What do an intrepid news reporter, a foreign-returned surgeon, a civic-minded feudal lord and an overweight police officer have in common?

They’ve all had it up to here and — willingly or not — they’re not going to take it anymore.

Muhammad Ali Samejo’s debut novel, Legends of Karachi, is about those denizens of Pakistan’s largest city — also its commercial capital — who are tired of being pushed down by those with money and power. They are fed up with getting mugged on their own streets, of ‘tanker mafias’ stealing their water, of turf wars between neighbourhood gangs, of sexual harassment in the workplace and of rampant domestic abuse.

The novel begins with an altercation, one that has been patiently planned for weeks and executed in a manner that anyone who has encountered idiots driving on the roads — and all of us have — will find immensely satisfying.

Meanwhile, a woman comes to a hospital seeking treatment for yet another ‘accidental’ injury; she is a repeat customer, so to speak. In The Sentinel’s newsroom, the editor debates whether to kill an expose after receiving a threatening phone call. Across the city, a young man experiences his first mobile phone snatching. A corporate executive is shot dead in broad daylight and, instead of helping, passers-by make off with his expensive belongings. A minister’s VIP cavalcade disrupts rush-hour traffic at the busy Sharae Faisal. A drug dealer is arrested at a families-only entertainment spot. A half-baked elopement goes terribly wrong.

So much is happening, none of it pleasant. Readers familiar with Karachi will, unfortunately, not be very surprised. After all, these are things we have come to accept. This seems to be the underlying question Samejo poses: why are we accepting all this?

A debut novel weaves together a picture of denizens of Karachi who have had enough of being pushed around and who decide to fight back, vigilante-style

The answer is fairly simple. We’re accepting this because, for a variety of reasons, we are afraid to fight back.

But what if we weren’t?

Legends of Karachi could be construed as an exercise in hopeful fantasy, in that if only we had the courage that Samejo’s characters possess. Tired of waiting for the authorities to do something, anything, they have taken matters into their own hands, consequences be damned. Their methods are certainly not above board, but then, it’s not a fair playing field to begin with.

As the vigilantes rack up their individual scores, some of them come to the attention of the Pantheon, a group that has been operating on similar principles for years. Each member of this hush-hush organisation is known by the name of a Roman god: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Neptune, Pluto and, the most powerful of them all, the all-knowing, all-seeing Jupiter. Despite the nomenclature, though, they are not gods. They are human and very fallible indeed. Will they be the right mentors for the new crop of vigilantes? That remains to be seen.

Then there’s The Watch, whose members — unlike the Pantheon — don’t hide in the shadows. They patrol the streets of Karachi, armed with crowbars and cricket bats. In a lawless city, The Watch is all too ready to take the law publicly into its own hands. Bullies, thugs, spoiled rich teenagers joyriding in their fathers’ expensive cars, entitled double-parkers — if you don’t possess any civic sense or respect for your fellow human being, The Watch will literally pound it into you.

As this very visible group begins to grow exponentially — like-minded citizens joining it in droves — it seems only natural to take over a chunk of land and create the perfect utopian community, where rules are meant to be followed. But how long before a secure state turns into a police state? What happens when people decide they don’t want to give up personal freedoms in exchange for the freedom to walk the streets safely? Which freedom is more important, and who gets to decide that?

Plenty of food for thought there, that can lead to interesting debates on whose approach is better, the Pantheon’s or The Watch’s.

In many ways, Legends of Karachi has a strong flavour of the 1990s drama serial Dhuaan. The show was ahead of its times but, at the same time, it didn’t feel implausible. Samejo’s book is, for the most part, similarly believable. The most refreshing aspect of the novel is that it steers clear of the tiresome — and frankly, quite boring now — subject of religious terrorism.

There’s no pandering to a Western audience that expects Pakistanis to be slotted neatly into the categories of suicide-bombing men and burka-draped oppressed women. Instead, Samejo’s characters are ordinary, everyday people. If it weren’t for the risks they’re willing to take, they could be someone we know. They could very well be us.

However, for all its inventive subject matter — by Pakistani Anglophone fiction standards, at least — the book is not without its flaws. The author is guilty of the two biggest crimes many Pakistanis writing in English commit. One, too much telling and not enough showing. Two, poor dialogue construction.

At some places, the author gets a character’s voice spot on. At others, he elicits a genuine chuckle from the reader. For the most part, though, his people speak in a jarring mix of styles, stumbling suddenly from formal school-essay English to American gangster films.

Occasionally, the dialogue seems more suited to a screenplay: a barrage of banter — cue that annoying film trope where characters engage in witty repartee while beating up baddies — that would take up a minute of screen time, is slowed down when read as a book. In the author’s note, Samejo states how television and film were a great influence on him, so that explains that. Still, he might want to bear this in mind, next time round, that he’s writing a book and not a film screenplay.

There are also way too many subplots that have been given far too many pages. Often, the detailed back-stories, or lengthy conversations, that Samejo provides for the smaller characters are not needed. Yes, these do allow for some thoughtful ruminations, but this is not literary fiction. This is fast-paced thrills and fiery excitement. If the overall story is meant to make readers go ‘Dang it! This is what we need to do!’, don’t push them into an existential crisis with deep philosophical musings.

A few threads require too much suspension of disbelief and just seem forced. Suzie and her magical hairbrushes, for instance, is a cop-out, taking the story forward with minimal rationality. With the one involving a mad physicist, K-Electric and Aaron the intelligence guy, maybe what Samejo wanted to show is that there’s a lot more happening in the nooks and crannies of the city than we are aware of.

Even so, the resulting city-wide blackout — crucial to the plot — would have connected to the main story a lot more had the rationale for it been inspired by perfidious intent rather than science fiction. As for the showdown between two of the characters over the deliberate poisoning of a shanty town’s water supply, it serves no purpose at all.

The author should simply have excised these and published them as a collection of short stories because, while they don’t gel well with the bigger picture, they are very readable on their own.

That’s also what Legends of Karachi is. The writing could certainly have been much stronger and the sentences better constructed. Crisper editing would have done absolute wonders in tightening the pace and piecing all the patchwork plots into one, cohesive quilt. All its flaws aside, though, it is a genuinely entertaining book.

The reviewer is a member of staff. She tweets at Sarwat Yasmeen Azeem

Legends of Karachi
By Muhammad Ali Samejo
Liberty, Karachi
ISBN: 978-9698729592
310pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, November 14th, 2021