The Idle Stance of the Tippler Pigeon
By Safinah Danish Elahi
Neem Tree Press, UK
ISBN: 978-1911107705
234pp.

In 2020, lawyer, educator, poet and writer Safinah Danish Elahi presented us with her debut novel Eyes on the Prize, a sharply paced novel about secrets and social one-upmanship among Karachi’s jet-sets and wannabes, played out through an intense footrace between their children studying at an elite school.

This year, while Eyes on the Prize serves as the script for the television drama serial Daurrh (Race), Elahi has come out with a new book, The Idle Stance of the Tippler Pigeon.

A most intriguing string of words. What could it possibly mean? Is it some kind of deep philosophical musing? Or could it be that Elahi has strayed from the absorbing readability of her first novel and turned into one of those writers who glow under the delusion that, if readers struggle to understand, it means the writer is operating at a level of literary sophistication far above the grasp of the unrefined rabble?

That would truly be a tragedy. I Googled ‘tippler pigeon’. Much to my surprise, these are merely the ordinary grey birds found everywhere in the country. Such a simple explanation. Deceptive, even.

‘Deceptive’ appears to be the motif of the novel, where the main story is built around friendships, envy, economic divides, selfishness and people’s individual ways of dealing with the aftershocks of catastrophic events. It moves between Karachi, Lahore and Okara and is told from the perspectives of several characters.

A novel challenges expectations in a story built around friendships, envy, economic divides and people’s individual ways of dealing with catastrophic events

The primary individuals intimately involved in the story’s watershed moment are Nadia, Zohaib and Misha. Many years ago, they all lived in the same house; siblings Zohaib and Misha the pampered and adored children of the rich Hashims, and Nadia the daughter of their domestic employee.

Misha tells us that, ever since Nadia arrived, the two girls have been “best friends.” Nadia, however, is not very eager to corroborate this claim. Yes, she considers Misha her friend. She thinks Misha is beautiful. She accepts that Misha is kind and wants the best for Nadia — except when she wants the best for herself.

But as they grow older, Nadia begins to find Misha clingy and irksome and is only too happy to leave her behind whenever an opportunity arises, especially if it means being able to spend time with Zohaib, who gives her all his candy, lends her his blanket and whose ears snap to attention whenever she is mentioned.

The disparity in their circumstances also hurts, and understandably so. Misha is everyone’s princess, Nadia is fair game for even the cook to mistreat. But when the catastrophic event happens and the Hashims’ home falls apart, we realise — as Baba had explained to Misha and Zohaib — things are not always what they seem. The tippler pigeon may be sitting on a wire, looking inept in its idleness, but do not underestimate what it is capable of. “Do not be fooled,” says Baba.

Yes. Do not be fooled by acts of kindness that come not from a place of altruism, but vanity. Do not be fooled by a mother’s occasional, insensitive slighting of her child, for she will be a protective shield when the need arises. And, challenging as it will be, do not be fooled by people who are fooling themselves.

This makes it difficult to decide if we want to love the novel’s characters, or hate them with a passion. Pitiable and at the same time deeply unlikeable, they are infuriatingly flawed, as only humans can be. We wrestle with trying to place them in a box. We want to draw a line on the ground and put the good guys on one side and the evil souls on the other, but how do we decide which is which?

Big-hearted Misha doesn’t like that her mother makes Nadia eat in the kitchen, but she’s also quick to forget and abandon her “best friend” when it suits her. Impoverished Nadia has terrifying horrors inflicted upon her, but she is also sly, underhanded and calculating. Mrs Hashim talks up a good case, but her actions do not match. As for Zohaib, his pathetic feebleness is enraging, until the full extent of his trauma is revealed. Poor boy.

Respite comes in the form of the minor characters. Zohaib’s friend Talha demonstrates extraordinary patience in handling Zohaib’s fragile state of mind. Nadia’s cousin Gulshan is enterprising, upbeat and loyally stands by Nadia in her hour of need. Perhaps they are more likeable because we know comparatively less about them. Familiarity breeds contempt, after all.

The most likeable of the lot might be Sumbul, the seemingly vapid teenaged daughter of Mrs Hashim’s acquaintance. At first, she grates, but in the brief time she gets in the book, we realise there’s quite a bit of promise to her. Then she reverts to her immature, careless self, causing the story to take a sharp detour. It’s a miraculous mercy that, despite this fresh disaster, things don’t take a turn for the worse, as such.

Another mercy is the ending Elahi chooses for her story. The lead-up to the climax suggests very strongly that it will go in a particular direction, but Elahi masterfully deceives us yet again. Her course of action may not sit well with expected notions and some readers might feel robbed, but it is what it is and the more pragmatic will appreciate the author’s clear understanding of how the real world works.

The one thing Elahi gets wrong is chronology. The past is frequently recollected so there is much going back-and-forth in time, but while the author manages to keep this aspect coherent, she slips up in delineating her characters’ ages. For instance, Zohaib is 25 years old in the present day and Mrs Hashim says that the incident happened “17 years, two months and four days ago.” That’s a very precise calculation, but it throws the timeline off by approximately four years.

It also obfuscates Nadia’s age, which is never expressly defined to begin with. Some readers might not care about this slip-up, others will feel it is a colossal gaffe, especially since one entire chapter is based on Nadia choosing her own birthday. The age she chooses to be upsets Misha and the underlying reason is important to the tale, so Elahi might want to revisit this for future editions.

Some might also wonder at the inclusion of subplots that do not have any direct bearing on the story. They do bring to light the realities of being poor, or a poor woman, or even just any female, in Pakistan, but had Elahi not put them in, it wouldn’t have made much of a difference. The Idle Stance of the Tippler Pigeon remains an enjoyable book regardless.

The reviewer is a former staffer and works in advertising.
X: @SarwatYAzeem

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, September 17th, 2023