I know for a fact that in India, people make too much fuss about your capacity to be an emotionally balanced human being if you have been raised by a single mother or if you have endured a broken marriage.  These days, I am so much into the young and supremely gifted Aatish Taseer’s, writing, that it really buries this line of thinking.  For someone, who’s a couple of years younger than me, to have come up with three works of fiction and one work of non-fiction in the last five years is a remarkable achievement by any standards.  And yes, he’s been brought up a single mother, the well-known journalist Tavleen Singh.

Back in the 80s when she was making a name for herself as a journalists, she met one of the prominent Pakistani politician and the time, the late Salman Taseer, who was in India to promote his book on his political godfather and former prime minister of Pakistan Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.  As they say, the cupid struck and both of them disappeared for a week in the mountains north of the country.  People in those days were pretty casual about any form of protection, and those were kind of hit and miss affair anyway.  Aatish Taseer was the result of that summer of love.  But because of the history bad blood between the two countries and the excess baggage that people from different religion sometime carry made it impossible for them to continue.  Salman knew that if the word got out that he was not only romantically involved with a non-Muslim and that too and Indian, and he had also sired a child with her, would sound death knell for his political career.  So, when it came to making a final choice between his political ambitions and commitments to the woman with whom he produced a son, and because he got so spooked by the barrage of negative publicity that was bound to come his way, that he chose the former and broke all ties and went back to Pakistan married and settled down, leaving the eighteen months old Aatish to be brought up by the feisty Tavleen on her own.

Of course, I have given this brief background only to illustrate the point that things don’t have to go to pieces if you didn’t have a ‘’wholesome’’ childhood and that you don’t have to act like being “damaged goods”, if your parents first drifted apart and then parted company in acrimonious circumstances.  I am a firm believer that what you grow up to become, depends less on what values were inculcated in you by your parents, and more on your innate and intuitive grasp of the environment around you and how you interpret and make sense of the world.  And what a finest specimen of a man Aatish Taseer has turned out to be.  From a boarding school in South India to one of the finest of liberal arts college in the U.S.  From working with Time magazine and also many freelance work for the leading publications around the world, he’s settled down now to writing fulltime, something he always wanted to do ever since he was a teenager.  But it took some time to find the right kind of voice, his own voice.  And the voice he has found as a writer is one of the most authentic voices in the subcontinent.  The power of raw prose and the astuteness of his observations have a starkly searing feel about it.  The rootlessness of the elite, the resentment of the underclass, old money clashing with the new, sometimes it’s hard to believe a thirty four years old man can be a Naipaul like chronicler of this half made society.  Whenever I read him, there is this intense desire to be like him.

But like he said about his father once, that the presence of him in his life can only be marked by his absence.  My feeling about Aatish Taseer is not too dissimilar.