This article reads Kamila Shamsie’sKartography(2002) as a response to the systematicsuppression of the 1971 war within Pakistani national culture. Set in Karachi across 1971 and1995, the novel follows Raheen and Karim, two childhood friends from the city’s Anglophoneupper-middle class, as they circle a family secret rooted in the year Bangladesh was born.Drawing on Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s notion of the crypt and Jacques Derrida’sspectrality, I argue that the canonical frameworks of trauma studies, derived from Holocausttestimony and calibrated for individual experience, have little purchase on the slow andmanufactured silence that operates at a collective scale. I examine how the novel’s formalresources, from Caroline Herbert’s “lyric map” to the urban palimpsest and the anagram ascryptonymy, render an inherited absence legible without resolving it. Read as a microcosm ofnational historiographical distortion, the privileged Karachi household finds its closingcounterpoint in Calvino’s ethics of vigilance.