PARTYING WHILE LAHORE BURNS
Nadia Akbar’s debut novel, Goodbye Freddie Mercury, has been met by whoops and hosannas from breathless reviewers apparently unable to believe that feckless, rich, young(ish) Pakistanis swear, drink, take drugs, have sex (sometimes consensual, often exploitative), and have ambivalent feelings towards the cities of their birth. Akbar is equally breathless, dazzled by her own irreverence, by the brazen ‘politics’ of having her female protagonist, Nida, be unlike “most desi girls”. That repeated refrain soon becomes wearisome as it translates into an affected nonchalance toward the crude debauchery you witness, a ‘been there done that’ insouciance despite having been nowhere and done almost nothing. Nida is cool because the boys in the novel keep telling us she is.
Nida appears to have no opinions of her own. She’s a piece of malleable putty for the likes of Omer, the boorish son of the right-hand man to the corrupt Pakistani prime minister. Omer believes that crude cynicism and faux frankness make him less despicable. “My father’s been in Paki politics for, like, forty years,” he tells Nida. “His job isn’t to make this country better, it’s to make the same fuckheads win again and again and again until they die and their dumb-ass kids take over.” A little earlier, Nida had been ‘reflecting’ that Omer had “made Lahore, as he says, ‘his bitch’”. Neither Nida nor the novel are as appalled as they should be that such a state of affairs has come to pass.
Half the novel is told in Nida’s indistinct voice. The other half is told in the voice of Bugsy,
AKBAR’S title is not elegiac; it reflects an English - Speaking class comfortable with the status quo
the son of a war hero who helms a late-night rock and roll show on the radio. In his ‘RJ’ persona, Bugsy offers a paean to Freddie Mercury. Bugsy pronounces Mercury as born in 1946 “to dal-eating, finger-flicking desi parents just like yours and mine”. It’s reductive, as if an individual is defined by where and to whom he was born, as if Mercury can be at once “classless, raceless, beyond culture and creed” yet annexed as “ours, yaar, he’s ours”.
Akbar’s title is not elegiac. It’s ambivalent, reflecting perhaps an English-speaking class that is comfortable with the status quo, able to exert its privilege and live as if somewhere else. There is a political subplot, with the rise of Mian Tariq, a conflation of Imran Khan and Arvind Kejriwal. But you sense that Akbar’s main interest is not in politics or the banal hypocrisies she identifies. Bugsy, at a Bacchanalian mujra thrown at the PM’s farmhouse (in Nawaz Sharif territory) ‘revels’ in the ridiculousness that these “are men people take seriously during the day... men who lead the government and decide the fate of our national economy... men who meet UN dignitaries... the US President, Angelina Jolie, for goodness’ sake”.
It is Bugsy’s inability to express moral disdain without deflating it with weak irony that is both his and the novel’s principal weakness. This is no Pakistani Les Liaisons dangereuses, in which Ancien Regime aristocrats are exposed as morally bankrupt and deeply cruel. Akbar’s heart is in the interminable descriptions of parties that bloat this slight novel to over 300 pages; but no ‘charming’ loucheness, no ‘witty banter’ makes up for the essential hatefulness of her characters.
—Shougat Dasgupta