Reality, writers have always known, is more ugly, more improbable, more distorted, more fantastic, and immeasurably more sad than any fiction could ever be. We turn to fiction as an antidote to despair. Of course, as the Pakistani writer Mohammed Hanif has pointed out, human beings are able, in the direst circumstances—perhaps especially in the direst circumstances—to pretend they are immune to that which affects their compatriots. We carry on, live out what we regard as ordinary lives as everything burns around us.
Six years ago, in an essay published by the Pakistan Human Rights Commission, Hanif told the stories of the missing Baloch, young men and women who’ve been disappeared and whose families, stuck in the hellish limbo of not knowing, try to impress upon the courts, the press…
