‘Desecration’: Playing a sacred game in Pakistan

Sohail Rauf’s excellent Blassphere is equal parts tragedy and detective story. Reluctant police officer Inspector Waqas Mahmood investigates the apparent suicide of teenager Hasan, who may or may not have been involved in a recent mob lynching of a Hindu youth in his neighborhood linked to blasphemy charges. The case is particularly important to Waqas, as as a boy he witnessed his father being lynched for accidentally burning some pages of the Quran.

The parallels to current events are eerie. Earlier this month, a Pakistani tourist was lynched (and detained by police) in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province for allegedly burning a Quran. The dead man’s mother issued a statement disowning him to protect her other children. In the novel, Hasan’s family repeatedly urges Waqas to end the affair for roughly the same reasons.

Written with restraint and sympathy, Blassphere The book makes little attempt at formal dramatization. Each chapter is a “point of view” (PoV) chapter, told by one of three characters: Hasan’s friend Furqan, Hasan’s sister Lubna, or Waqas himself. Even when the narrators are in emotional turmoil, no one has a mental breakdown in real time, and everyone remains calm enough to handle important plot details. It’s all very neat, with meticulous, sometimes life-threatening editing.

The descriptive prose is designed as a sort of sociological variant of the “hard-boiled” genre, where short, pithy sentences are the norm. The sociological portion typically begins when the first victim, Hindu lecturer Mohan, enters the fray. Through flashback chapters from Furqan’s point of view, we see how Mohan and his brother Ram have been involved in Hasan and Furqan’s lives. A mentor and a bit of a renaissance man, Mohan has degrees in both science and art. He teaches teenage boys poetry, philosophy, and anything else that catches their interest. Finally, he begins teaching at a boys’ school with the mission of developing an arts program. This marks the tipping point that makes him the target of Taraba, a powerful student organization of Deen-e-Kamil, the dominant theocratic organization in the region.

Orhan Pamuk’s My name is RedThe issue of Western-style portraits being un-Islamic has been a source of dramatic tension. A similar thing plays out between Mohan and Taraba, with the latter claiming that his lessons are corrupting the minds of young Muslims. They don’t like that Mohan questions everything, and are even more annoyed that he usually responds to their threats with polite smiles and measured retorts.

Lubna and Mohan’s dynamic is delightful; in flashbacks, it’s clear there’s sparks flying between them (she’s a student in the art class he’s just started teaching). They’re aware of the dangers of a Hindu-Muslim romance, so they don’t act on it; this fear proves prophetic, of course. But Lubna and Mohan don’t shy away from forging an intellectual romance; it’s a charming, old-fashioned one that unfolds over the exchange of post-it notes on the pages of a book of poetry they’re both reading and analyzing.

Rauf is not always free from stereotypes when it comes to portraying female characters. For instance, the “feminist woman” of the group (Waqas’s college sweetheart) is introduced to the reader early on with a sexual joke. Waqas’ wife (a housewife) is introduced in a scene where Waqas makes physical advances and she rejects them because their children are passing by. But Rauf gets it absolutely right in other scenes, such as the relationship between Lubna and her brother Hasan. Lubna is a little older than Rauf and, as teenagers often do, they wake up one day to find themselves strangers to each other. As Lubna grows closer to Mohan, Hasan begins to have doubts about his former leader and at the same time starts hanging out with Taraba men and growing a beard.

Blassphere is a very entertaining novel, but the entertainment is not cheap thrills. It is more like a dark realization that, given recent events, should have come sooner. Pakistan’s blasphemy laws may be the focus here, but there is no doubt that large swaths of the subcontinent – including India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and, increasingly, Nepal – are surrendering their societies to organized religion. This trend leaves us vulnerable to small theocracies that take us all hostage in the name of God. But as the adventures of Inspector Waqas show, anyone claiming to be an emissary of God should be greeted with at least a robust scepticism.

Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based writer.