After a flurry of Lucknowi-style exchanges over the logistics (“I’ll be happy to come where it works for you”; “No, no, you choose the venue”), we finally met in a crowded Italian restaurant in South Kensington. It was a miserably wet and blustery afternoon, even by London standards. Both of us arrived looking a bit ragged and needing a hot drink to revive us.
In the age of the celebrity writer, policed by their agents and PR team, Aamer Hussein is a pleasant exception — unfussy, down-to-earth, and so courteous that people often ask him if he is from Lucknow. No, from Indore, he protests. Indore is where his mother comes from; and where he spent a lot of time as a child.
As identities go, Hussein — a British citizen born to a Pakistani father and an Indian mother both of whom later settled in Britain — couldn’t have been more multicultural. And then there is his Muslim identity to boot. Not the easiest of identities post 9/11.
A Muslim character in 37 Bridges , his latest collection of stories, recounts how after the July 7 London bombings his son had difficulty getting a visa: “If he wanted to go to almost anywhere in the world he had to wait for weeks... He’s British now, says it’s a relief as far as airports are concerned, but they still pick him out of the crowd.”
Hussein insists that he takes as much pride in being British as in being a Pakistani of Indian heritage. And a Muslim. His Muslim identity matters to him particularly, and he believes there’s no reason for people to be apologetic about their religious identity so long as it doesn’t subsume their other — secular — identities.
But what the 60-year-old writer-essayist-academic doesn’t like is being pigeonholed; and then expected to behave in a certain way. “I’ve been quoted, or rather misquoted, as saying that in order to succeed as a Muslim or Pakistani writer, one was expected to write about bombs and burqas. It was true at one time, but not any more,” he says.
Hussein is not an overtly political writer, but his characters react to political situations and take positions according to their political beliefs. “Since my metier is not political analysis, I’m generally better with discussing books; though my characters’ political views will inevitably find their way into my fictions, I have no didactic purpose when I write.’’
In one story, there is a reference to how “the election of (Narendra) Modi had driven a young friend to consider abandoning his research in India to come back to London”. The narrator, referring to the “young friend” in question, says: “Someone had told him that if he didn’t like India, he should go and blow himself up across the border. Living there’s becoming unbearable, he’d written. Even one’s friends are becoming strangers.”
The episode was based on someone who went through such an experience, he says. Of course, it also reflects his own concerns about India’s lurch to the Right. “I wonder what the future of secular India will be under Modi. But I still have faith in the dissident voices and in those who have expressed their opposition to any attempts to segregate society.”
What about India-Pakistan relations? “When the Congress was there, there was always hope for reconciliation, but I wonder about the possibilities now.”
His anxieties about sectarian strife and the threat posed by the Muslim Right in Pakistan are echoed in ‘Two Old Friends on a Stormy Afternoon’ in which two Pakistanis reflect on the political and cultural climate in their country. In another story, there are references to communal violence in Pakistan — “More killings in Karachi. Even in Ramadan,” laments a character.
The stuff that really interests Hussein, though, is the idea of cultural and physical dislocation (exile, migration), interrupted relationships, and what one critic has described as “the delicious pain of unrequited love and wisdom gained after lifetimes of suffering”.
Memories — often selective and sort of reinvented — play a central role in his stories. A man recalling a fragment from the past says to himself: “Yes, you forget nothing…Things change, people leave, and you reinvent the past to remember moments of happiness that weren’t always so bright, and pretend to forget what made you unhappy, so that you can live without the discomfort of memory.’’
Hussein has been praised for his stark prose and understated style. Mohsin Hamid hailed him as a “trailblazing figure” whose work is both “formally daring and deeply touching”.
So what made him turn to writing? Rather than go all dreamy-eyed and claim how that’s what he always wanted to do, Hussein smiles, “Because I wasn’t good at other things. The only two things I knew were singing and languages, but not good enough (to make a career). My teaching job came because I write.” That, of course, is an understatement. Hussein grew up in a bookish environment (his mother has a literary background) and I suspect that deep down he has always nursed the ambition to be a writer.
Since his first collection of stories, Mirror to the Sun was published in 1993, he has published two novellas and four more collections of short stories. Many have been translated into other languages. Unusually for a South Asian writer writing in English, he also writes in Urdu. Five stories in the new collection were first written in Urdu.
Asked what he thinks of contemporary Indian writing in English, he is too polite to say anything critical despite attempts to provoke him. Instead he names three or four writers “of my generation” whom he admires. Clearly, Hussein has no time for two of the most acclaimed South Asian writers — Salman Rushdie and Khaled Hosseini. He says he doesn’t “relate” to Rushdie, though he liked his portrayal of Bombay and Karachi in Midnight’s Children . Until then, other Indian writers were not writing about big cities; and he found Rushdie refreshing in that sense. Besides, Hussein could identify with both Bombay and Karachi.
He is harsher with Hosseini. After The Kite Runner , he seems to have taken to marketing Afghanistan’s misery to the outside world, according to him. “I liked his first book, but found A Thousand Splendid Suns full of clichés. It was catering to a certain market.”
As we prepared to wind up, I couldn’t resist asking why he chose to be a short story writer? Why not novels? But Hussein shrugs: “I prefer them.”
And was he content? Immediately I felt foolish as I remembered one of his characters witheringly dismissed contentment as a sign of mediocrity. I held up my hand indicating that it was the wrong question to ask. He smiled, and let it pass.
37 Bridges & Other Stories;Aamer Hussein, HarperCollins, Rs.350.
