Invitation

The novel’s narrator, Shahbaz, is a young Pakistani from Paris who returns out of a 19-year exile to his home city in West Pakistan, to settle a family property dispute. He arrives in a 1970s Karachi preparing for democracy, seething with political machination, corruption and class tensions – and, above all, facing the prospect of a changing power balance between the dominant West Pakistani establishment and the Bengalis of East Pakistan. The property dispute pits Shahbaz against his father’s older sister, Mona Phuppi, a strong-willed woman with deep knowledge of Karachi and, unlike Shahbaz, certain of her place in it. More than defeating his aunt, Shahbaz wants to reclaim a place in a Karachi aristocracy he was once entitled to.