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Journalism of Courage
I imagine writing to be an intimate affair. Did the success of Home Fire (a reimagination of Sophocles’ Antigone, the novel won the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2018 and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2017) make you conscious of a readership?
I never know how to think of a reader for the very specific reason that when I was growing up in Karachi, I was never the reader anyone thought of, but it didn’t get in the way of my love for the Narnia books, or even Enid Blyton, let’s face it. I think one of the joys of fiction, if done properly, is it allows you in from a position of knowing but also a position of unknowing. There are books we love because there’s so much that’s familiar. Then there are books we love because the world it is introducing to us is completely unfamiliar. So no, I don’t think of the reader in that way. What does happen after you have a book that does better in the world than anything before, you know what that feels like — it feels very nice to have that many people read your book. But my feeling about it is that you only get that kind of luck once in your writing career, so I’ve sort of had it (laughs). That thing you mentioned about the intimacy of writing, once you actually sit down to write a book, that process, in some odd way, hasn’t changed since I was a university student working on my first (novel), which is you sit down and the problems you’re dealing with are the problems of a novel. Everything else disappears.
I believe it was a conversation with your sister on the nature of friendship that led you to Best of Friends (Bloomsbury, Rs 599)?
It was decades ago, we were in our 20s, and she said, in a throwaway manner, the friends we make when we’re adults are our friends because we have something in common with them, but our childhood friends are our friends because they’ve always been our friends. It stuck with me for some reason. Of course, as the years go on, statements like that start feeling more and more true — some people live in one country, some in another, your professional lives are different, your political views change. Yet, for me, there are so many childhood friendships that have remained very central to my life. I’m very aware of the fact that the friends I’ve made in adult life roughly are in the same world as I am — they’re writers or publishers or academics, they’re broadly progressive in their political views. My childhood friends are all over the place. They’re bankers, they have hedge funds, they’re doctors or architects or running a business. It’s a very different kind of friendship. The reason why I wanted the book to be in that childhood is because of that adolescent friendship, which is so intense, where your closest friend is the most important person in the world. But I wanted to bring it up to middle age where you’re very firmly set in how you see the world. These last few years, in many different countries, whether it’s India, Pakistan, America, Britain, politics has become something that people feel so personally about, it’s putting a lot of close relationships under stress. So, I wanted to go back to that idea of childhood friendships and these people you have nothing in common with but the friendship itself and see what it would look like in today’s world where we’re feeling those pressures and fault lines so strongly.
This is a book as much about friendship as it is an examination of power dynamics. Did that play any role in the fact that you base the initial parts of the novel in 1988 when Pakistan got its first female Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto?
I had written some years ago an article on the women’s cricket team in Pakistan and that article had started in the winter when Benazir Bhutto was elected to power. I wrote maybe two paragraphs on what it was like in Karachi at the time and I thought, it’s so vivid to me what it was to be young and female in Karachi then and how I’ve never strangely, in all the writing I’ve done about Karachi in fiction, really written about that properly. It was such a crucial time between the last days of Zia-ul-Haq to Benazir coming to power, and, if you were a young girl, in some ways, it felt as though everything had changed, and anything was possible, but in the other, you also knew you were still a 14-year-old girl in a patriarchal society and the same rules applied. So, I wanted that as a starting point and then I wanted to bring them (Maryam and Zahra, childhood friends and the protagonists of Best of Friends) up to the present day.
The other crucial thing in the novel is the universality of the male gaze and the response of Maryam and Zahra to the hold that patriarchy wields over women. Was there anything in particular that led you to that?
When I start a novel, I have very little idea of what it’s going to be. I knew female friendship but beyond that, I didn’t know anything. Then, as you start writing, these things emerge from within. In the last few months, I’ve been talking to various friends, and they’ll say, tell us something about the book. I talk about the drive, that moment when you’re with a guy and it feels fine, it might even feel fun, and then something changes, and you feel that sense of danger. And the women would say, ‘Oh, we’ve been in that car’. They’re women from everywhere. So that idea that so many of us just recognise the particularity of the way you feel the sense of threatened danger, as soon as that got into the book, it was something that had to carry through. Because it’s happening when Benazir is becoming Prime Minister, this idea of the different kinds of power and powerlessness that women have in the world became something that I was interested in. Which is why I wanted in their late years both Maryam and Zahra to have power, but to have it in different ways, and to think about it in different ways.
Given the polarisation on social media, do you ever feel it has initiated an era of propinquity rather than deep friendships?
I don’t think the human need for friendship is going away. We often talk about social media in terms of its worst aspects. Of course, on Twitter particularly, more than anything else, you’ll align yourself with people simply over certain views. But WhatsApp is also social media and it has meant that a lot of people who live in different countries are able to be in touch in the way they couldn’t. With a lot of my childhood friends, we have a WhatsApp group, where there are about 10 of us, and because it’s not the one-on-one of a phone call, or even email, there’s a way in which that kind of group dynamic locates itself that is actually comforting. I see young kids, 13-14-year-olds, want those deep friendships. This isn’t to say there’s no damage and downside, there’s a lot of awfulness that goes on as well. But the need for friendship is a profound human need and we will always find ways to do that.
Speaking of friendships, I was recently reading about your bond with the (Kashmiri) poet Agha Shahid Ali (1949-2001). How did the two of you get acquainted?
Shahid, who I still miss tremendously, was one of the most important people in my life. I landed up at a small liberal arts college (Hamilton College) in America when I was 18. It was on a hill in a snow belt in the middle of America, and there was this Kashmiri poet. Shahid was wonderful both as a writer and as a human being. As a writer, he was passionate and made you understand the importance of every single word. The thing that he made you know very early on was that if you’re going to write about a politically difficult subject, you don’t just allow the weight of the subject to carry your poem or your short story or novel, you have to earn it. That, if anything, you have to make greater demands on yourself; that you can never compromise on what the writing itself wants. Sometimes, you want to make a political point, but if it’s going to look like polemic or it’s not going to fit in your book, throw it out. The writing has to work on its own terms before anything else.
He took me seriously as a writer, which meant a lot. He would say in his light manner, ‘Oh, I lie about everything, but poetry.’ He would never say a piece of writing was good if he didn’t believe it. So, when he looked at something I wrote and said this is good, it made me feel, maybe I can do this, maybe I’m good enough.
The longer I’m on this planet, the more I appreciate the fact that he was so good at taking the writing seriously, and not taking himself seriously. He was just a wonderful human being to be around, particularly, between — as I was — the ages of 18 and 25. It teaches you how you can be successful and confident in the world, how you can be serious about your work and also have the best sense of humour, be generous and not be fussed about the tiny disruptions that come along.
