Subcontinent,here stories do not draw to a close without a crisis; here they do not live happily ever after without the threat by a bad,or temporarily bad,guy to overturn their certainties. Here Mona cannot find a feminist equilibrium without taking the big dramatic step to show she is capable of handling her affairs.Farooqi,whose translation into English of The Adventures of Amir Hamza won immense praise,pulls it off in the end. But there is a tentativeness in The Story of a Widow that one suspects will not carry into his next novel.
