collection of stories. Gall Kuce (1952), implicitly compares the Delhi of 1947 with the Jerusalem of the Lamentations of Jeremiah, which the author says haunted him throughout the communal riots and destruction of Partition.^ The city of Lahore during the 1965 war between Pakistan and India, and the capture of Jerusalem in the 6-Day War between Israel and Egypt are compared to the desolation of Jerusalem as described in Nehemlah ("Sut ke Tar")^ and in The Lamentations of Jeremiah ("Sarm-al-Haram").8 His most recent novel, Basti, is based on the effects in Lahore of the Bangladesh war and the fall of the city of Dacca.
The aptly named Basti ("an inhabited place," which can mean a village as well as a city) encompasses cities of the present, of memory and of myth. The narrative present is set in Lahore before and after the Bangladesh war (1971), but flashbacks add the main character's memories of his childhood in a small town in pre-Partition India, and include the history of Pakistan from its founding to the present. Through surrealistic voyages into worlds of history, dastan, and myth, the author shows us parallels with cities from the Jerusalem of Nehemiah to the Delhi of 1857, and from the Dwarka of Krishna to the Kufa of Imam Husain. The fallen cities, filled with portents of apocalypse, are made more poignant by their contrast with the idyllic, sacred world of his childhood in the "beautiful city" Rupnagar.10 The harmonious world of the beautiful city becomes the nihilistic world of the city of doom because of man's growing greed, his hypocrisy, and his failure to speak out, witness and warn. Basti does give warning in its complementary themes of the fall of man and the approach of Doomsday, as they are witnessed by its main character Zakir who is, as his name indicates, the "chronicler" of his age.
Basti moves from the particular to the universal; from history to myth; from memory to nightmare; from Utopia to Apocalypse. Centering on the fall of Dacca and its effect on Zakir, it begins with the life history of Zakir, who grew up in a village in northern India and migrated to Pakistan at the time of Partition. It uses fantasy, myth and religious history to universalize both the biography of a particular person and the historical fall of Dacca to represent the more general theme of the fall of man, and end with a comparison of the fall of man's city to the fall of man.
The story is narrated from the point of view of Zakir, a professor of history in West Pakistan, just before the 1971 war. In the quarter of a century since he came to Pakistan, Zakir has forgotten his past. Now he tries to remember it, both in order to search for his self-identity through his personal history, and to seek the cause of the decline of a city, a cultural tradition, and of humanity itself, as "the days pass and the purity of the first day wanes with the revolution of days" (p. 83).
The book begins with the main character's memories of his early childhood in Rupnagar, a village in Uttar Pradesh. It is at first an idyllic, mythic time of wonder, "when the world was new and the sky fresh and the earth not yet soiled" (p. 9), a description which is later applied to his first day in Pakistan
124