‘Blasphear’: Playing sacred games in Pakistan

Sohail Rauf’s excellent Blasphear is a novel that’s equal parts tragedy and whodunit. A reluctant cop, sub-inspector Waqas Mahmood, investigates the apparent suicide of teenager Hasan, who may or may not have been a part of a recent, blasphemy-related mob lynching of a young Hindu man in his neighbourhood. The case is especially significant to Waqas because, as a boy, he saw his father being lynched for accidentally burning a few pages of the Holy Quran.

The resemblance to current events is eerie: earlier this month, a Pakistani tourist was lynched (in police custody, no less) in the country’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province after allegedly burning pages of the Quran. The dead man’s mother made a statement disowning him, in a bid to protect her other children. In the novel, Hasan’s family keeps nudging Waqas to close the case for much the same reason.

Written with restraint and empathy, Blasphear seldom attempts formal pyrotechnics on the page. Every chapter is a “point-of-view” (PoV) chapter, narrated by one of three characters: Hasan’s friend Furqan, Hasan’s sister Lubna or Waqas himself. Even when the narrators are undergoing emotional turmoil, nobody has a breakdown in real time and everybody keeps their wits long enough to get important plot details out of the way. It’s all very neat and edited scrupulously, sometimes to within an inch of its life.

The descriptive prose is designed to be a kind of sociological variant on the “hardboiled” genre, with short and clipped sentences being the norm. The sociology bit usually kicks in when the first victim, a Hindu lecturer named Mohan, enters the fray. Through Furqan’s PoV flashback chapters, we see how Mohan and his brother Ram entered the lives of Hasan and Furqan. A mentor and a bit of a Renaissance man, Mohan has both scientific and fine arts degrees. He educates the teenaged boys in poetry, philosophy and anything else that catches their fancy. Finally, he begins to teach at the boys’ college, with a mandate to develop a fine arts programme—the tipping point that places him in the crosshairs of the Talaba, the powerful student wing of the Deen-e-Kamil, the dominant theocratic organisation of the region.

In Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red, the question of Western-style portraiture being un-Islamic was a source of dramatic tension. Something similar plays out here with Mohan and the Talaba, with the latter insisting his classes are corrupting young Muslim minds. They don’t like that Mohan questions everything, and they’re even more annoyed that Mohan usually responds to threats with polite smiles and measured ripostes.

The dynamic between Lubna and Mohan is enjoyable. In the flashback sequences, it’s obvious that there’s a spark between them (she’s part of the fine arts class he has started to teach). They don’t act on it because they recognise the dangers of a Hindu-Muslim romance. This fear, of course, proves to be prophetic. However, Lubna and Mohan do not hesitate when it comes to developing an intellectual romance: charming and old-fashioned, conducted via post-it notes exchanged on the pages of the book of poems they are both reading and analysing.

Rauf isn’t always free from stereotypes when it comes to writing his women characters. For example, the “feminist woman” among the group (Waqas’s college sweetheart) is introduced to the reader by having her crack a sex joke straight off the bat. Waqas’s wife (a homemaker) is introduced in a scene where he makes a gesture of physical affection, and she rebuffs it by saying the kids will walk in on them. But he gets it absolutely right on other occasions, like Lubna’s equation with her brother Hasan. She is slightly older than him and, as it so often happens with teenagers, one day they wake up and realise that they have become strangers. As Lubna grows closer to Mohan, Hasan begins to grow suspicious of his former mentor and, at the same time, begins to hang out with the Talaba men and grow his beard out.

Blasphear is a highly entertaining novel, but its pleasures aren’t cheap thrills. They are more like sombre realisations that couldn’t have arrived a day too soon, especially given the recent turn of events. Pakistan’s blasphemy laws may be the focus here, but there’s no doubt that large swathes of the subcontinent (India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and, increasingly, Nepal as well) have surrendered their societies to organised religion. This trend leaves us vulnerable to tiny theocratic organisations that then hold us all hostage in the name of God. But as sub-inspector Waqas’s adventures show us, anybody who claims to be God’s special envoy should be met with dogged scepticism at the very least.

Aditya Mani Jha is a writer based in Delhi.