Mapped
Cracking India
Bapsi Sidhwa
Through the eyes of Lenny, a small, polio-stricken Parsee girl, the novel watches Lahore tear itself apart in the Partition of 1947, as her beloved Hindu nanny is betrayed by a besotted admirer, the Ice-candy-man. Sidhwa maps her city: the Parsee family's house on Warris Road, the Queen's Garden and the Mall where the nanny's many suitors gather, the old neighbourhoods that erupt in slaughter, and Hira Mandi, into whose brothels the abducted are sold.
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Kartography
Kamila Shamsie
Two Karachi childhood friends, Raheen and Karim, grow up in the privileged seaside world of Clifton, until Karim's obsession with mapping the divided, violent city and a buried secret from the 1971 war drive them apart. Shamsie maps the real Karachi: the affluent villas of Clifton, the beach at Sea View, the tense old-city districts around Saddar where the ethnic violence flares, and the wider fractured metropolis Karim tries to chart, its wound reaching back to the war that made Bangladesh.
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Kim
Rudyard Kipling
It opens on the gun Zam-Zammah outside the Lahore Museum, both still there, then walks the Grand Trunk Road the length of northern India. The anchor city is Lahore, now in Pakistan; the road and the Great Game carry the book east to Benares and north into the Himalayan foothills, so the bounding box spans the whole run from the Punjab to the Ganges.
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The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Mohsin Hamid
A single evening in Lahore frames the whole book: a Pakistani man buttonholes an uneasy American at a cafe in the Old Anarkali bazaar and talks him through his life over tea and a long dinner, the two of them drifting out toward the Mall as the light goes. His memories carry the story abroad, to Princeton, Manhattan, Manila and Valparaiso, but the ground under the telling stays fixed in Lahore. The map holds the old bazaar quarter and the colonial spine of the Mall, with the outside chapters pinned where they belong.
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