Keeru and Instructional Fictions

There has been a reaction from within the Pakistani Punjab irritated by narratives that the history of Pakistan is the history of a Punjabi subjugation of all other identities beyond its own. A range of writers and critics have emerged, arguing that the Punjab has always been the most uniquely welcoming, most diverse of all Pakistan’s territories. Only here, they claim, could a Kashmiri or a Pashtun be elected by the popular vote, rise so astronomically that they lead major political parties. Only here do students from across the country receive generous scholarships and government-provided laptops, become student activists and professional migrants. Only in the Punjab are people so open to such possibilities, so tolerant, say these men and women.

Of these romantic fantasies, none are to be found in the Punjab of Fauzia Rafique’s Keeru. Instead, Rafique’s Punjab is a space teeming with prejudices, with otherisations and religious violence. It would be, for Keeru locates most of its story in Pakistani Punjab’s Christians, its most demographically sizeable minority community. As a little boy, Rafique's hero, Keeru, is subjected to scorn even for his name: the cleric of a neighbourhood mosque deems it so unsavoury that he demands it be changed before Keeru can join his Quran lessons. Elsewhere, Keeru’s Christian mother, Haleema, reflects over her dread of a province in which so many of her community and its sympathisers have paid the price of exile or murder, thinking of Shahbaz Bhatti, Salman Taseer, Aasia Bibi, Rimsha Masih. Even the fate of Sajjad and Shama Masih — burned to death in a brick-kiln for an allegation of blasphemy — are part of how Haleema's consciousness recalls Punjab.

Keeru too has a brush with this hysteria. Although raised a Muslim, one Ramzan, Keeru raises the concern that perhaps his high school’s policies of disallowing all students from eating and drinking during the holy month are insensitive to the Christian, Hindu and Sikh students on campus. This triggers such a dangerous furore that he must escape Lahore, that he must leave Punjab forever. Eventually, Keeru is whisked away to Canada. Once there, Keeru tells the reader: “A whole new story started when I got to Canada. I like this story more”.

Most of the narrative’s present is set in the Vancouver of British Columbia. Surprisingly, the tumultuous movement that pushes Keeru to it does not lead to any diasporic yearnings, and the story remains free from the tropes of more conventional exilic literature. Rather, in Rafique’s Canada, Keeru grows up to be a reasonably successful businessman, an employer of an all-female working staff drawn from both the Punjabs. He also makes the time to write and read poetry; here, Keeru meets an admirer of his poetry in the pleasantly clean-shaven and un-turbanned young Sikh, Daljeet.

So otherwise wholesome, fulfilling and financially secure is this Vancouver that one cannot help but feel that Keeru almost acts as a promotional advertisement for Punjabi immigration to British Columbia. Rafique’s vision, in fact, leaves behind all horrors in the abandoned Punjab. The new Punjab of Vancouver is a multi-religious space, full of many emancipations. Women finally gain the courage to escape their unhappy marriages; young men learn of the seriousness of depression and gain mental health awareness; inter-caste and queer attractions can be realised and celebrated.

For the novelette’s translator into English, Haider Shahbaz, this is what makes Keeru a refreshing act of creative optimism — a rejection of the tired and depressing tropes associated with such characters and plot-lines. However, that this utopic imagination draws such a neat dividing line between the lands in which horrors can occur and where dreams come to fruition makes one hesitant to celebrate Keeru and its acts of hope. After all, it is not especially creative to imagine a city like Vancouver as a utopic space — that is their conventional, popularly conceived promise.

For many others who have tried to use Canada as an escape, life has not been so idyllic. Dissidents have mysteriously drowned, assassinated. Clashes have taken place between religious groups in a manner not unfamiliar to communalist tensions in South Asia. Aasia Bibi is named in Keeru; to Pakistani journalist Ailia Zehra in 2023, Aasia Bibi said she found herself working over 14 hours a day to make ends meet in Canada, styling her asylum in the country merely a more spacious imprisonment than that of her prison cell in Pakistan. In some sense, it would seem that the realities of Aasia Bibi's life far exceed the fiction at play in Keeru.

But that Keeru and its characters do not resemble these dire realities are part of what makes it so accessible, so light-hearted and straightforward. On the level of language too, both the original Punjabi and the English translation are colloquially rendered, emulating the imagined diction of each first-person narrator. Most amusing of these narrators — a role that switches with chapter — is the Punjabi of Bella, a half-white Canadian Punjabi quite unrestrained in her Englishisms, her “what the fucks” and “lols”.

