There are journeys that only someone who has left everything behind can take. The young German who sets off on a hitchhiking trip to the East in the early 1970s does not know whether he will ever return to Europe. He drifts aimlessly, listening to storytellers in Persian opium dens and wandering along the Gulf until, on the beach at Paradise Point near Karachi, a fisherman sends him to a Sufi shrine in the Indus Valley.
Together with a Malang – the name is given to dervishes who reject all conventions – he is picked up by a military patrol. His friend is tortured before his eyes, and he himself is sent to Quetta prison after a mock execution. When he is unexpectedly released after three months, he makes his way to Germany as a street musician. Forty years later, he returns to Pakistan to find the Malang, whose trail he lost in prison. Some things he recognizes, others have changed beyond recognition. The search for Malang comes to nothing, but on the eve of his planned return flight from Karachi to Berlin, he has a surprising encounter on Paradise Point beach, from where he set off on his journey forty years earlier.
“Peter Pannke is a master storyteller.“ – Naveen Kishore, Seagull
Novel
Peter Pannke, born in 1946, is an author, musician, and producer. After studying Chinese, Indian, and comparative religious and music studies, he lived in Pakistan and India for many years before settling in Berlin as a radio presenter and festival curator. Paradise Point is his first novel.
