The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Divided Nation

by Declan Walsh

The United States and Pakistan had been feuding and falling in love for decades. People often compared their tempestuous, co-dependent relationship to a bad marriage, but it was more accurately the worst kind of forced marriage – a product of shared interests rather than values, devoid of genuine affection and scarred by a history of dispute and betrayal.

‘You guys in the West call it corruption,’ he said. ‘We call it a reasonable cost of business.’

Fakir Syed Aijazuddin, a writer from Lahore, noted that Pakistan recalls Julian Barnes’s definition of a net as ‘a collection of holes tied together with string . . . less a country than a mesh of voids, bound by coils of self-interest’.

‘I have no concern but carouse and rapture,’ wrote Jalaluddin Rumi, Sufism’s most celebrated philosopher-poet. ‘I have no tale to tell but tipsiness and rapture.’

As Jinnah’s admiring biographer Stanley Wolpert put it: ‘Few individuals significantly alter the course of history. Fewer still modify the map of the world. Hardly anyone can be credited with creating a nation-state. Muhammad Ali Jinnah did all three.’

Back in London, Radcliffe burned his papers and refused his £3,000 fee, vowing never to return to India. ‘There will be roughly eighty million people with a grievance who will begin looking for me,’ he wrote. ‘I do not want them to find me.’ A year later, he was awarded a knighthood.