Hay Festival Dhaka
A Writer of Lost Lovers
A prize-winning British Pakistani novelist, Nadeem Aslam was born in 1966 in Gujranwala, Pakistan. His first novel “Season of the Rainbirds,” was published in Britain in 1993. Aslam has written three more books- the Encore Award-winning “Maps of Lost Lovers” (2004), “The Wasted Vigil” (2008), and this year's “The Blind Man's Garden”. Nearly two decades of his career he has produced only four novels, when so many contemporary writers are writing stories and novels hastily, however Aslam seems content with his four novels and with the quality of his books rather than the quantity.
Nadeem Aslam, Photo: Prabir Das
Your father was a poet, film producer and a hardcore communist. You must have grown up in a very different environment. Tell me about your childhood in Pakistan? And how did you start writing?
My father wanted to be a poet. When he was young he published some poems in local newspapers. But the way things worked out in a middle class family was no different for him. By the time he was 21, a young man, he had to maintain certain responsibility, which we call in Urdu- “zimmedariah”. His mother was a widow and he had younger siblings and eight other brothers, so he had to go to earn to live on. He didn't have time to sit down and write and read as much as he would have like. So he couldn't carry on his writing habit, couldn't concentrate on his studies. But there were lots of books in the house. The feeling for the life of the mind was always in the house. Since he was with politics, film and poetry, from my childhood I have learned the political commitment, and the life of the mind. At that age the most important learning for me was “an artist is never poor”.
Moreover I have grown up in a very different environment. I have 50 first cousins, and everyone has their own kind of belief. So I always knew there is no one way of being Muslim, but a whole spectrum. And the whole situation has played a tremendous role to be a writer. That's how one day I began to write. And that is how it happened.
I was a child when I was wrote my first story. And it was about a school boy who couldn't do his math's home works, just like I couldn't do my math's homework. So I wrote 27 stories from the age of 12 to 14 and they were all in Urdu.
Suddenly we found that things started changing. General zia-ul-haq seized power in a military coup in 1977. He manifested Islamic values and changed the entire texture of Pakistani life. After Soviet invasion of Afghanistan Pakistan was flooded with refuges and Afghan Mujahideen. The Pakistani government, CIA, Saudi Arabia, and other western government decided to provide over billions of dollars of weapon support to the Afghan Mujahideen via Pakistan.
You know my father was a communist so he was against the mindset. In early eighties my father and my uncle protested against the decision. They asked, “What is going to be the consequence of this Jihadi mindset you are stirring up? What do you think is going to happen to these shiny beautiful weapons once the soviets are gone?” Things were made hard for those people who tried to stop the Jihadi propaganda. One of my uncles was taken away and tortured. And my family was forced to flee into exile in 1980.
Why did you take 11 years to write a single novel- ‘Maps of Lost Lovers’? Is it because you want to put different layers of time and experience in your story?
Yes. “The Blinds Man Garden” took four and half years, The Wasted Vigil took four and half years, but “Maps of Lost Lovers” took 11 years because I was also learning English. So I wrote it over a period of eleven years. I think that is the better way of saying it.
When I went to England at the age of 14 my English wasn't very good. So I had to learn the language. At the age of 21, I realised my English is good enough to do what I want to do, which is to be a writer. So I began to write and my first novel took 11 months to complete.
Since I was not educated in English literature properly, so I began to read slowly, went to one person to another and said- tell me who is a great writer, they would reply, Thomas Hardy. So I went and read all the books of him and also copy out the entire novel by hand. And systematically I went through everyone, read and write William Faulkner, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Toni Morrison etc. That's how I learned English, looking at the sentences.
I wanted to know how a book is made, how many thoughts are allowed in a paragraph, how many images are allowed per page? So to learn it properly I started to copy novels by hands. I wanted to see where the comma fell, where the full stop came. While I was doing this I was also writing the “Maps of Lost Lovers”. So it took 11 years to educate myself and write the novel.
In the mean time I was also growing. I was experiencing different kind of love, different kind of heart break, what it likes to have a job, what it likes to have boss, what it is to have money and what it is not to have money. So all of these things were going in and I used to write down in my note books. When I sitting down to make a book, write a chapter I used to go through my note books and I ask myself–can I use any of this in my novel? So you can say in my novels I used my experiences.
Your novels portray the horrific side of religion as well. Have you ever tried to know how the general Pakistani or Muslim readers from any part of the world receive your writings?
You know due to an accident of history I ended up writing in English. I can't write as well in Urdu. However my books are available in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan, so Muslims are reading my books. But they are all elite people who can read English and the elite do not have that kind of attachment to religion and etc. And you can't get much criticism from the elite. But if these books are being translated into Urdu then may be my books would go to a large number of readers in Pakistan. Than may be I would learn about the criticism.
Through an article I have learnt that you love to use pen and papers to write your novels.
Simply, because I didn't have money when the new technology became available. I got a computer in 2002, I believe. Until then I was very poor. I wasn't able to afford a computer. But still I used to write in papers. Because when you are writing there is a direct connection between you mind and paper. When I write, the words- verses seem to be flowing from my mind into my hand then onto the page. In other words you can say thoughts becoming ink in my stories. I love to feel the weight of the paper, the lightness of words.
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