Nadeem Aslam …

 

I grew up in Pakistan. I lived there for my first fourteen years. The wonderful thing about growing up in a big Asian household was that you saw that there wasn’t just one way of being a mother or an aunt or an uncle or a son or a daughter. There were so many examples. I have uncles on my father’s side, four on my mother’s. I have about fifty or sixty cousins. I had an orthodox uncle who said, I will not have pictures in my house, and children within my jurisdiction will not play with toys. Across the street [from him] was another uncle, who was busy playing music and who had pictures on the wall. In an extended family, you learn there is no one way of being a human being, you can choose; that if one uncle says this is truth, another says it isn’t truth at all, that life can be lived in another way.

     I come from a politically minded family. My uncles were imprisoned under President Zia [ul-Haq, assassinated 1988]. My father escaped the coup [in 1980]. They taught me that great artists have a responsibility to comment on the world.

     My uncle, about whom I wrote in Granta, was a really fundamental Muslim. He would not allow pictures on the wall, and he would break our toys because they were idols. He used to go to England when we were kids, to preach to the infidels. This was back in the seventies. He used to go to a mosque in Dewsbury [West Yorkshire]. That mosque is the one where the July 7 boys [allegedly responsible for the London bombings] used to study.

 

... on the difficulties of being a writer.

 

When I meet younger writers, we talk about many things. But one of the things that always comes up is how to make a living while trying to write better books, trying to learn the craft. I worked in pubs, I worked in cinemas tearing up tickets, I worked on a building site, in a factory. For two or three months of my time I would have several jobs and I would collect all the money I could. And for the next four months I could write. I would black out the windows and not leave the house. I would sleep on the floor using a book as a pillow. TV went out the window. Radio went out the window. Friends went out the window; I couldn’t afford to see them. You can ask someone to pay for your drink once. You can ask them to pay fifty times, or two hundred times, but there does come a time, the two-hundred-and-first time, when you think, I can’t.

 

... on the events of September 11, 2001.

 

Maps for Lost Lovers is set in 1997, but it’s about 9/11. I remember looking at the planes going into the towers and thinking: There is my novel, on the screen. Chanda and Jugnu are the 9/11 of this book in that violence was done to them in the name of religion, but it wasn’t religion at all: it was hundreds of different things. There were so many reasons why Chanda’s brothers did what they did. I didn’t set out to write a relevant book. I was worried that nobody would understand it. As a writer, as an artist, as a human being, one has a duty to explore one’s place in the world and try to bring news to the rest of the world. If you come from places like Pakistan, and if you keep an eye on them, you are aware of the good, and also the bad. And hopefully, if you are looking at the thing honestly enough, and diligently enough, and intelligently enough, you are able to identify those things, and then as an artist, bring them into the work that you are trying to do. I thought, these are the things that matter to me, I am just going to write about them and if the world is not interested in them, well, that’s that. We have been living with 9/11 all our lives.

 

... on the responsibilities of moderate Muslims.

 

I went to New York last year [2008] and I was terrified, thinking: what will I go through at immigration? I read letters from Muslims about how bad things were in New York. And it is bad. But, I thought, it would be so refreshing in those letters if you mentioned that before 9/11 you didn’t have to go through this, that something happened on 9/11. Can we have please a few sentences condemning Osama Bin Laden? People think it’s implicit. Why do we have to say it? People say, leave us alone, we are decent people, we are not involved. I sympathised with that viewpoint, but these are strange times. We are involved. They involved us. Let’s ask moderate Muslims to stand up and say it.

 

... on his use of sensual prose.

 

I wanted the language to counterpoint the misery imposed upon the characters. One of them says that the system, which here happens to be Islam, is based on contempt for the human body. So, I wanted to touch everyone’s skin, again and again. It is like the taste of strawberries. There is nothing disgusting about the physical world. I wanted to show what a brilliant phenomenon it is to actually exist within the world. And how beautiful our planet is. And yet we are surrounded by these systems that won’t let us enjoy it, which is why everybody’s so miserable in the novel.

 

... on the use of symbolism.

