While writing Burnt Shadows (2009), set in Japan in the final, apocalyptic days of the Second World War, Kamila Shamsie chose not to visit Nagasaki. Nothing remained of that city incinerated by the atom bomb in 1945, not a street or a tree that would shape the author’s imagination. To bring Nagasaki alive for a brief while, as it was on the morning of August 9 — “the perfect blueness of the sky” before “the world went white” — Shamsie pored through old photographs of the city at a New York library, and traced the maps of the city. In her fifth and new novel, A God in Every Stone (Bloomsbury), the 41-year-old Pakistani novelist recreates Peshawar in the early 20th century, much of her research an excavation at the British Library archives in London. “Even when I travelled to Peshawar, I did so in a focussed way. Because it has changed so much physically, I didn’t want my image of 1915 and 1930s Peshawar to get diluted. I went to the Peshawar museum, the old city and the Street of Storytellers, and a couple of archaeological sites. I kept to places that still carry a reminder of the past,” she says. Like the three archaeologists in A God in Every Stone — the Turkish Tahsin Bey in search of the mythical circlet of Scylax, one of the earliest travellers to cross the edge of the known world into the Indian subcontinent; his British protégé Vivian Rose Spencer, who tastes freedom among the ruins of Labraunda; and Najeeb Gul, the young Pathan, who she later mentors in Peshawar — Shamsie is enthralled by disappeared worlds, drawn to unearthing lives and civilisations. Though she didn’t know it at the time, the seed of A God in Every Stone was Shamsie’s reading of a book on Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan’s band of unarmed Pathans, the khudaai khidmatgars, who went against their martial grain to become part of a non-violent resistance during the 1930s’ Civil Disobedience Movement against the British. In the novel, it is a part of Najeeb’s brother Qayoom Gul’s transformation from a loyal soldier of the British Empire who is nearly killed at Ypres in Belgium, to someone who begins to believe, contra Rupert Brooke, that “if a man is to die defending a field, let the field be his field, the land his land, the people his people”, and, finally, to becoming a part of Ghaffar Khan’s army. “I became very interested in Ghaffar Khan, particularly because since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, you only hear about Pathans as fighters, as people who pick up guns. That there was this alternate narrative of (still) the most revered Pathan leader following a policy of non-violence was very interesting,” says Shamsie, when we meet her on the 22nd floor of a Delhi hotel. It was the figure of Scylax, the famous Greek seafarer who travelled to Peshawar (or Caspatyrus) in the service of his Persian conquerors, who illumined Shamsie’s way forward. The most trusted of the Persian king Darius’s men, his often-fantastic accounts of what he saw in the subcontinent are lost, but reported in the travels of Herodotus. But in Shamsie’s telling, Scylax becomes one of many people whose loyalties and lives cleave along the fault line of empire and conquest. “I found that there were a few places, where a Scylax was mentioned as having written a biography of a Greek (the Carian prince Heraclides, who rebelled against Darius), 20-25 years after his voyage to India. No one is sure if they are the same person, but the dates match,” says the author. This thread is a part of the novel’s exploration of how people define themselves against colonial power, even when they seem to be a part of its machinery. Or, as Tahsin Bey, says in the novel: “We take from the Empire what it has to give — but in the end, our loyalties are with the people we loved first, most deeply.” While her early novels were set in Karachi, the city she grew up in and which she left six years ago to settle in London, Shamsie’s most recent novels explore elsewhere, whether in time and space. “I used to be a writer who’d write about the world I knew and grew up in. Not just Karachi, but its neighbourhoods. As a writer you have immediate access to that world. I don’t have to sit and do any work on what the temperature is like or what the fruit tastes like or what the streets look like or what happened in 1987. [But] when I wrote Burnt Shadows, I realised that although it requires much more work, there’s a very deep pleasure in using the novel as a way of discovery. And of watching a place that is merely a word to you — like Peshawar or Nagasaki —turn three-dimensional in your head,” she says. In the novel, Peshawar comes to life through the imagination of archaeologists Najeeb Gul and Vivian Spencer, for whom its many pasts are always immanent: “In a single day, (Gul) might encounter the Chinese monk Fa-Hien throwing flowers into the Buddha’s alms bowl; the Kushan king Kanishka laying the foundation for the great Buddha stupa.and the Mughal emperor Babar.hunting rhinos.” The Peshawar of today, says Shamsie, is a place of sadness and much violence, its syncretism lost to the rise of an extremist culture. “It changed dramatically in the 1980s and 1990s, because it became a hub of the jihad against the Soviets. In the ’80s it was a spy town, with American and Russian spies and the ISI, and the mujahideen in and out. But it is also a place where there has been a lot of resistance to the Taliban. Where the descendants of Ghaffar Khan have been standing up and being killed and are still standing up to the Taliban,” she says. Shamsie grew up in Zia-ul-Haq’s Pakistan, in a Karachi family where “books were a deep part of people’s lives.” Her mother was a literary critic and journalist in Pakistan, and from her maternal grandfather, who spoke Greek and quoted Homer at the table, she found her love for Greek mythology. The writer Attia Hosain, whose Sunlight on a Broken Column was a defining feminist novel set in pre-1947 India, was her great-aunt. History was an early interest. She was about seven or eight, she says, when her mother gave her a slim book on historical figures to read. “The chapter I remember best was on Alexander the Great. I remember being very struck because it showed a map where he comes from Peshawar and goes down to Karachi. And, here I was, sitting in Karachi and thinking, Alexander was here. Though I later discovered, that he probably wasn’t here, that his admirals were here, and that he took another route,” she says. She was nine when she decided she would be a writer. “It was because I loved reading, a day wasn’t complete if I hadn’t read a book from start to finish. I didn’t know of any way that you could grow up and be a reader. So I thought, the next best thing would be to be a writer,” she says. By 11, she was working on “what she thought were novels, 40-pages long, and divided into chapters”. The first, co-written with a friend when her dog died, was on the afterlife of dogs. It was called A Dog’s Life and After. As a child growing up in a privileged Karachi home, she was relatively untouched by the degradation of public life and institutions in the Pakistan of the 1980s. But her first moment of political awareness, ironically, was at the death of Zia-ul-Haq in 1988. “Like many other Pakistanis, I realised how oppressed we had been feeling. There were scenes of such extraordinary celebration in Pakistan. There were people singing and playing music till 2 in the morning. To be 15 and to witness that was amazing. And to have a young woman, Benazir Bhutto, where there had been Zia was transformative,” she says. For Shamsie, history and politics have never been intangible: “Anyone who thinks they are living outside history is quite deluded. In some parts of the world it is easier to believe so than others. If you grew up in Pakistan, you’d never think so.” She writes entire novels to answer the question of how individuals with conflicting ideas of history relate to each other, and how that alters their lives. In her work, history is an echo of older times, but in joining the dots between Nagasaki in 1945 and 9/11, between the Purushapura of the Gandhara kingdom and the Peshawar where a non-violent resistance ended in great tragedy, she is also speaking to the present.
