The life and mind of a gangster is a strange one to assess. Is he inherently a bad seed, or someone circumstances have rendered ruthless, or someone who acts as he pleases in the understanding that murder is justified so long as they can get away with it? Conscience is not necessarily immaterial here, just that it is malleable; it is no objective adjudicator or moral authority. Only revulsion (a more manageable avatar of fear) can dissuade you from acting against social norms.
And Nate Rabe does a great job — even if not as elaborate as of Gregory David Roberts — of peering into the criminal’s mind with Shah of Chicago. Only, you have to wonder whether protagonising an anti-social individual is at all sagacious. No matter how loveable he is rendered by the narrator’s eminent storytelling, you’re sceptical because you know criminals have no conscience, something human beings are supposed but not expected to have.
Protagonist Yakub Ali Hassan Shah’s myriad aliases show that he has illustrious as well as inglorious pasts, which he is running away from. And Pakistani though his origins may be, he has turned himself so distinctly American that he is oblivious enough of the British slang for ‘cigarette’ to be homophobically offended. But his ‘desi’ heritage obliges him to take refuge in the Ghulam Ali ghazals he retained growing up amid the trauma of child abuse and daddy issues.
Rabe makes you wish complex layered characters didn’t have to resort to wearing stereotypical ‘gangsta’ hoodies over their balding heads. Shouldn’t a man be able to feel sentimental by himself in peace without having to camouflage it with a hard core?
Money and crime is not in aid of greed or vanity, just a means to cloak trauma, whispers Rabe. Here’s Jake, a brown-skinned person feeling a greater affinity towards the darker-skinned yet more enlightened ‘Brothers’ than his parochial brethren. The irony is rich as well as metrosexual. As soon as he is out of penitentiary, he begins to entertain paradoxical thoughts — expand his criminal empire; never be imprisoned again. ‘How?’ screams the rational reader. ‘How’ screams the excited reader. There’s that irrationality that endears.
Jake is eyeing his grandmother’s trust fund to get his (ad)venture started. But there are complications, bureaucratic and political. And thus ensues the intrigue, with authentic scenes set in Pindi and Peshawar and Abottabad, interspersed with character flashbacks. With the humanisation of criminality, Rabe succeeds in portraying ambition as a cry for help, through various characters. Formulate meticulous schemes and plans, but you’re going to end up executing them with those you get inebriated with or feel attracted to, as per life’s gravity.
And yes, there is the romance. It begins, as any caper would, at an elite binge party and progresses in an authentic way, swaying between past and present continuous, tense and heady all along. This is no Titanic love, but there is a Jack and a Rose. Afroz Gul, what’s in a name? It’s all in the stories and secrets we share, and the transformations we catalyse in one another.
