It was penned at a time when
there was no hint of the trouble that would rip the tribal areas apart
in the decades to come, but it rings hauntingly true in today's era of
the War on Terror. Teen Sanki begins with the disappearance a group of
men who had gone into the desert.
Tribal chief Shahbaz Kohi,
along with six companions, goes missing and is last seen going to Rehban,
a place in tribal areas, to investigate the mysterious disappearance and
return of 11 tribesmen. The 11 men eventually return from the desert,
but start to behave very strangely. Without telling anybody why, they
isolate themselves from everyone they know, and even start to shun the
company of their families.
Meanwhile, a shocking
realisation dawns upon the locals as a number of them begin to change
their appearance. They act and talk like normal human beings, but their
body begins to sprout thick, dark fur, until nobody can deny that they
have been transformed into gorillas. Through all of this, Ali Imran, the
hero of the novel, remains wearily unsurprised.
"What can I say?" says Imran,
the hero of the novel. "Anyone who can make an atom bomb can surely turn
human beings into animals for entertainment."
The villains of the novel are
foreign, and when Imran plaintively asks one of them why his tribal area
has been chosen for the experiment, he receives a chilling reply: "The
local are uncivilised and believe in superstition, but more importantly,
we have space to do it here. It was a perfectly harmless experiment.
Everything was being done for the welfare of humanity, but the present
circumstances have made bloodshed necessary."
For all his shortcomings, this
foreign character makes an insightful comment. "These people cannot
tolerate anything that doesn't conform to their religious views."
If anyone in the novel could
have foreseen this, it is Imran. Previously, Imran had warned a younger
native that Shakral would run into trouble unless it learns to cope with
the modern world. When the tribal chief snaps, "I can't trust
foreigners!" Imran replies, "You have to. These Western people have an
astonishing attitude. When one of their groups fires at us, a second
group is ready to give first aid to the injured."
The violence in this previously
peaceful area escalates to a point where both sides hold hostages.
Evocative of today's political "with us or against us" frame of mind,
the leader of the foreign mission issues an ultimatum: if our prisoners
are not released, the whole area will be bombed.
Whether or not the area is
bombed is left to the reader to find out, but what is certain is that
the events that must have seemed so unrealistic at the time have proved
to be prophetic today. As noted fiction writer Shakil Adilzada says of
Ibn-e-Safi, "He had great vision and wrote about things that weren't
present then but happened later."
Adilzada, ruefully adds,
"Writers can often imagine what will happen in the years to come, but
compared to the West, fiction writers in Pakistan receive no importance
at all." There are novels that exist strictly in the moment, and there
are novels that are ahead of their time and read as though the writer
could peer into the future. "Teen Sanki" has a firm place in the latter
category.