 

The house is the human body; it has five senses, five rooms, which are now shattered by war. Next to the house is the perfume factory, which is the soul. I think that these are the things that a novelist does, really, for himself and the reader might – fingers crossed – pick up on if he or she reads the book a second time. At the end of the first sequence in Maps for Lost Lovers, when Lara takes the mirror and puts it on the floor, and tries to look at the library’s names on the ceiling, she says that the frame of the mirror has left sandalwood fragrance on her fingers, and she sniffs them and she remembers what Marcus has told her, that the wood of a living sandalwood tree has no fragrance, that perfume materialises only after it has been cut down, and she thinks that it’s like the soul vacating the body. Smell is the sense that is most closely linked with memory, and I wanted the perfume factory to be memory, which is why it had to be underground. And, of course, there is the Buddha’s head, Afghanistan’s past, Afghanistan’s memory, as it were, which the Taliban did not want. The Taliban said only one thing was allowed to exist, and that was Islam, and only one book was allowed to exist, and that was the Koran. And by placing the Buddha’s head at the centre of where the memory is, I wasn’t saying that somehow Buddhism is better than Islam, but that it is Afghanistan’s past, and a nation and a country and a religion cannot forget what was there yesterday.

 

... on Afghanistan.

 

In 1989, the war with the Soviets finished. The Soviets left, and America and the West thought: ‘Our job is done – we have defeated the Reds.’ But you cannot pour billions of dollars’ worth of weapons and money into a place and then walk away thinking there will be no consequences. Those consequences were pretty obvious pretty quickly for the Afghanis. The civil war began immediately, back in 1991. Pakistan and Iran got involved. Saudi Arabia was still there. For those of us from that region, we were concerned about it.

     I went there two or three years ago, with a historian friend, Salman Rashid. He is a wonderful character, more or less uninterested in the present. He just picks up the stones, and sniffs them, and thinks Alexander was here. Genghis Khan was here. When I looked at a landscape, I was thinking a battle happened here in 1995. But he was thinking: Timur passed here.

     Going to Afghanistan was like entering a mirror. Up until I crossed the border, everybody in Pakistan and here in the West was saying America has to get out of Afghanistan, this is imperialism. The moment you crossed into Afghanistan, nobody says they want the Americans to leave. And I talked to everyone! I talked to the taxi wallah, to the girl who booked my seat on the plane from Kabul to Herat, to the man who sold me bread, to professors. They said that if the Americans leave, the Taliban would come back, al-Qaeda would gain strength. They said that, for the time being, the Americans have to stay. That is where we get into trouble. What does ‘for the time being’ mean? That could be decades, twenty years, twenty-five years, Americans could be there indefinitely. That was the only surprise for me.

     But I am not an Afghani. There are plenty of good Afghani writers, painters, artists, film-makers who are doing great stuff about their own country. I just wanted to use Afghanistan as the setting for The Wasted Vigil to see what its tragedy illustrates. Dostoevsky completed The Idiot in Florence; he did not write it in Russia. It is very spare when it comes to the details of street life compared with his other novels. According to his notebooks, he said that he wanted Russia to be a question, rather than a presence, the way it is in his other novels.

 

... on the power of belief.

 

Not everything that is wrong in the Islamic world is the West’s fault. We must understand this. Within all societies there are elements that will get out of hand. It is all coming from Pakistan, and the tribal areas. They have hijacked something very important. They have hijacked people’s core beliefs and they have somehow tried to link their brand of Islam to the true Islam. If you study Osama bin Laden’s speeches sequentially, and also those of al-Zawahiri [former head of Egyptian Islamic Jihad], al-Qaeda is, I think, tormented by the fact that the world, for better or worse, has managed to make a distinction between Islam and them, the Islamists. It is still way short of the ideal, but the world has understood that what al-Qaeda represents is not Islam. They want the West and the world to think that Muslims are all terrorists. But it is not going to happen.

