GENOME

Book Description

GENOME

BOOK SUMMARY

‘You need to be deported,’ said the retired army general. What follows is not deportation but the beginning of an exploration, both personal and political, of the Pakistani mind and that of a nation state. It becomes the beginning of an exploration, both personal and political. An Indian Muslim woman travelling alone in a supposedly restricted space with a socio-psychological baggage of not wanting to be seen as a Pakistani – ‘Pakistan had to remain a secret: just visiting it made me feel like a traitor.’

From travelling in the cockpit of the PIA aircraft to having the door shut in her face by a born-again nationalist to attending parties in perfumed salons to examining the minorities; from being treated as a philistine to enlivening conversations with those who had to pay the price for dissent; the author attempts to understand what it means to live in Pakistan today.

The journey, at times interrupted, through the cities of Karachi, Islamabad, Lahore and Peshawar, Farzana Versey finds herself struggling with her own identity – as an Indian and a Muslim woman ‘When I was on soil of the land of the pure, my impurity struck me. I was the emotional mulatto.’ The narrative, in spite of its deeply personal tone, discusses the evolving of Pakistan as a nation state.

The Journey Interrupted is not a conventional travelogue. In the vignettes Farzana weaves together of living and travelling in a complex society with its layering of religious tradition and barely-in-check liberalism, the personal becomes the political. In these times of political and social unrest in Pakistan The Journey Interrupted is a timely book – one that delves into the Pakistani mind and traces the chasms in its recent history.