Award-winning author Farah Ali’s debut novel The River, The Town paints a poignant narrative that traces the lives of Baadal, his mother Raheela, and his wife Meena. The story moves between the1960s and the 1990s from the eponymous drought-stricken town to the city capturing the characters’ thwarted dreams crushed by unjust systems and the weight of their own sorry histories, rendering them perpetually close to complete ruin.
The River, The Town is a unique book for multiple reasons, not least because it is the first piece of climate change fiction by a Pakistani English-language writer. Moreover, its treatment is unlike any other work by English-language writers in Pakistan that has explored the lives of the marginalised and dispossessed. In the past, progressive, left-leaning writers created pressing works addressing broader social concerns. However, over time, poverty fell out of favour as a literary subject. Farah Ali resurrects that tradition, marked by the same brand of raw realism and authenticity.
Another notable aspect of the novel is the namelessness of the town and the city. Not only does this prevent the story from being confined to a particular place, but it also denies readers a convenient recourse to political blame. In an atmosphere of stringent political affiliations, naming the city Karachi—which we have ample reason to believe it is—would reduce the novel to a simplistic critique of certain political parties. Ali offers us no such easy answers. As a character reminds us, names are "loaded with origin," a truth echoed even in the novel’s nameless acknowledgements.
A lesser writer may have offered token catharsis, but in the world of The River, The Town, that would amount to inauthenticity
Additionally, while The River, The Town is a story about immigration, it defies the conventional arc of East-to-West migration. The book’s journey of internal displacement—from village to town, and town to city—is a phenomenon much older than global migration yet there is none of the usual nostalgic longing for a lost home. Instead, we have a ‘lost’ generation for whom home was never a place of safety and who, in their new urban setting, find themselves pushed to the peripheries, literally and metaphorically.
Just as remarkably, the novel subverts conventional tropes of rags-to-riches sagas and coming-of-age tales refusing to make poverty palatable by extracting forced humour or poetics from hunger, loss, and pain. The story is told through a grim, merciless, and deeply heartbreaking lens of destitution and this is where the novel’s greatest strength lies. The reader gets a raw glimpse into the inner recesses of the characters without the experience being diluted by the author’s own worldview. We experience their everyday moments: eating crickets when food isn’t coming, marking days by the changing colour of their urine, destroying a profiteering neighbour’s dish antenna, zoning out on the death of a sibling, pelting a government building with rotten eggs, inhaling the exhaust fumes of the city, or accumulating material things to put a physical distance between their past and their present. The characters behave organically, not merely moving in service of the storyline.
A lesser writer may have offered token catharsis, but in the world of The River, The Town, that would amount to inauthenticity. Instead, meagre respite is offered through the use of irony—characters named after water-related imagery like ‘Baadal,’ ‘Kawsar,’ or ‘Aab,’ despite living in drought; the river reduced to a muddy stream but still called ‘bara darya’ or big river. When a character attempts suicide but fractures his legs instead, Baadal observes, "They really should have been careful when naming him Kasrat, which means abundance."
Also of note is how the novel gets its continuity right, ensuring that cultural and historical details are never anachronistic—short hemlines in the 1960s, a 1990s TV schedule with extended ‘Open University’ programming, or, more subtly, mainstream interpretation of religion gaining traction in the 90s in urban centres compared to the more spiritual practices back in the town.
The passive, languorous narration reflects the realities of its characters’ lives with remarkable fidelity. In the drought-stricken town, nothing is actively done—things simply happen. Houses are abandoned, children die of malnutrition, wells dry up, relationships disintegrate—not through dramatic arguments, but through accumulative indifference. Raheela and Baadal, mother and son, barely speak. Meena and Baadal’s "love," if it can even be called that, is not romantic but a pragmatic response to the characters’ circumstances.
Important plot developments are rendered in the same detached tone. With the authenticity of a psychiatrist, Farah Ali has Raheela recall her wedding to Baadal’s father, not through memories of the day itself, but through the "blemish removal cream" she received as a gift—her fixation on the trivial rather than the immediate a hallmark of trauma survivors. The account of Raheela’s molestation as a young child at the hands of a grocery store owner is recounted in the same matter-of-fact manner. Yet the decision to name Raheela’s introductory chapter after him underscores how deeply the experience shapes her. There is no room for indulgence in prolonged grief; instead, the novel’s most harrowing emotions lurk between its terse, compact lines. A single sentence—"We try not to be thirsty at our homes."—encapsulates an entire world of deprivation. Ali conveys histories in similarly compact images. There is a poignant moment when Baadal dissuades Meena from tying banknotes into the corner of her chaadar like "poor people."
Moreover, the novel resists neat binaries. The town is neither fully urban nor entirely rural, and this in-betweenness defines the tragedy of Baadal’s generation, finding themselves trapped in a place that lacks the economic opportunities of the city yet also fails to provide the support system of an ancestral village.
With no hope for better times, faith becomes a coping mechanism for the townspeople. Without explicit judgement, we are given hints on the true nature of heaven-sent visions when Baadal observes, "Weeks go by and he doesn’t mention another vision” “because there is a little more food in his body." At a river encampment, townspeople—including Meena—atone for their sins, highlighting both faith’s role as solace and the absurdity of blaming suffering on divine punishment rather than systemic failure. Raheela, however, has no such escape. Unmoored and bereft, her world is populated by the dead (Sohail, her daughters), the undead (Aneela), and the not-yet-dead as she channels her misfortunes in shockingly destructive ways.
The novel also explores the "mother wound" as the town finds itself forsaken not only by Mother Nature but also by the Motherland, and in Baadal’s case, by his own mother. Raheela’s rejection of him is, possibly, a survival mechanism; having lost everyone she ever loved, perhaps cruelty is the only way she knows to protect him. Baadal’s most haunting memory of his mother is the moment she abandons him on a seesaw as a young child. This memory also resurfaces at the novel’s end, recalled by Raheela herself, underscoring how emotional neglect often leaves deeper scars than physical violence.
The book’s complexity is compounded by unreliable narrators damned by factors both external and internal, physiological and psychological. When Baadal sees Juman, having turned him away just a few pages earlier, it’s unclear whether it is real or simply a drug-induced stupor. Similarly, Raheela’s state of mind owes to a lifetime of loss but also, perhaps, the effects of menopausal hormones, since we’re told she has been missing her period. By the book’s end the reader is left reeling trying to distinguish the real from the imagined.
At its core, however, ‘The River, The Town’ is about the dehumanisation of those trapped in abject poverty. Farah Ali compels her readers to confront their own privileged gaze time and time again whether it is through the media reducing deprivation to spectacle, government officials offering band-aid solutions like food and cash distribution, school teachers lecturing students on the virtue of abstaining from excess food and water or schoolgirls from the city who exoticise Baadal and his friends making them feel “collectively altered, diminished.”
The River, The Town serves as a reminder that dystopian scenarios need not be evoked through futuristic, sci-fi worlds. The apocalypse exists, in the here and now: wherever there is abject poverty and unjust systems, wherever hunger is an inheritance, wherever rivers run dry.