When your palimpsest of memories is made of politics, when you can divide the years of your life into the Zia regime, the Benazir interregnum and the Musharraf moment, then you are in serious trouble when you sit down to write your first novel. You wouldn’t be able to escape politics spinning through your tale. But then Ali Sethi does not want to escape it at all. “You can’t get away from politics in Pakistan,” he says in between mugs of black coffee. The 25-year-old, the latest and arguably the youngest of the new generation of Pakistani writers, is in Delhi for the launch of his debut novel The Wish Maker (Hamish Hamilton, Rs 499).

Sethi, the son of Najam Sethi and Jugnu Mohsin, the couple behind the political weekly The Friday Times, says one of his earliest memories is “of Zia... actually, my Daadi exclaiming Zia mar gaya”. His childhood games outside his father’s bookshop on Mall Road easily extended to his jauntily joining the protest marches that wound through the streets against the removal of Benazir Bhutto. His adolescence was marked by a 3 am jolt when his father was dragged out of bed and arrested by the intelligence services for allegedly speaking against Pakistan in Delhi. And when he went to the US to study, exactly a year after 9/11, he was stumped by the Pak questions that were thrown at him by his friends. And he sat down to write a novel — the tale of young Zaki and his family in a mansion in Lahore, his mother fighting the Establishment through her journal, his grandmother watching Doordarshan, his cousin in love with Amitabh Bachchan, his friends buying bootlegged liquor, his aunts worried about Bhutto’s rule.

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