Opinion Midnight’s other children

Now,Granta has assembled another well-timed issue devoted to the subcontinent,but this time the subject is Pakistan,partition’s other child. In the past few years,several Pakistani writers — including Mohammed Hanif,Nadeem Aslam,Daniyal Mueenuddin and Kamila Shamsie,contributors to the Granta project — have been praised for their fiction.

But there is no exclamation point on this colorfully designed Granta cover (inspired by Pakistan’s painted buses and trucks),and the collection lacks the whimsy that Americans simplistically identify with India. Granta’s Pakistan is a country of jihadists,anti-Americanism and increasingly misogynistic and brutal forms of Islam. Mohsin Hamid’s terse short story,for example,is a first-person tale of being beheaded; it ends with the narrator describing “the sound of my blood rushing out.”

Such subject matter will hardly surprise. It’s almost impossible to pick up a newspaper without reading about Pakistan’s war with fundamentalists,its corruption and its willingness (or unwillingness) to help the American military in Afghanistan. “We are getting attention. It’s a Pakistani moment,” Daniyal Mueenuddin,whose story collection garnered raves last year,said to me.

The collection also reflects debates over the degree to which Muslims can and want to assimilate to the West. While Indian immigrants are thought to arrive with vibrant traditions,Americans worry that transplanted Pakistanis hold dangerous religious and ideological beliefs. Granta’s contributors do not skirt these realities.

Indian writers can hardly be accused of whitewashing the status of women in India. But the Pakistani contributors to Granta are particularly attuned to the misogyny that has been so central to recent debates over Islam. The longest entry,“Leila in the Wilderness,” a novella by Nadeem Aslam,concerns a Pakistani whose husband physically and mentally abuses her because she is unable to give birth to a male child. Mohammed Hanif’s story “Butt and Bhatti” is also unsparing in its portrayal of gender relations,with a male protagonist who is unable to divorce romance from violence. “The Sins of the Mother,” by Jamil Ahmad,is even more squirm-inducing: his story recounts the attempts of a couple to escape their families,and the gruesome stoning that follows.

If these tales are excruciating,the contributors’ critique of American foreign policy may make some readers uncomfortable in an entirely different way. Many of the writers describe the harm done to Pakistan in the 1980s by American-backed dictator Zia ul-Haq. The secular ideals of Pakistan’s founder,Muhammad Ali Jinnah (evoked in “Portrait of Jinnah,” an essay by The New York Times correspondent Jane Perlez),vanished in Zia’s increasingly Islamicised country. Even the sympathetic characters here are full of rage at America. “A country demoralised and humiliated by its myriad problems could either turn reflective,or it could simply blame everyone else,” the novelist Kamila Shamsie writes in “Pop Idols,” her essay about growing up in Karachi immersed in John Hughes movies and Madonna records. Many characters in these stories have chosen blame. While Arundhati Roy and others have fiercely criticised American foreign policy,those tensions tend not to be at the centre of Indian fiction.

But perhaps the starkest difference between this collection and Indian diaspora literature in recent decades is the depiction of immigrant life. Pakistani immigrants,especially in the years since the September 11 attacks,face challenges completely different from those of their Hindu counterparts from India. (Of course India has a huge Muslim population,but the country is seen as a victim rather than a perpetrator of terrorism.) “Restless,” Aamer Hussein’s account of his formative years in London,and Sarfraz Manzoor’s “White Girls,” a rumination on interracial romance,are funny and poignant. But the most famous Pakistani immigrant in America,and the one whose story is told at length here in a piece of reportage by the American novelist and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Lorraine Adams and the Pakistani journalist Ayesha Nasir,is Faisal Shahzad,the would-be Times Square bomber. The essay somewhat glibly presents his radicalism as a result of American foreign policy,but it does highlight some of the harsher realities confronting Pakistani-Americans. Shahzad’s inability to fit in — a theme treated with delicate melancholy in the immigrant tales of writers like Jhumpa Lahiri — is less melancholy than terrifying.

For all the violence and brutality in this collection,the reader does get glimpses of a less visible Pakistan. (In a humorous touch,the photographer-protagonist of Uzma Aslam Khan’s story “Ice,Mating” is rebuked for not taking war photographs,and is told that his more artistic snapshots lack “authenticity.”) The great value of Granta’s compilation is that it shows us this side of the country while never ignoring the crueler,more vicious aspects of Pakistani society.