Fifteen years into his marriage, Noor Mohammad Ganju has never seen his wife naked. He lusts after her but sex, when she occasionally obliges him, is reduced by veils—literal and symbolic—to tedious and unimaginative coupling in the dark.
Negotiating with multiple folds of crumpled sheets, he would wander through the fluffy confusion, etching a figure in his mind, reading zips and buttons … At last, she would let him pull her shalwar half down and he would perform a missionary in her midwife position; a pantomime of awkward limbs and dull weight.
This early passage sets the tone for Sarmad Sehbai’s novel The Blessed Curse that, in 25 relatively short and vivid chapters, tells the increasingly absurdist story of the lengths to which a politically and militarily powerful trio of men will go to swell their ever-flagging male potency. The country is never named but is recognizably Sehbai’s home nation of Pakistan in which he has been, since the 1970s, esteemed as a poet and playwright in Urdu and Punjabi and as head of PTV’s theater department.
The symbolic veils thwarting Ganju’s erotic pleasure appear just as he lusts after his wife in the opening pages and the phone rings. On the line is an otherwise unnamed General who proceeds to emerge from the phone in uniformed regalia and begins to undress. Ganju then begins to shrink and moves “between the large thighs of the General.” Then, on the General’s command, Ganju charges at his wife and “the bed jolted with militant thrusts” until Ganju is “spent and shrunk” and the General disappears into the phone’s mouthpiece. Soon afterwards, while his wife sleeps “calm and collected”, Ganju finds the General’s massive moustache stuck to the mouthpiece:
He touched the moustache. Lightning flashed, a thunder reverberated.
Without thinking he tried it on and checked himself in the wall mirror. The mirror gave a royal smile.
A repeat from the history books.
The passage is noteworthy because it condenses a dynamic of displaced masculine desire and fantasy that will play out through the rest of the novel. Ganju basks in the pleasure, not of sex with his wife, but of having assumed the General’s identity by wearing his moustache and seeking confirmation of his identity with the General in a mirror. Ganju is pleased that this has happened before with earlier men in “history books.”
His is a dynastic marriage in which his wife, who is his cousin and the daughter of a locally renowned Sufi divine, was trapped. This, we may infer, is perhaps why he’s never seen his wife naked: she has never enjoyed sex with him. Indeed, it’s not clear by this chapter’s end that Ganju has actually had sex with his wife. He does charge at her at the General’s command, but we see her sleeping serenely in bed at the chapter’s end, suggesting that the only persons who actually had sex were Ganju and the General. Ganju cannot consummate his desire for his wife—and later for a flamboyant prostitute called Lilly Khanum—except through the arrangement and urging of (and submission to) a coterie of similarly powerful men.
There are passing glimpses of how the women of the book experience the same world as these men: Ganju’s wife later dies a dignified but lonely death; his daughter flees after shooting dead the child husband to whom Ganju forcibly married her; and Lilly Khanum rebels and rises through a patriarchal society until Ganju has her murdered by having acid flung at her face.
The General’s moustache that emerges from and disappears into Ganju’s phone is the first of a series of weirdly animate things that condense into themselves the quest for phallic superpower by three men – Ganju, the General and Zahid, an arms procurer for the army who “would often show off to his guests his fancy clothes, aftershaves, deodorants, cigarette lighters, flashy goggles, and at times pens displaying floating topless women.” The other animate things are a potency-enhancing she-donkey Ganju procures to have sex with, a potency-promising rat that has sex with the General, a potency-inducing rooster, and Ganju’s own penis that, after he’s murdered at the General’s behest in an operation that’s supposed to cure him of his dangerously swelling erection, takes on a gigantic life of its own, killing the General.
The Blessed Curse is a case of absurdist satire. Domestic and international observers of Pakistan’s military-political state apparatus will discern the reality in the novel’s absurdism: a few men who command vast concentrations of economic capital, military power and religious charisma cynically work the state apparatus in pursuit of their fantasies until it goes into tailspin and kills two of them. Readers will recognize here a combined allusion to the deaths and assassinations of Pakistani prime ministers, presidents and military dictators. The realistic interludes in which we read of Ganju’s daughter’s nightmarish marriage to her delinquent child husband, his wife’s mild rebellions and lonely death and his son Taimur’s grave Islamist righteousness serve as foils for the absurdity.
Towards the novel’s end Ganju goes on pilgrimage to Mecca, a merely hypocritical semblance of piety for he has been secretly dispatched by the General to meet Arab sheikhs who have agreed to bail the country out of financial ruin. But once in Mecca, Ganju undergoes a conversion to god-fearing Muslim piety and returns repentant. But Ganju’s conversion is too little too late. His erection rises from his grave, working international mayhem.
Sehbai began his career by traveling across rural Pakistan as a marketing executive of a tea company, experiences that inform the novel’s precisely-observed Sufi shrines and spectacles of popular piety. He began writing this novel—his only novel and only work in English—in the 1970s, adding to it over the decades so that it became a picaresque commentary on Pakistan’s history as America’s client-state through the Cold War. By 2024 the novel was nearly 800 pages long but the editor at Mawenzi House whittled it down ably to its current length of 266 pages. Meanwhile, Sehbai had gained renown for heading Pakistan Television’s theater department, as the author of four collections of Urdu poetry and two collections of Urdu and Punjabi plays—a rich vernacular seam this novel mines.