Best of Friends by Kamila Shamsie
My love affair with Kamila Shamsie's work continues; every relationship has rough patches.
I moved to the UK in September 2022 to pursue a Masters in Creative and Critical Writing. (For those of you who are not sure what the curriculum of such a course is, in a nutshell, it is a starter pack on how to be a broke, aspiring writer.)
In September 2023, I finished my one-year degree and moved from my uni town of Brighton to London, with three suitcases, the countless books I’d bought in the previous year, and the hope to find a job in this city. But that was the beginning of the struggle… I come armed with over four years of experience in my field, a slightly unhealthy hardworking attitude, and a, rather unimaginatively named, Post Study Work Visa; that allows me to stay and work in the UK for the next two years. And yet, it was as I started looking for work here that I realised just how precarious my situation is.
I am in a country that isn’t my own. A Visa in my passport and a card I hold more dear than my own life, gives me the permission to live here. I don’t share the same liberties as those who can call themselves citizens of this country.
Amongst other things, Best of Friends by Kamila Shamsie is an exploration of this precariousness.
Earlier this month, I reviewed Burnt Shadows and exposed my slightly unhinged obsession with the works of Shamsie. In that blog, I mentioned the things that are typical of her writing: questions about love, family, home, all enmeshed in an allegory for global politics. These are themes that were constant in the three books I have read by her, along with a complex bond, nostalgic yet pragmatic, with Pakistan. Best of Friends has all these things, yet, it somehow felt like she got the measurements wrong this time and the book was only half-baked.
This is not to say that I did not enjoy her prose. Once again she had me enthralled with her carefully chosen words and her ability to bring such a tale to life in a comparatively slim book. Very few authors have her ability to make characters leap off the pages, their bonds as real as any I have with my friends, their ambitions and fears resonating with my own experiences. Shamsie talks a lot about the importance of shared subtext for lifelong bonds; and when I turned the last page of the book I had this overwhelming feeling that I had shared subtext with Shamsie.
Best of Friends is divided into two halves; two timelines. The first half of the book picks up in the moments leading up to a great metamorphosis in Pakistan. The main characters, Maryam Khan and Zahra Ali, are 14, struggling with the changes in their bodies, learning to take space as young women in a world that does not permit them that. They are in the heart of Karachi in the 80s, as Pakistan sees the end of a dictatorship and seemingly welcomes a new dawn as Benazir Bhutto takes oath as the new President of the country. Their ambitions; big and small, their struggles; personal and political, but most importantly their identities as girls from greatly different socio-economic background mirror Pakistan. These two girls represent the two sides of a country which seemed to be on the precipice of something exceptional in the 80s.
Benazir was Prime Minister; she had taken the oath of office in a bright green shalwar with white dupatta, the colours of the Pakistan flag, and made the men around her look like pygmies.
I remember vividly that it felt like I inhabited two different lives. A part of me believed that the world was my oyster. Everything was achievable. But while being a teenager, especially a girl whose body seems to be doing things completely out of her control, is hard. There were moments when it felt everyone was hell-bent on telling me exactly how much space I was worthy of in the world; absolutely none. It is the age when you start losing your innocent outlook of the world, suddenly you’re faced with all the big, bad monsters of the world. And as a young woman there is this rude realization that your carefree days are a thing of the past.
Even though I have learned that this is a universal experience for girls in their early teens, reading it in a book felt like being seen and understood.
Through Zahra and Maryam, Shamsie demonstrates the little rebellions that girls sometimes undertake to assert their independence or challenge societal norms. They simultaneously detest male attention and crave it. The line between acceptability and proclivity blurs for them at 14 and as they struggle to toe that line, one unfortunate night changes things for them and shapes the people they become.
In this representation of 80s Pakistan, Shamsie describes the differences in Zahra and Maryam's socio-economic backgrounds, 'class' as Maryam crudely puts it later in the book, through subtle signs. It is evident in the kind of houses they live in, their summers and family outings, and their access to material goods. But most importantly, it is made apparent by their outlook towards the present and their ambitions for the future.
But for Maryam, university was just an interruption before she could take over the family business. The only future that mattered to her was the one that would unfold in Karachi, a city to which Zahra had no intention of returning once she’d left it.
Used to spending her summers in London, Maryam knows that she is destined to attend university abroad, like most of her classmates. It is a given. It is as certain as the fact that she is going to then return to Karachi and take over her family business: Khan Leather, from her grandfather. She has no doubts that she is going to take her place in Pakistani society, brush shoulders with a particular kind of people, and there is no doubt about her proximity to power. National politics affect her only to the extent of who to invite to a party, and how to get out of a fix by employing a convenient name.
You don’t mind the exclusivity, you just mind that you aren’t part of it, Layla had said once, as if this was a Maryam-specific attitude rather than absolutely everyone’s objection to exclusivity.
On the other hand, brilliant and dedicated Zahra needs a scholarship, preferably not ‘financial aid’ to get into Oxbridge or an Ivy League. Her future is something she has to make on her own, in the same way that she has to fight for her space in the higher echelons of society. The fear of one wrong word about her sports news telecaster father bringing down the wrath of a dictator lies heavy on her shoulders. And while Maryam’s rebellions can be loud and obvious, hers have to be hidden in the shadows.
