Readers of Nadeem Aslam’s novels have come to expect a certain attention to beauty. His prose is often described as luminous, the images he offers, startling and rare—buffaloes whose hipbones jut out like archipelagos, a moth from Madagascar that frequents birds at night to drink their tears. In The Golden Legend, his fifth novel, this beauty is juxtaposed with a kind of terror. After a Christian neighbourhood is set on fire, a deluge of rose petals falls on the burnt earth from a politician’s plane. Set in Zamana—a fictional city in Pakistan, Aslam tells the story of an architect couple Massud and Nargis, and their Christian housekeeper Lily and his daughter Helen. He writes with great intimacy about their loves and losses, always drawing us to a larger picture of history, intolerance and power. Always reminding us that the voice of a lone bird singing I am I am I am… is an important, necessary act of insistence. Excerpts from an interview:
Why is beauty so important to you, and does it ever get tiring?
I think beauty for the sake of it is not important to me. I use it to ask certain metaphysical and spiritual questions. I write novels about East and West, tradition and modernity, the global and the local, and about religion and secularism. But one of the main questions of my novels is: Do the horrors of the world diminish the beauty of the world, and—equally importantly—does the beauty of the world diminish the horrors of the world?
Your writing habits are legendary—blindfolding yourself while writing Blind Man’s Garden, staying up all night, not seeing anyone for weeks. Do you see what you do as a kind of method-writing?
I love writing. I take delight in the fact that my initials in Urdu look like a pen next to an inkwell. I would do whatever is required of me to write the best book I can. I write at night and sleep during most of the day. It’s simply because in my 20s I ended up living next-door to noisy people.
I could only write when they were asleep, and that habit has stuck. Beyond that I don’t really have any other set methods. You must understand that the Nadeem Aslam who is answering your questions is not really the Nadeem Aslam who writes the books. He is a different person. I know him vaguely. I can become him fully by arriving at my writing desk and writing.
You lose your self while you are writing. When I turn up at my desk at midnight, everyone in the world is there with me. Everyone in India, everyone in Pakistan and Bangladesh and Sri Lanka and England. All my concerns, all the concerns of the people close to me, everything I have read in the newspapers. The study is completely filled with people. But slowly, as I begin to write, people begin to leave, so that eventually only I remain. And as the hours pass I too leave and only the book remains, writing itself.
All Massud’s notebooks begin with the line, “War will drown in the writer’s inkwell”…. I’ve heard you speak about the failure of western fiction to respond to the aftermath of 9/11. But there’s also an opposing view that insists on the necessary separateness between art and politics—how do you respond?
It’s a very important question. I want my work to be political like the work of Milosz, Garcia Marquez, Faiz, Mahasweta Devi, Naipaul, Morrison, Berger, Camus, Baldwin… Recently there was a suicide bombing at the Sufi shrine in Sehwan in Pakistan, killing more than 70 people. There is a similar bombing of a Sufi shrine in The Golden Legend . I wrote about it because I know about the politics of Pakistan. Given our military, our politicians, our mullahs—I knew such a thing was a possibility. Many of the things that happened in the aftermath of the Sehwan massacre also happened in my novel—people blamed the so-called secret hand of India and Afghanistan; the lack of medical facilities near Sehwan meant further deaths; and people said shrines are forbidden in ‘true’ Islam anyway. To some people, dancing in the name of Islam is a bigger affront than massacring in the name of Islam. And it’s all being engineered and manipulated by the politicians, by the mullahs and the military. There are reports from Sehwan that some of the body parts of the dead have been thrown onto a garbage heap, instead of being buried. Cats and dogs are eating them. Did India, Afghanistan and the CIA prevent Pakistan from burying them, from having enough hospitals in the area around the shrine? I come from Pakistan and live in England as a brown man. I don’t have the luxury to be non-political, either in life or in my work.
There is a very strong moment in the book when Farid says to Lily, “despair has to be earned.” I think there is a collective despairing in the world right now, and in order to earn this right, I wonder, how should we be thinking about the transformative powers of despair?
The British Prime Minister, Theresa May, said last year, “If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.” I want her to take a DNA test—and in a way The Golden Legendis that DNA test, telling Mrs. May that she is in fact a citizen of everywhere, no matter what she thinks. How to counter the ugliness of the world? To be kind; to never lie; to not be competitive; to ask for forgiveness; to give forgiveness; to just want to make a living, not a profit; to say to someone, “You’ve given enough”; to say to someone, “I think I can give more”; to leave your wealth to the nation at your death, not just to your family; to observe the birds appear and disappear with the seasons around you; to notice how something that happens over the course of a decade in a human life can be over in a week in the life of a moth; to read a novel or spend 20 minutes looking at a picture. I am an atheist; but I believe that Paradise, if it existed, would resemble the books of Italo Calvino illustrated by Persian miniaturists. All this may sound impractical, abstract and amorphous, but I can tell you that I know people who live by these rules. That is where hope is.
You’ve written about Kashmir in this book—it’s such a fraught dialogue in both India and Pakistan, how do you think fiction can allow for openings?
Kashmir can be written about with intelligence and integrity, which are the main instruments of the writer dealing with any subject. I know the Pakistani side of the Line of Control only but I believe I can imagine the Indian side of the Line, sympathetically and with wisdom. I love the freedom to invent that is given to me by fiction. In a non-fiction work about, say, my beloved Agha Shahid Ali, I can only write ‘he said’, ‘he wrote’ or ‘he did’, and then I have to provide footnotes and references. But in a novel about Agha Shahid Ali, I can write ‘he thought’, ‘he felt’, and ‘he dreamed’—all this even if I know it be officially untrue. Thomas Mann in his novel Lotte in Weimar imagines the inner life of Goethe, and puts his own thoughts into Goethe’s head. And it is a delight then to think that Goethe himself had done something similar: he had imagined God in Faust , putting his own thoughts and ideas into the Divine mind.
Tishani Doshi is a writer and dancer. Her most recent book is The Adulterous Citizen: Poems, Stories, Essays.
