KARACHI: The one-day, or rather one-evening 7th Adab Festival at Habitt on Sunday was, as the founder and managing director of the main organisers, Lightstone Publishers, Ameena Saiyid OBE put it, a mini festival to cut the year-long wait in between festivals.

For book lovers it was a pleasant surprise as ‘City Talks’, the multi-level main hall where all the sessions were held, was filled to capacity throughout the four-hour long festival.

The first session, ‘Lost in the pages, a journey through the novel Betrayal’ had the novel’s author Omar Shahid Hamid in conversation with another well-known author of English novels Safinah Danish Elahi. They discussed sticking to the genres to expand slowly to other subjects.

“One can’t always stick to the same genre so I did take a departure from spy thrillers, crime and detective stories. Otherwise, my writing would have turned boring,” said Omar Shahid Hamid.

When asked if he stuck to the plot or synopsis of a novel, Omar Shahid pointed out that one gets so many new ideas during the two or more years of penning a book so the initial plotting is not etched in stone. “Still, it is good to have a structure or road map to not get totally lost,” he said.

While replying to a question from the audience, Omar Shahid also said that he had given his consent for two of his books to be made into a series for Netflix but there was a problem with finances as Netflix wanted the producers to make the series with their own money.

“There is a demand on streaming services for Pakistani content but Netflix’s local offices are in Delhi where their policy is to suppress Pakistani culture,” he added.

The following session, ‘Page turner, the art of storytelling’, had author of Beyond the Fields Aysha Baqir in conversation with Zahra Sabri, the moderator, who incidentally spoke more and expressed her own opinions than the author could throughout the session.

The novel is a result of an eye-opening protest demonstration, which the author had attended with her mother as a child. The protest was about a young girl who had been raped by her employer. The sad incident stuck with her as the victim was being accused and questioned due to Ziaul Haq’s Hudood Ordinance. “More women have been attacked after that. There was Mukhtaran Mai’s case and so many others until the recent case of Noor Mukadam. These stories are all still the same,” she opined.

The next session was with the Indian author Aayush Puthran, who has penned Unveiling Jazbaa, A History of Pakistan Women’s Cricket. The author arrived at the session straight from the airport after his connecting flight from India landed here. It was an absorbing session with moderator Omayr Aziz Saiyid with Omar Shahid Hamid and journalists Mazhar Abbas and Madeeha Syed, who is herself very active in sports and has recently summited the highest peak in Africa Mount Kilimanjaro, on the panel.

Aayush said that he chose to write about women’s cricket because as a journalist he does cover cricket. But his main inspiration for the book came after he spoke to Pakistani women cricketers Nida Dar, Bismah Maroof, Naheed Khan and others, who struggled hard to reach where they are now. “They disguised themselves as boys in order to play cricket. Some even changed their

names so that their family wouldn’t know that it was actually them who were playing,” he said, adding that he had not heard such stories in India. “I was just trying to understand what their lives were like here. So my reasons for writing this book were socio-cultural,” he said.

During the session, Mazhar Abbas spoke about the pioneers of women’s cricket in Pakistan, the sisters Shaiza Khan and Shermeen Khan, who were treated very unfairly and not acknowledged as much as they ought to be. They had also discovered the talented Kiran Baluch whose record of 242 runs against West Indies in 2004 still remains unbeaten. He lamented how Kiran, too, was ignored by the Pakistan Cricket Board’s Women’s Wing after it came into existence.

Omar Shahid Hamid recalled how the two pioneers’ contributions to women’s cricket in Pakistan were forgotten soon after the International Cricket Council made it compulsory for all cricket boards in all countries to have a women’s wing.

Saving the best for last, the most interesting of the sessions, with the most speakers had to be ‘From policy to prose: a story of triumphs and challenges’, which was a panel discussion with Salman Faruqui, the author of Dear Mr Jinnah: 70 Years in the Life of a Pakistani Civil Servant, with five more panellists, and moderated by journalist, author, art enthusiast and collector Hameed Haroon of Dawn Media Group, who articulately prompted each of the panellists to tell about different aspects of Pakistan’s history through their eyes, which in a way also complemented the author’s observations in the book.

Senior journalist and poet Mahmood Sham spoke about the moving of the capital from Karachi to Islamabad, the insecurity of Bengalis that later resulted in the breakup of East Pakistan and the birth of Bangladesh.

The author’s old associate Farooq Hasan spoke about Mr Faruqui’s student days, which brought up the issue of student unions in Pakistan and how they were thwarted.

Another former bureaucrat Aslam Sanjrani spoke about the military, politicians and bureaucracy troika. Banker and economist Dr Ishrat Husain enlightened about the service and commitment of the 100 civil servants who came to Pakistan in 1948, and who didn’t even have proper chairs and tables to sit on but gave this country their all as they were not looking for personal perks. Ameena Saiyid, spoke about how the book mirrors the absentee women’s role in the early years of Pakistan, which still happens unless the woman is strong enough to hold her ground.

Published in Dawn, August 19th, 2024