Through these characters, Shamsie perfectly illustrates the subtle disparities that exist in the two different worlds that people can inhabit in South Asian countries. I say South Asian because as an Indian these are distinctions I’m exceedingly familiar with.
By contrast, whatever happened to Maryam today wouldn’t matter very much. She’d still inherit a business and a place in society. The rich lived in a different universe.
The one night when this distinction, some might even call it a power dynamic between the two despite their strong friendship, is questioned is the night that changes the trajectory of their lives.
Childhood friendship really was the most mysterious of all relationships, maryam thought, as she signalled Zola to get up and clear the plates; it was built around rules that didn’t extend to any other pairing in life. you weren’t tied by blood, or profession, or an enmeshed domesticity or even – as was the case with friendships made in adulthood – much by way of common interests.
While Shamsie writes about Karachi through rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia, from the picture she paints of London you know that this is someone who has come to the city and fallen in love with. When I first came to the UK I remember going to Finchley Road and Wembley, trying to trace the routes described in Home Fire. Reading the descriptions of the city through the changing seasons felt like walking through the now well-traversed roads. I found beauty in Shamsie’s descriptions in the same way that Zahra found beauty in the blooming flowers as she waited for Maryam in the park on a Spring Sunday.
That is when the second half of the book picks up. In 2019, Zahra is the Head of the Centre for Civil Liberties and Maryam is a leading Venture Capitalist. Both living in London now. Both ridiculously successful, with media clamouring to get interviews and rubbing shoulders with the all-powerful, creme de la creme, of London society. (I tried to keep my bitterness about the unattainable, unrealistic, absolutely absurd expectations of what life is like for international students in this country; maybe I should have tried a little harder.)
The repercussions of their different backgrounds that were subtle in the first half of the book are more evident now. Their beliefs about the world, their politics, and morals are on opposite sides of the spectrum. While Maryam believes that profits are more important and proximity to power brings you those profits, Zahra is a human rights lawyer, highly idealistic, and refuses to bend. However, their friendship traverses their differences. Until people from their past make an appearance in their present and throw their lives for a loop.
The distinctions between the friends are made further clear through the ways in which they react to this reappearance. Maryam believes in justice, got through any means, while Zahra has no such illusions about justice being guaranteed.
Burnt Shadows spans across decades and continents. It is broad in its scope and the comments it makes about global politics. In contrast, Shamsie seemed to have narrowed the scope of her fiction down with this novel. It is about these two girls, later middle-aged women. Questions about family, home, and identity exist; but they are secondary to conversations about childhood friendship. Shamsie seemed almost determined to prove the almost sacrosanct quality of lifelong friendships by often digressing off into sentimental paragraphs that were meant to encourage the reader to associate these feelings with the characters. (I am trying not to use the terms ‘sickly sweet’ and ‘in your face’.)
their laughter built, moving beyond the immediate joke into a deep laugh of joy for friendship, for each other, for the certainty that whatever happened in the world you would always have this one person, this north star, this rock, this alter ego who knew your every flaw down to your atoms and who still, despite it all, chose to stand with you and by you through everything that the world had yet to throw at you, every heartache, every disappointment, every moment of darkness. always this friendship, always its light.
The really interesting plot lines are put on the back burner. I wanted to know more about the consequences of the face-tagging features of the fictional social media app Imij. There are interesting ideas she mentions like the moral ambiguity of Maryam’s ethics regarding the racial discrimination of the feature, or the misuse of similar features in law enforcement, however, she dangles these ideas and leaves the reader anticipating a discussion that never comes. The part that resonated the most with me was the mentions of people struggling with their visa applications and citizenship statuses. Shamsie evokes the fear of having to leave a life and go back to a world that no longer feels like home with mastery. Her descriptions of the detention centre, and the lengths to which people are ready to go to live in a country even when the dream does not turn out to be as promising, are nuanced.
They opt in to being tagged by their friends. That’s a different thing to the police watching you at all times because you’re a climate activist or a guy who goes to a mosque.
And then Shamsie does not delve into it at all. Except for a well-written but brief chapter describing Zahra’s struggles while applying for a student visa, these are struggles faced by the secondary characters.
I think that is what my biggest complaint about this book was. All the things I believe are Shamsie’s strong suits are explored only half-heartedly in this one. It left me wanting more; almost like there were parts of the story that were just not included in my copy. Even Shamsie’s penchant for explosive climaxes was missing in this one. And what’s more annoying that with a fade to black penultimate chapter, and a two-page epilogue set in 2020, the end of the book feels abrupt.
Having said all of this, Best of Friends was still a captivating read, especially because it gave me another opportunity to immerse myself in Shamsie’s exquisite writing. At the end of my review for Burnt Shadows, I mentioned my aim of reading all of Shamsie’s bibliography and I am still determined to do so. I just have to swallow the slightly bitter pill that I’m not going to absolutely love every book.