Kathmandu:

Even at 50 pages, Prakash A Raj’s Four years in Pakistan: a memoir, travelogue cum monologue — you figure it — makes for a laborious read. Bar the shoddy editing, the writer careens off the subject time and again, cutting corners and jumping topics throughout his jumbled narrative.

The book aims to provide the insights of someone, says the author, who is “from the region not belonging to Pakistan or NWFP (North-Western Frontier Province) and someone who could speak Urdu” into the Afghan refugee crisis.

Between 1986-90, as an employee of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, Raj found his calling working with the Afghan refugees in NWFP camps, at the time teeming with as many as three million refugees, who had crossed over the porous border after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Interestingly, in some areas of NWFP, the refugee population outnumbered the locals many times over, with the Afghan refugees expected to reproduce in high numbers to churn out enough warriors for Jihad, the Muslim holy war.

Raj opens the book with his first Pakistan visit in 1997, which seems to set the tone for a thought provoking and fascinating narrative of his experiences. But the book soon falls victim to frequent, gratuitous digression. If now Raj quotes verbatim his diaries written during his stay in Pakistan, the next moment he is at pains absolving himself of anti-Pakistan allegations levelled against him in the local press.

The saving grace of Four years in Pakistan may lie in its informative tidbits tossed sparsely about in this otherwise ungainly book. It was the poet and philosopher Mohammad Iqbal, a fervent supporter of a separate state for Muslims, the author enlightens, who penned ‘Sare jahan se accha Hindostan hamara’. And did you know that less than 10 per cent of all Pakistanis bring into daily use their lingua franca, Urdu?