Stranger to History: A son's journey through Islamic lands by Aatish Taseer
Picador, 2009
When he was eight, Aatish Taseer sent a letter to his politician father, who was contesting elections in Pakistan, through his journalist mother, who was coming from India to cover the polls. They met and the letter was passed, but Taseer received no response. A few years later, from his boarding school in South India, Taseer decided to make a call to Lahore. His father picked up and said, curtly, that it was not a good time to talk. So, Taseer called the next morning and was told, perhaps by his dad himself, that the person he was looking for was not available. At 22, after finishing college in the US, Taseer decided that his quest to discover his father would require going to Pakistan.
It was perhaps Taseer's most important decision. In particular, it was one that would eventually lead him on a journey to confront the past – his own and that of his family, going back generations. But that journey came later, a few years after he had gone to Pakistan to meet his other family; after a thaw in the father-son relationship; after Taseer began working as a journalist in London; after his attempt to be a writer had left him with a failed novel; and after he did a cover story for Prospect magazine on the rise of a strong Islamic identity among Britain's second-generation Muslim immigrants. His father contemptuously dismissed the story as one pandering to the West with "invidious anti-Muslim propaganda", a story in which Taseer had "posed as Pakistani … without even superficial knowledge of the Pakistani ethos". The reaction shocked Taseer, especially because his father was a pork-eating, Scotch-drinking man: not one who held the views of a radical Islamist, but one who nonetheless accused his son of being, essentially, anti-Muslim.
It was then that Taseer packed his bags and got on the road, with an eye to grappling with who he was. He knew he would have to deal with Islam, the religion and civilisation, which was integral to his own identity despite having grown up in the hybridised Hindu-Sikh culture of New Delhi, with an occasional element of 'cultural Islam' thrown in. (He realised he was different from the Sikh family of his mother only as a five-year-old, when he was urinating and a cousin stared at him and screamed, "Aatish ka susu nanga hai!" At that time, he wondered why anyone would say he had a naked penis.) So began Taseer's journey to understand the Subcontinent, ravaged by divisions that had shaped and destroyed the relationship of his parents. To fulfil this goal, he would have to navigate not only through Pakistan – the land of both his father and his maternal grandparents – but also other Islamic societies, to explore the 'ethos' that his father had accused him of failing to understand.