Such instructional commitments do not in themselves diminish Rafique’s work; many stories can be said to serve similar functions. With Manto’s Khol Do (or Open! in Amina Azfar’s translation), for instance, one can glean what horrors of Partition that Manto is testifying to for his reader. But where it exceeds other Partition narratives is within its explosive ending, when a barely conscious young woman is violated by the Muslim volunteers tasked with her rescue. In narrativising this act of intra-community violence, Khol Do overturns popular Partition tropes, unlocking new possibilities of reckoning with what happened in the Punjab in 1947. Of the classic, socially-concerned writers of South Asia — Ismat Chughtai, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Krishan Chander, to name but a few — this aspect of being provocative with what imaginations and discourses a narrative puts itself in conversation with is fundamental to what has made this fiction so transformative, so timeless. Indeed, many of these short stories present complex analyses well before journalists or social scientists would, imbibing within their fictive constructions new horizons of seeing and engaging with reality.

Keeru’s simplicity, on the other hand, bars it from such effects. Its readers may be pleased to see Rafique condemn villainies that they too find unacceptable, and in the chapter from Haleema, those familiar with Lahore’s progressive personalities may delight at this shout-out: “Father Francis told me that there are two sisters in Lahore, Asma and Hina, both lawyers, who fight the cases of poor people for free”. But it is less easy to discern where Keeru presents an evolution in the conversations around blasphemy, in the crises of Punjab and the Punjabi peoples. At times, this makes Keeru read like an elaborate campaign document, one that lists and ticks off prejudiced representations with each memory and self-reflection, only to resolve them in the sweet fictive present of Vancouver.

Moreover, as a novelette — as a written text created for a reading public —Keeru hardly implicates or challenges this readership in documenting the horrors of its world. On the contrary, much progressive fiction from the Pakistani Punjab has transcended many of the risks Rafique takes with Keeru. Despite bans and a story centring queer romance in Lahore itself, the movie Joyland has garnered quite an enthusiastic response in Pakistan and beyond, seemingly reaching its intended audience. In kind, the Puffball Studios short film, Swipe, took on Punjab’s blasphemy obsessiveness through a speculative story of a disturbing app. Its intensity of subject matter has not compromised its circulation: it remains publicly available on Youtube, having been screened at a variety of Pakistani university campuses and covered in major news publications. Both Joyland and Swipe represent creative forms with fundamentally wider reach than a novelette; that they have gone farther than Keeru with themes that it too is grappling with makes Rafique’s work land an underwhelming note. Instead, her intentions here feel particularly instructional: a primer for an audience conceived to be ignorant and unaware of what goes on in the Pakistani Punjab. But it would be difficult to say that Keeru would be initiating a conversation with persons unfamiliar with these or similar precedents — its very form invites such a readership.

Where Keeru does create a unique thematic focus is in its probing of caste, in its persistence among Muslim Punjabis. Although the word ‘Dalit’ has been used in English-language promotional material around Keeru to an extent that, initially, appeared questionable — Punjabi Christians have resisted this terminology to characterise themselves — after following the journey of Keeru and his mother, it did feel justified and important. Debates and articulations surrounding Dalits in India have an immense legacy, the violence around them much better probed and analysed. In attributing this category to Keeru and his mother, Shahbaz brings into attention the particular, understated discriminations faced by these peoples, even after they convert into Christianity or Islam, creating a space for Keeru to be located in a larger canon of Dalit literature in South Asia. As many Christians and Hindus in Pakistan are Dalit in background (and Pakistani Hindus have utilised this label to political ends), this makes for a moving interpretive emphasis in translation, one that also allows Mohammed Hanif’s novel from 2011, Our Lady of Alice Bhatti, to be read in a similar spirit.

It may also be argued that Vancouver is a space of possibilities, is the multi-religious Punjab of Rafique’s imaginations. Schools in this Canadian province teach Punjabi and decades’ worth of migration have made it a productive space for Punjabi literature and politics in exile. But by injecting Keeru with so many resolutions that neatly tie up its central concerns, Rafique’s ode to Vancouver flails before the realities that inspire it.

As a final illustration of this work’s strange redressals: Rafique creates an Afghan character who is “handsome”, “fair”, always wearing “white, starched” clothes. When Keeru is sent away from the mosque for his name, this Afghan reassures Keeru’s mother, telling her that from that day forth, Keeru shall be known as ‘Keeru Khan’ — that Keeru can thus join the Quran lessons at the Afghan mosque instead. One can understand the well-meaning messaging driving this characterisation, the challenge such a character is meant to pose to conceptions of the ‘Punjabi’ as the open-minded, the Afghan as an unlettered fundamentalist. But as a response to the politics it counters, it is one among many plottings that make Keeru feel mostly banal.