     At one point in The Wasted Vigil, Casa says to Dunia, the schoolteacher, that the Taliban will destroy America the way it destroyed the Soviet Union. She says, well, the Soviet Union was hated by its own people. You can’t destroy America because Americans love America. He says, how can we stop them from destroying Islam? She says, they can’t destroy Islam, because Muslims love Islam. What we have to make sure is that Muslims don’t fall in love with the ways of the fundamentalists. Then we will be in trouble. If a billion people love something, it is hard to destroy. You simply can’t destroy England, because 70 million people love it. But if the whole of England said, we hate this system, please someone come and rescue us, it will be easy to do.

 

... on the origins of radicalism.

 

My sister told me a cousin of ours, who lives in Sweden, has become radical; shaved his head, grown a beard, trying to prevent his wife from going swimming. He shouts at his kids when they come home from school: why aren’t they going to the mosque, why are they playing in the streets. We’re worried. What is the next step? He was at a family dinner party and somebody made an anti-Islamic comment and he literally swept everything off the table and said, ‘I can’t listen to this.’ A lot of it is personal. He had an arranged marriage. He was sent over to Stockholm because we knew the family. He hated Sweden from day one. He didn’t want to live there. He doesn’t speak the language. He drives a taxi. His wife, who was brought up in Sweden, has a very good job. Eventually, he actually prevented her from taking trips to other cities for work. She tried to accommodate him more and more. Now she has snapped, and he has snapped as well.

 

... on the lie of orthodoxy.

 

Islam has contributed so much to the world. But it is not unique in doing that – so have the Chinese, so have the Indians, so has Hinduism. These achievements can be framed in chauvinistic terms. Did Islam give Europe the Renaissance? Well, yes and no. Europe was in the Dark Ages. The Greek manuscripts were in Islamic hands, and Muslims added to them. We must consider that those people who were working on some of those texts were actually persecuted by the Orthodox Muslims. Al-Kindi [also known as Alkindus, Arab polymath, d. 873CE] was condemned to be hit on the head with his book, until either the book or his head broke. And he went blind. Lara and Marcus have that discussion [in Maps for Lost Lovers] – that philosophy means going against God. So when talking about the achievements of Islam, you need to define Islam. Fundamentalist Islamists did not want any of these things to be achieved by Islam. Even in its glory days.

 

... on optimism.

 

I am optimistic about the world. What else can we be? But the problems exist, and those problems will not be solved by us pretending that they are not there. The very great and very brilliant writer Cormac McCarthy said in an interview with Rolling Stone that the world is worse than it used to be; who would have thought, fifty years ago, we would have beheadings on TV? Well, every man must learn to stand up to his heroes at some point, and I don’t agree with Cormac McCarthy. Fifty years ago, we had beheadings, we just didn’t have them on TV. If something terrible is happening in the world, I wish to know about it, so that I can become angry about it, I can become depressed about it, or I can be galvanised about it and try to put an end to it. That is what I want to do. I mean, what’s the alternative? Not knowing about these things and going around pretending don’t I live in a world that is wonderful? No. If the book is painful to read in places, imagine how difficult these things must have been to live through. I did not make anything up in the novel. All of these things happened. As Toni Morrison said, ‘If they can live it, I can write it.’ I would go one step further and say that if they can live it, we can read it.

     The novel essentially is an optimistic form. You cannot treat your characters too cruelly. The reader will feel a sense of betrayal. But I want to give a sense of the true complexity of life, to not lie and say life is simple. We are in a difficult time, but, like Marcus, we are not going to stop looking for the missing boy.

 

... on the purpose of his work.

 

There really isn’t a message in my work. I am not a spokesman. My writing is my way of exploring my own consciousness, my own time and my own place in the world. There is nothing extraordinary about me. I am one of billions of people in the world. If there is something true of me, it is likely true of millions of people. So I suppose you do end up sending a message. You do end up being a spokesman for people, because you begin with the belief that I am one of them. If something is troubling me, there is every possibility that it is troubling you too, and millions of others.

     When you reach that place, it is wonderful, because you are suddenly not alone. Whatever tragedy you have gone through in your personal life – the death of a parent, or whatever – it is happening to others as well, and when you try to do something with this pain, to articulate it, to somehow try to make this better, people perceive a message, but really I am just like everyone else.

