“You search for life sitting in closed rooms and reading books, and I have seen life in the brothel. I have seen life in small huts and narrow, dark alleyways... Look at life with the naked eye, and see the extent to which it has become a victim.”

Shaukat Siddiqui.

Shaukat Siddiqui wrote these words with a touch of irony, in my opinion, in his influential novel Khuda ki Basti(God’s Colony). After all, in 1957, this book was a vehicle that delivered insight into life’s tragedies to thousands of Pakistanis still reeling from the effects of the Partition.

So when one of the protagonists, Salman, a wayward university dropout, delivered this tirade to his former professor, I was struck.

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I am relatively new to the world of Urdu novels, having abandoned them after my O’ levels in favour of a more popular option – studying literature in English. Yet, when I began Khuda ki Basti, I was struck not only by its beauty, but its realism – it felt too close for comfort.

Khuda ki Basti is Siddiqui’s exercise in both irony and prophecy.

The author spent a long time talking to residents of Karachi’s shantytowns and observing their lives, so the novel can be taken as much as a study of the times as a work of fiction.

I read it as Pakistan’s past, present and future encompassed in 530 pages.

The book's 1974 television adaptation on PTV was telecast five times due to its popularity. Yet, even the television show; remarkable in its dialogue, characters, harsh realism and a marked contrast to our one-note shows today, could not do complete justice to the scope of the novel.

The novel takes the characters from their small, broken-down hamlet and idealistic social workers’ societies into the rough and tumble slums, as well as the upper crust clubs and bars of a post-Partition Karachi.

From land encroachment to male prostitution; children as products of rape to flawed inheritance laws; struggling social movements to powerful newly minted capitalists; religious fervour to debauched social climbing; the novel left no stone unturned.