His new collection is a slim one, not even two hundred pages long. Yet, Pakistani author Aamer Hussein’s “37 Bridges and Other Stories” leaves you with the feeling that you have consumed multiple worlds, met multiple people, and lived multiple lives. In short, succinct ways, Hussein unfolds deeper, lasting experiences, allowing you to feel much more than just what’s being said. Every story, its contemporary setting familiar and its tone the kind of strong silent one that doesn’t need frills, paints a unique picture, drawing you in slowly. Already known as a man who wields his pen with ease and finesse, Hussein has authored eight other books, one of them a novella, and the rest, collections of short stories. With “37 Bridges and Other Stories”, Hussein proves yet again that he has mastered the art of telling a tale.
Excerpts from an interview:
Very different people inhabit the stories in this book. Could you talk about finding the characters? Arriving at, say, Murad, or Jami and Kazi, or Umair? What made you create them?
Umair came to me because some reviewer had just assumed my novel, which had just been published, was disguised autobiography and Mehran was me, which is untrue – he can’t even write fiction! As a young man I was obsessed with music and singing, and I wanted to write a story in which the narrator gives up his musical vocation for ever, but Umair went his own way and ended with a performance. Ghazali and Rubina were borrowed from a romantic novel; Marya, whom you only ever know obliquely, was inspired by the paintings of Leonor Fini and the German-Pakistani artist Esther Rahim, Kazi and Jami jumped out of a box fully grown and talking away about those subjects, trivial and important, that I often hear discussed when I’m back in Pakistan. Neither resembles anyone I know. Zohra and Shams were taken directly from life. Other characters are composites.
Were these stories written over a stretch of time, one after the other, or were they scattered and the collection brings them together?
Almost all of these stories were written between summer 2011 and autumn 2014; one, though, in 2010, while I was still editing ‘The Cloud Messenger’ and longing to get back to my favourite short form. My rate of production is normally 2-3 stories a year, but yes, they were written one after the other, albeit in gaps: three of them, though stylistically very different, question the conflict between faith and doubt, between or within the characters; two are linked by images taken from visual art; Karachi and the sea are in two, because I am constantly in and out of the city; and the two ‘Knotted Tongue’ stories, ‘The Swan’s Wife’, and ‘The Entrepreneurs’ were written in Urdu over a period of about a week in 2012: my rate of production astonished me, not least because I’d never written in Urdu before. ‘37 Bridges’, though it came later, echoes the themes of the ‘Knotted Tongue’ stories: why women choose to leave troubled homelands; friendship; the search for a small personal voice.
I ask the previous question because of how stylistically different they are from each other. How do you find the exact way in which you want to tell a story? How do you discover which method fits which tale?
I usually know the method when I begin, or discover it if I find the progress of the story difficult and swerve in another direction. I wrote ‘Two Old Friends’ mostly in dialogue as it was inspired by a similar story: ‘A Dialogue’ by one of my favourite writers, Qurratulain Hyder, and as I said earlier I was longing to escape the prison of the confessional novel at the time. With ‘Beni Mora’ I was visualising a particular novel as a film while I read it, and created an imaginary screenplay. It came very quickly. ‘The Tree at the Limit’ was inspired by a photograph and my desire to create a story round a painting; that became a series of paintings. That one wasn’t easy, though it’s short. I also love fables and parables, and often use them within my stories. I sometimes instinctively choose the memoir form, which is a staple of stories of all lengths: what a critic called autofiction. Then I get bored with that and stay silent until another way of telling suggests itself. I like to entertain myself, even to laugh, while I write, and to take the reader on a journey.
Each story is a snatch of life, sometimes a single afternoon and sometimes years, but they are still snapshots. So then, how do you know when it ends? And more specifically, where it begins?
I’ve occasionally deleted the end of a story, or (as in ‘The Swan’s Wife’) just left the story suspended, because it isn’t working on the page or in my head, or because I feel I’ve said enough. But I rarely changed the beginning, probably I always start with an image, a line of dialogue or a memory, and I think I’m always right in my choice . Twice, however, I started by knowing the words with which the story would end: ‘The Entrepreneurs’, for example, or ‘Love and the Seasons’.
‘Snap of life’, yes,but are these stories merely snapshots, though? The snapshot captures a single moment: that’s one of the clichés of the short story. Mine are deeply concerned with time, whether it’s internal or external, half a lifetime in an afternoon or on a journey. But to return to Hyder, she once pointed out that short story can cover the timespan of a novel, though with very different methods, and I sometimes write stories that move through several months and even years in a more or less linear progression of events.
Is there ever a temptation, to go on? To explore further, perhaps the story of the protagonist, or another character that you create and who becomes too fascinating to let go off?
Yes, sometimes! Umair appears as narrator or protagonist in several of these stories, even when he’s unnamed. I knew Maia’s story was untold when she appeared offstage in ‘Love’….as the Swan Feeder. More often, though, I say goodbye to my protagonists after a single long encounter. We’re not likely ever to meet Maia, Zohra, Fabi, Ghazali or Kazi again in another book.
While each story is told differently, there is one thing that I noticed in each of them...a kind of half hidden, half unsaid quality, like only part of the story is being told, and the rest is being thought...Do you think that's true of your work?
I wonder. I feel I say as much as I want to, and aim for clarity, though without nudging the reader with explanations or messages. Reading between the lines is the reader’s job, though a few of you are left puzzled, as if there’s a lost or missing part of the jigsaw. Actually I feel I’m often too transparent.
And they are also quiet, introspective, reflective stories. There is more thought, less action, the story progressing inside even as it moves on or stays still outside. It is this that seems the most difficult, to so completely inhabit another mind, another character.
Emotions and experience come first for me, but also the historical contexts that create them. That said, many of the stories here are based on encounters, meeting, dialogues and exchanges rather than self-examination: the narrators usually reach outwards, they are concerned with significant others, with making themselves known to friends or lovers, or recreating the lost or the dead. We never, ever know Marya in her own words; Ghazali, Safia and Kazi talk, but we never enter their inner minds. I like narrating from the outside, too. Pure introspection is the work of the lyric poet; as an extroverted writer of fiction I tell other people’s stories. I’d have loved to write poetry, but have no vocation for verse or rhyme. When a fiction writer tells me his/her primary concern is with crafting sentences, I flinch. If I haven’t told a story well, I haven’t done my job.
