Saad T. Farooqi (Michelle Elliott)

Saad T. Farooqi’s debut novel White World starts right in the middle of the action – with his protagonist, Avaan, running with a gun in his hand, in a dystopian Pakistan engulfed in a civil war set 60 years in the future – and doesn’t let up.

In the first of the three sections of the novel, the chapters switch between the perspectives of Avaan, a man who has lost everyone closest to him, in 2083, and Rahee, a young Ahmadi boy, in 2043. At the end of Part I, a third point of view is introduced and the subsequent sections expand to feature the voices of more characters from Avaan’s life that shift the reader’s perception of him, and shake their sense of what is true.

Farooqi takes time to build scenes that are as poetic as they are horrifying. “Allah burned the sky!” is a refrain that characters repeat. In the opening pages, he writes of Avaan: “I keep running as the voices and footsteps echo distantly. Miles ahead, almost too far away, the mosque is a blue-eyed wink in the misty snow. But this isn’t snow.” Pauses like this, where Farooqi shifts from fast-paced action scenes to a brief moment of observation, compel the reader to sit with the language and with the story. By the end of the first chapter, Farooqi has conjured a Pakistan that is both familiar and not.

Religious segregation is a major feature of the dystopia of New Pakistan. Checkpoints, swearing soldiers patrolling the streets, a world filled with guns, and more make up a surveillance landscape where stepping outside the home is dangerous. Pakistan’s historical treatment of religious minorities, including minority sects of Islam, makes the world Farooqi evokes feel all the more visceral – and horrifyingly possible. He references such moments in Pakistan’s history as the Bangladesh War of Independence in 1971, and the 1984 Ordinance XX that declared Ahmadi Muslims non-Muslims. He also imagines terrible events in the near future, such as a “cataclysmic Fifth Indo-Pak War,” that rupture the country. “Pakistan was a nation chasing many, many ghosts,” is as applicable to the present as it is to the world of the novel. Farooqi’s vivid world-building encompasses historical realities to create a truly immersive setting.

Like the nation of New Pakistan, the characters in White World are all haunted. Avaan, most prominently, is tormented by his lost love, Doua, whose mysteries are unravelled as the book progresses, and she is revealed to be haunted in her own way. Jahan, a particularly compelling character, thinks, “Even before Allah burned the sky away, there were Pakistanis like me who felt lost inside their skins, who felt and sensed the world around them as if they had been born inside a block of ice.” Here, Farooqi grounds the intangible with the physical sensation of an ice-cold touch. Haunting is not just a metaphor in this book.

There are no loose ends as the narrative presses on. Characters who haunt Avaan either come back into his life, or their stories and mysteries are revealed through encounters with other characters. Some of the narrative’s turns feel surprising on first reading, but Farooqi has thoughtfully set up the trajectory of the novel. White World is a gritty read that shocks, frightens, and challenges.