Umber Khairi worked as a print journalist for the Newsline magazine in the 1990s, where writers enjoyed poetic license. They wrote about ethnic violence, a woman prime minister and palace intrigues with the question, “Is it rumor or reality.” Umber returns to the `90s in her fiction piece, `Akbar in Wonderland.’ Akbar is the fictional character who enjoys the buzz of the newsroom, and where he discovers through his journalistic endeavors that Pakistan becomes “curiouser” and “curiouser.” Maybe Akbar is Umber, maybe not. But as she herself said at her book launch, freed of the constraints of non-fiction, her novel allows people to see characters in recent history.