Saad T. Farooqi's ​White World

Reviewed by ​Mona Angéline

(Cormorant Books, 2024)

​White World by Saad T Farooqi is a book of violence. It is also a book of love, of family, of perseverance. Of a country divided, a country aflame in religious conflict, its reach ever increasing from Pakistan’s historical independence in 1947 to the dystopian future in 2083 that the book is set in.
 
It is a future in which Sunnis rule the country in their green garb, while Shiites are relegated to wearing blue. Sunnis get to live in their paradise called New Pakistan, away from the pollution, the burning sky, and the scheduled electrical outages in Old Pakistan’s Sectors 1 to 3.

​Staring outside, I watch New Pakistan’s crystalline white buildings pierce the evening sky. Against the shadowy mountains, that walled city remains incandescent while Old Pakistan curls around it in dark supplication. We’ve all heard the stories of New Pakistan—more food and water than a person could consume in a lifetime, electricity with no load-shedding, safety and protection, zero crimes, clean air. No snow. A slice of heaven.

​Christians and Hindus are clad in red and orange, bright and identifiable for the world to see, restricted in countless ways such as being forced to get water exclusively at night from the river.
 
But then there's the paleets, the Untouchables, destined for blackness both in clothing and future, destined to spend their livelihoods in the Badlands, away from the eyes of the more deserving.
 
Avaan, the protagonist, grows up on the remains of a 2040s Civil War that continues what was fought over in 1971’s real-life Operation Searchlight I. This dystopian Operation Searchlight II seems to be a nuclear war, leaving behind a gray, everlasting snow, consisting of the ashes and bones of its victims, bestowing a “sky sickness” on many.

It struck me how quickly people had begun calling the snowfall ghosts. Pakistan had become a nation of ghosts—a nation of men, women, and children trying to find everything they had lost in these ashes. My father told me that Pakistan was a nation chasing many, many ghosts.

It is in this snow that Avaan learns about a world in which violence is part of life. A violence that leaves him orphaned, leaves him to fend for himself, leaves him with a lifelong search for the meaning in this scarcity of humanity, of love.
 
He finds little snippets in Doua, her group of children, and his last remaining family member, his brother—but even then, all of it is snatched away by the military in yet another deadly raid of the martial law that besets his country.
 
Avaan gets away, believing everybody dead, and forms a new identity in order to pick up the pieces of his life. He becomes involved with a mob. Soon, all eyes are on him as one of the fastest shooters known.
 
And it is then that he discovers that he is acting against his former values, killing the fruits of his labor he established with Doua and her resistance fight.
 
Avaan subsequently takes a stand for his values and in turn for his country as it weeps underneath all the fire, all the ashes and bone fragments, underneath the snow that falls over it all. It is then that he discovers that all the people from his past are connected to the present, that each one of them has a role, a responsibility in this fight, this country, no matter how small. It is also then that he realizes that each one of them fights the other, partaking in a never-ending cycle of violence, all for the strikingly common goal of a peaceful country.
 
Will the survivors of this story do the impossible and find trust in one another after so much suffering? Will they join forces and create something new, a lasting peace? Or will history rewrite itself over and over, the way it has? This is the question Farooqi attempts to answer in his epic.
 
White World is one of those books that pack a punch. Farooqi throws a scene onto the pages, gives some details and not others, keeps us guessing as if it were a puzzle, makes us travel along two different timelines, and then slowly unravels the story and its answers, sometimes in reverse, other times not, and leaves us wanting for more on every page.
 
His extremely vivid and visceral writing style makes this book stand out among so many. I found myself imagining every scene as a picture, something I rarely do. I don't normally enjoy violent content, but something about the exacting description brought it alive, focusing on the dimension of pain caused, of the emotions behind it all, the reasoning, the shame, and then some.
 
It does still feel hard to read about so much violence, but I think it is important to feel it in your bones to really understand what Pakistan's history and the future imagined by the author here are all about.

​It’s the very edge of the world, a place where Pakistan pushed us away decades ago. We were supposed to die. And though we starve and suffer, we strive and continue to survive. Though they fly the PFM flags and blame us as the reason Allah burned the sky away, we’re still here. We always will be.

This is one of those books I couldn't put down, and it is one of those books that are written to be read again and again, revealing more details and another piece of clarity each time. The book is intelligent, weaves in an LGBTQ+ narrative, its details connected through the story arc, uses historical names for some of the rulers and characters, but is also funny in parts despite its bleak plot, whenever an “Aaanold” reference comes up. As an Austrian I had to laugh, but I also felt like crying when the armbands and the rains of ash reminded me a touch too much about some of the scenes that shape the history of my own country.
 
White World is an immersive, vivid story, conveying a sadness that remains with us. I suspect that there's a lot more to come from Farooqi and his storytelling talent once this novel has reached the minds and hearts of his readers.
 
In gratitude to Cormorant Books for the Advance Reader's Copy of this book.

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Mona Angéline is an unapologetically vulnerable artist, athlete, and scientist. She honors the creatively unconventional, the authentically "other". She shares her emotions because the world tends to hide theirs. She is a new writer. Her work has been accepted for publication in a number of magazines - see more here.