     Casa says to Dunia [in The Wasted Vigil], before the confrontation in the orchard, ‘I wish I didn’t feel alone all the time […] There are so many questions.’ She says, ‘Those questions are being asked by everyone. You have no need to feel alone.’

John Berger was talking about these things years ago. So was Michael Ondaatje.

 

... on his faith in literature.

 

Art may be a way of looking at the current situation in the world – including the war on terror. If you become interested in it, you might try to find out more about it. You might end up disagreeing with this once you find out more about it, but this was your way in. Looking at my own life, One Hundred Years of Solitude [in English, 1970] was my way into Latin America. I might not agree with [Gabriel García] Márquez’s vision now that I know more about Latin America, but he opened the door. He got me interested. You read other books, you visit the countries, talk to people about it.

     If you look at history, you could say that greed and ugliness and the love of blood are constants. It’s there in the Greeks. But wait a second. You can also make the case that generosity and beauty and hatred of bloodshed have also been constant in human history. It depends on what you want to look at, how you want to go through life.

 

... on Casa, the Taliban foot soldier, in Maps for Lost Lovers.

 

During my visit to Pakistan, I did not meet a single person who did not tell me that a friend of theirs had been martyred in Kashmir – a cousin’s schoolfellow, a student’s brother. In Pakistan, it is in the air to do jihad, to go and die, to go and fight the Americans in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Kashmir.

     No one believes that 9/11 was the work of al-Qaeda. Not younger people, educated people, DJs playing American rock music. They believe it was all the work of Jews. That’s what they say. I wrote it in this book and I thought I was going to get flak for it, but this is what they believe. Osama bin Laden has said that he was responsible for 9/11, and those tapes exist. But if you are that conspiracy-minded, the next step is to say, how hard is it to forge a tape? There is no answer to that mindset.

     America can afford to have a few lunatics who believe these things. Pakistan cannot afford to have 165 million people who believe or are inclined to believe this conspiracy theory. America is rich, America will be fine. The World Trade Centre, something will be built in its place. In Manchester, the IRA bombed the Arndale Centre, it has been built over. But go and look at Afghanistan. Those places are ruined. America will look after itself. Pakistan does not have the luxury. Last year, there were fifty-two suicide bombings in Pakistan – nearly as many as in Iraq – and one thousand people died.

     This is who Casa is, a young man, easily swayed. We have to, first of all, make sure the jihadis don’t get him; give him an alternative. Do you remember being sixteen? How clear-minded were you at sixteen? You haven’t got a clue.

      With someone like Casa I was slightly apprehensive to begin with; I thought that people are going to hate him, in that he says and does very objectionable things. But at the readings that I give, people come up to me and say that they actually understood him. And of course, this is a guy who, as a child, was in those orphanages, which, even in non-war situations in the Third-World countries are hell. It is wartime and he’s a war orphan. As a child he has been raped and has been beaten, and when he grows up, he has raped and beaten others. He’ll say that his deepest belief is that human beings have nothing to offer but cruelty and danger. What kind of beliefs do you think this guy is going to have? And he’s out there in the world that we live in and we have to understand him.

 

... on his father's influence.

 

My father was a poet during his youth and early manhood, but he was living in Pakistan and in a country like that a marriage is arranged for you and you don’t really have much say in it. Very quickly the children came and he couldn’t write any more because now he had responsibilities. When I was growing up, I always felt that my father had a kind of wound, that he felt that his real life didn’t happen. He wrote poetry under a pseudonym, Wamaq Saleem, and in all three of my novels, the great Pakistani poet is called Wamaq Saleem – he will appear in all my novels, a small appearance. In The Wasted Vigil, he gives a reading and some college girls cover his car with lipstick kisses. I have done for my father, in the universe of my novels, what he couldn’t do in real life because of me. He is in his early seventies, retired, and he just reads and writes.

 

... on becoming a writer.

