After a car crash in Karachi

Tunnel Vision
Shandana Minhas
IndiaInk/Roli
288 pages
Rs295

Driving away from a marriage proposal where the girl asks and the boy stays silent, feisty and fiercely independent Ayesha Siddiqui is crying as she handles her rage and the road in Karachi. Halted by a water tanker at a traffic light, her car is hit from behind by another and Ayesha is propelled through the windshield and into coma. What follows is a surreal narrative, a series of snapshots from her life.

Ayesha discovers that she is present in some ethereal, ghostly way, hovering above her comatose body in hospital. Sharp-eyed, critical and funny in turns, she watches and records all that happens in the vicinity of her body. She notes how her mother, having played the perpetual victim all her life, immediately begins to seek assurance from the male doctor. When her family comes to ‘view’ her in the hospital, they trigger recollections of childhood, college and Karachi. Most of all, she recalls Saad, the man she fell in love with and to whom she had proposed before her accident. Each visitor brings memories, and this constitutes the bulk of the tale, though they are interspersed with descriptions of the present — the hospital scenes themselves.

Ayesha had been propositioned by the manager of the firm where she worked. When rejected, she is harassed until she quits. Her fiery character is forged in such crucibles.
She recalls how her father, after being caught with their maidservant, left home and never returned. Later she finds she cannot fit into any social circle with other women because she “made no attempt to hide [her] disinterest in the things which preoccupied them (clothes, jewellery, marriage, gossip)”. Ayesha sees marriage as “diminishing” the woman, while the “man loomed larger”. With such an attitude men find her formidable even as her whiny mother becomes desperate for her daughter to find a match. She has some fond memories triggered when Omar visits her in hospital. Omar in her presence had stood up to some fundamentalist students in college, and had been beaten up for his efforts. It is with Omar that Ayesha has her first genuine affectionate relationship. But she turns down his proposal of marriage mainly because she believes he is too close to his mother. Her relationship with her father and her younger brother, Adil, occupies much of her comatose recollections and meditations.  Then there is the corruption in Pakistan. Ayesha works for some time for a pharma company which, she discovers, manufactures prohibited drugs — she loses her job for this ‘discovery’. In the present, she is frankly appalled at her mother’s behaviour (when Saad’s mother comes to hospital and compliments Ayesha’s good looks, her mother responds with: “she looks even better without the tube in her nose”!) and what she sees as her brother’s indifference. Finally, it is Saad himself who revives her from coma.

Tunnel Vision is written with zest and verve. Minhas’ character portraits are exceptional, especially that of Ayesha and her scheming, victim-playing mother. Crisp dialogues (notably Ayesha’s acerbic ones) and a fine sense or irony contribute to the tale. The use of bumper stickers and slogans as chapter headings might seem a bit trite, but they are definitely entertaining (since we are used to these in India too).

The plot stays firmly within the realm of the domestic. This in itself would have been fine except for Minhas’ attempts to reflect on Pakistani society and politics — which seem forced, almost as though Minhas felt compelled to comment on contemporary issues, and more like intrusions than anything else. Read Tunnel Vision for its family squabbles, not as a ‘portrait’ of contemporary Pakistan.

Pramod K Nayar teaches English at Hyderabad Central University.