Navigating the boundaries of the heart and history

If we map out the world in which we live, we succeed in making it plain to the eye, more easily navigated by those unfamiliar with the streets and landmarks of our lives. But in doing so, we also erase some of the mystery of the terrain. No longer is our insider status special, valuable for giving directions; no longer can we pretend that the world ends at the place where our awareness of what’s beyond its borders ceases.

“Kartography,” by Pakistani writer Kamila Shamsie, is a gorgeous novel of perimeters and boundaries, of the regions -- literal and figurative -- in which we’re comfortable moving about and those through which we’d rather not travel. Her book suggests that if we embrace a world wider than our neighborhoods, acknowledging the family and cultural history that has formed those places, we risk losing the comfort of paradise by knowing too much.

This hard knowledge, though, is the only path to adulthood, the one road to citizenship in the larger world.

At the heart of the novel is a love story. Raheen, the narrator, has been best friends with Karim since they were born. Karim was the other shape in the crib, the warmth toward which she instinctively curled. They have been growing up together in upper-class Karachi, like siblings but closer, finishing each other’s sentences, conversing in anagrams. Their parents are an inseparable foursome, the husbands having each been previously engaged to the other’s wife -- a tale the families tell with great amusement, though the mirth seems to hide something darker.

The novel opens as Raheen and Karim stand on the brink of adolescence. It is the mid-1980s, and their beloved hometown, Karachi, plunges into violence as ethnic fighting breaks out, worsening the desperation fueled by economic inequality. The various upheavals -- within the teenagers’ families, between their extended families, and in the society at large -- can be traced back to the 1971 Pakistani Civil War, after which East Pakistan became Bangladesh.

Racial tensions have played a significant role in Raheen’s life. “I was Muhajir, with a trace of Pathan, and [Karim] was Bengali and

As it turns out, there’s more ethnically sparked family history than she and Karim realize. Raheen’s parents plan to tell her this story “when she’s old enough to know the impossibility of tracing backwards and saying, here, this is where love ends and this is where it begins. When she’s old enough to understand that there is no understanding possible.” Love, it becomes apparent, cannot exist apart from the world.

Karim’s family decides Karachi has become too dangerous. “I’ve already started thinking of Karachi as a place I have to say goodbye to,” he tells Raheen. “Every day I say goodbye to some part of it, and then two days later I see that part again and I feel so relieved but also not, because then I have to say goodbye to it again. This must be what dying is like.” Eventually, the split occurs. Karim is spirited away to London, and Raheen is left to mourn his loss.

Alone in London, Karim makes maps of his beloved Karachi, determined to identify and quantify the city as a means of holding on to his earlier life and his connection to Raheen, and of understanding his place in the world.

Raheen, though, sees only the Karachi of her limited experience, an uncharted place that remains beautiful just because it is unexamined. “In my heart, I still carried around the notion of a friendship that no reality could live up to,”, she says of her bond with Karim, a sentiment that pervades her feelings for Karachi. The story picks up when the two are college age and living abroad -- he in London, she in the United States -- trying to come to terms with their love for each other and for their embattled birthplace .

Shamsie’s wry humor infuses and quickens the narrative, leavening even the most serious scenes without detracting from their emotional weight. She writes of Karachi with passion and deep love, delineating clearly the torn-apart-ness experienced by Raheen and Karim, as the damage wrought by ugly racial divisions threatens all they cherish.

The 1971 civil war, Karim’s Bengali mother tells Raheen, “made us see what we were capable of. No one should ever know what they are capable of. But worse, even worse, is to see it and then pretend you didn’t. The truths we conceal don’t disappear, Raheen, they appear in different forms.”

This piercing story of looking one’s past in the eye illuminates the craggy road of acceptance and forgiveness and the long pilgrimage to get there. Only by seeing where we’ve been -- individually and culturally -- do we have any hope of journeying to where we’d like to be.