Another India

Jimmy’s story,now available in a hardcover and priced at Rs 350,has grown from 4,000 words to 45,000 words. “The novel is technically based on the short story but it’s essentially a new work. One can’t change a 4,000-word story into a novel. It doesn’t work,” says the 35-year-old. In the novel,he starts the story with Jimmy’s father Rafiq,revealing more about his family and the lives of his parents. Rafiq,as a youth,aspires to hobnob with the upper class Muslims of Moazzamabad and later marries Shaista,who is from an elite Muslim family. After her death,followed by the demolition of mosque in Ayodhya,he becomes a mullah. And Jimmy grows up watching his father and his neighbourhood change as curfew reaches Moazzamabad.

For Ahmad,looking at Jimmy’s background was a kind of exercise in looking at India itself. “Doing the field research for the book was like discovering my own country — its history and current affairs,” he says. As it is,there are very few books written on India’s modern history,compared to Europe and America. “We live in perpetual embarrassment of not knowing enough about India,” he says. Ironically,it’s when Ahmad was studying in America that he realised how little he knows about his country.

An opportunity to rediscover India came when the author was working on a magazine’s special issue on India after 13 years of Independence. This explains the author’s decision to start the story in the ’60s,touching upon the lack of jobs and events like the Jabalpur riots. The story culminates amidst the paranoia and fear of the ’90s. Jimmy The Terrorist’s narrative,particularly in the second half of the book,acquires a tone that sounds very close to real life. Ahmad,who has lived in Aligarh and Gorakhpur,confesses to experiencing the claustrophobia of curfew and fear.

With a pronounced flavour of life in eastern UP percolating into his storytelling,the writer says that geography changes narrative. Readers can experience more of this in his next book,Unbelonging,a collection of “long short stories” set in this part of the country. For those looking beyond India,he is also working on a non-fiction book on Bhutan.