It was a book launch with all the fanfare to match its author. An eclectic guest list including family members, journalists, entrepreneurs and artists came together in Dubai last month to celebrate the release of Anthony J Permal’s Hot Cross Buns, an intimate memoir chronicling a childhood spent in Pakistan’s tightknit Catholic community.
But the event was tinged with sadness, Permal having died suddenly from a heart attack nine days prior in Dubai. He was only 44.
A culture lover and savvy digital marketer who relocated to Dubai with his siblings two decades ago, Permal is remembered for his garrulous presence and an acerbic tongue often disguising a deep-seated empathy. It was also helpful that he was something of a control freak, younger sister Sue Menezes, 42, notes.
“We didn't have to do too much when it comes to the book launch,” Menezes tells The National. “He had everything planned already to the last detail, including creating a beverage under his name and the menu items. There was no way we weren't going to do the launch because he was looking forward so much to the book coming out.”
Hot Cross Buns is an affectionate and at times searing look at 1980s Pakistan nearing the end of military rule. Seemingly innocuous to the political turmoil coursing through his country, Permal recalls a childhood in the family home within the Faraya Apartments, a middle-class residential building that still stands in Karachi.
Brother Adrian Permal, who is seven years younger, remembers how the pluralistic social life of the building was seemingly at odds with the greater Pakistani society riven with increasing sectarianism.
“There were about 15 kids from different faiths living in the building and we would play together,” he recalls. “During Christmas, the families in the Faraya Apartments would all put this star, which people said was the biggest in Pakistan, on top of the building to celebrate. What I remember was that these gatherings were not just with Christians only, but with Muslim and Hindu friends as well. The way that Anthony describes it is so vivid that the nostalgia makes me choke up.”
More than the sentimentality, Menezes says Anthony carefully chose those vignettes to paint an evocative picture of Pakistan rarely reported. “He wanted to remind everyone that Pakistan had these really good days that have formed many of us,” she says. “He is not writing about what we have lost but to remind Pakistanis to go back to our roots and to raise our kids as one community.”
It was a desire formed in the aftermath of the 1992 destruction of the Babri Masjid mosque in the Indian city of Ayodhya, an incident that sparked the country's worst sectarian riots. The riots spread to Pakistan, where Hindu temples and The Sacred Heart Church in Karachi were damaged.
“We were Catholic and we were in Pakistan, miles away from India. What did any of this have to do with us?” Anthony wonders in his book.
Menezes, who was 12 years old at the time, describes it as a moment when her brother lost his innocence. “Being his little sister I didn't even know he went through the anguish of how that incident shaped him,” she says. “It made me feel helpless and sad that I was too young to understand what he was feeling. But I do know it made him even more passionate about being a Pakistani, and he was determined to make sure we all look at ourselves as one community. It did make him realise that there was also a world outside of his bubble, and that life is not as harmonious as that in the Faraya Apartments.”
Anthony doesn’t provide solutions to Pakistani’s sectarian malaise. After all, Hot Cross Buns is a book about people and not focused on polemics. And in his descriptions of ordinary Pakistanis living through an extraordinary period, from the schoolteachers to the parishioners at his local St Lawrence Church, he provides examples of the resilience and good humour inherent within Pakistani people to ensure his homeland remains in good stead.
These attributes are espoused by one of the book’s central characters, Anthony’s father John Permal, an athlete who represented Pakistan at the 1972 Munich Olympics and the Asian Games in 1966 and 1970. Hot Cross Buns finds Anthony coming to terms with his father’s underappreciated legacy of beating the odds to represent his homeland as a rare Pakistani Christian athlete.
“He led by example on the field and at home,” Adrian recalls. “He is the one who formed Anthony's principles and morals about the world. He struggled every day to provide for his family and make a career for himself and he did that without cheating or hurting anyone intentionally – something that Anthony took to heart and embodied throughout his career.”
At 130 pages, Hot Cross Buns can’t be viewed as the definitive story of a life cut short at its prime. Instead, it’s an affecting portrait of family life with all the wisdom and moral clarity that it entails. With further launches planned for Karachi and Lahore in the coming weeks, Adrian feels the book was expressly written for surviving family members.
“A few years ago, Anthony shared with me the first seven chapters, which I read immediately,” he says. “I still haven’t read the whole book. I will instead keep reading a page whenever I feel like I want to talk to him. I am going to savour every word slowly and keep that conversation going for as long as I can.”
