In the 1980s, General Zia-ul-Haq's military government banned Rushdie's novel, Shame, because of its unfavourable depiction of a country that was "not quite Pakistan" and a dictatorship that was not quite Zia's — but just about. The ban backfired because with all the attention the book became required reading for new diplomats posted in Islamabad. Many Western capitals sent copies via the diplomatic bag and, as a result, the capital was flooded with copies — an attack of Shame, if you will — which eventually ended up in the many secondhand bookstores interspersed through the city's main markets.

You can, of course, find secondhand bookstores the world over. But in Islamabad these bookstores sometimes suggest a sense of a breach, of things that shouldn't be there. Like a Rushdie book.

There was another little book during the Zia regime that circulated in manuscript form, clandestinely, through these stores: Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto's If I Am Assassinated, which Pakistan's first elected prime minister wrote from jail after Zia's 1977 coup. Its publication was blocked, and the regime closed the offices of the press that tried to print it. The military hanged Bhutto in 1979, but he remained a powerful anti-military symbol that the regime tried to suppress by targeting his party colleagues, his daughter, his supporters and, indeed, his words. Yet, in stapled copies, there was his most polemical work being sold right under the dictatorship's nose.

In the Eighties and early Nineties, when my father was posted in Islamabad, these bookstores were a child's access not so much to forbidden works as to Western culture. In those days, the federal capital didn't have much. There was one television channel, state-run, that showed one highly censored English movie a week — including, my favourite, a censor board — approved Dr No with the bikini-clad Ursula Andress completely excised from all her scenes until the very end, when she appears out of nowhere, more or less fully dressed. 

There was no real cinema to speak of, so we survived on pirate video stores that rented "camera copies" of new releases overlaid with the silhouettes and chatter of moviegoers moving back and forth in front of the projector. 

In these conditions, the authentic experience was to be found in the secondhand bookstores, stacked with publications that were passed on by the city's many foreign visitors, including diplomats, donors, teachers and tourists.