 

I wanted to be a painter. My friend, the writer David Mitchell, says that every writer is a failed something else, and I think I might be a failed painter. I wanted to paint, but the way things worked out I’m now a writer.

     I think that might come from the fact that I was unable to go to art school because we had to leave Pakistan, and when I arrived in Britain I spoke very little English. A school, the subjects I did well in were the sciences, because for physics, chemistry and maths and biology, your English needn’t be that good. You can get by on facts. But the subjects that interested me were literature, history, politics, sociology, and for those your English needs to be good. You had to write essays. At university, I studied biochemistry, but in my third year I realised that my English was now good enough, that I could write a novel, so I dropped out and began to write Season of the Rainbirds (1993). I didn’t know how to have a book published, but the writers I loved, like Updike and Naipaul, were published in England by André Deutsch, so I sent it to Deutsch. Ten days later, I got a phone call – ‘Can we speak to Miss Nadeem Aslam?’ I said, it’s mister, and they said, ah, well, you know, there was some debate in the office; we were trying to work out whether you were a man or a woman, whether this was the work of a man or a woman, and we all decided that Nadeem Aslam had to be a woman because the writer’s constantly articulating the problems and pains of women. As a writer, one wishes to align one’s sympathies with the weak in the world, and in the society I come from – and that might be the case all over the world I should think – the weak are often the women.

 

... on women.

 

I could never write a book in which a woman doesn’t appear on the first page. It’s just the way I am. In my personal life, I panic if I don’t see a woman for an hour and a half. It’s just one of those things. At one point in Maps for Lost Lovers, Shamas says that Kaukab is the heroine of his life. She is the heroine of the book. Without her, this book wouldn’t have been written as it was.

     Without women, the story of the book would only be two hundred pages. With them, it’s twice as long. Ladies, thank you very much. With you the world is twice as beautiful, twice as wide, twice as rich.

     I kept throwing things at Kaukab to see how she is going to cope because she is such an interesting personality. Her faith is so strong. Readers ask at the end of the book what will become of her. Well, she is going to make everyone’s life hell – of course, she is – and her own life too, but she will live through it. The essence of Kaukab is the last sentence we get from her: ‘It is not our place to say why or how to god. We can only say help.’

 

... on anger.

 

There are certain duties as a novelist that I have to be aware of when I’m writing these things. If anger is there, then it must be mine. Yes. I am angry at some of the things that are happening in the world, just as I hope there is the rapture that I think existence can bring us.

 

... on his next book.

 

It is set in Pakistan, and it’s a companion piece, you might almost say, to The Wasted Vigil. I found I couldn’t talk about the war on terror and the war in Afghanistan with any depth from a Pakistani viewpoint. In order for me to explore it fully, it had to be another novel. There wasn’t room in Maps for Lost Lovers – I thought it would actually alter the shape of the book if I tried to add another story. I told myself I should write it separately. It’s coming along fine. It should take two, two-and-a-half years, now I know what I am doing.

 

... on beginnings.

 

When I’m beginning a novel, I see it as a house with the door locked from the inside. I knock and nobody is letting me in, and I circle the house, I look through the windows, through the curtains, and I can see things going on in the rooms, figures moving around. At some point, one of the characters lets me in and he shows me the rooms, says that’s where my mother sleeps, that carpet was bought by my uncle from Persia and that staircase was painted by me last month. And then I begin to know … Marcus, it was, who let me into the last house.

 

... on the importance of being alone.

 

There is a small garden at the back of my house which I am not allowed to go into. But my desk faces onto this enclosed garden which is very overgrown, with tall grasses and tall flowers, and I have a fox that visits. Isn’t that amazing! In the middle of London! I have a cuckoo and woodpigeons. And of course when I write at night, the moths come, attracted to the light. And I write and they are banging against the window. It’s lovely to have that when I am writing. And their eyes, when they are at a certain angle on the other side of the glass, catch the light from the lamp, and they are like tiny specks of gold, the brightest gold you could ever see, and they glitter like tiny dots in the darkness. It’s just a few moments, the fraction of a second. Who needs drugs? The world is beautiful.