Mirza Waheed, who lives in London and worked for the BBC for 10 years, has written three novels. The first two, The Collaborator and The Book of Gold Leaves , were shortlisted for several awards, and his third, Tell her Everything , has won The Hindu Prize 2019.
W ritten in deceptively simple yet powerful prose, it asks as difficult questions of the protagonist as it does of the reader. The writer speaks of those choices in this e-mail interview. Excerpts:
Your book is in many ways an oblique study of a totalitarian regime. What drove you to write it?
The novel started with a simple premise: what must go on inside the mind of a successful man who late in life begins to take stock of what he might have lost and gained in his single-minded pursuit of success and prosperity. That initial question was, of course, intrinsically linked to his immersion in a system that puts a premium on complete obedience and conformity, with little or no room for difference, leave alone dissent. As Dr. K is the product of a culture where docility of the citizen, acquiescence, and an uncurious deference to authority are often valued, he doesn’t think he’s selling his soul. He genuinely believes that by following orders he can succeed in life, acquire wealth, and he does quite well by the end of his career, living in an expensive apartment with a view of the Thames.
I think the corrosion of his soul comes about not because he believes in all this but because he’s unable and unwilling, at least initially, to see that ‘merely following orders’ doesn’t exempt him from accountability, that he’s complicit in an inhuman system of justice.
Having said that, he’s also a complex figure in that he is aware that penal systems can be cruel and barbaric even in so-called advanced societies. Totalitarian systems of all kinds depend on, and cultivate and impose, uncritical subservience to one kind of “ideal or other”, a “gold standard” that everyone must follow.
Dr. K’s naïve complicity in the system and the ambiguity of his character drove me on.
In the book, Dr. K’s choice is between sanctioned wrongdoing and official protection. Do you believe that politically we are today being offered the same sorts of moral choices? And is it going to be our individual consciences that have to stand up and be counted in the end?
Yes, and it’s quite probably worse in many parts of the world now, in that the state, whether autocratic or democratic, religious or secular, is increasingly characterised by a disregard, even erasure, of individual autonomy. I agree with your description of the moral choices ‘on offer’ today. Equally, we can detect a quiet rebellion from our consciences. We must also note that all these categories can’t be absolutes.
In the world of the novel, Dr. K probably discovers that the soul, too, has a spectrum. As his daughter, Sara, says at some point, “You are a good man, a very good man: that’s the reason you became a perfect wreck. You are, certainly were, a great father. A good man, a good father. But not good enough.”
It’s such an emotionally intense book. How long did you take to write it? And what, if any, was the fallout on your and your family’s emotional state during the writing and after?
It would be dishonest to say that it was an easy novel to write. It took me a while to get inside the head of Dr. K, but once I had some sense of his voice, I became excited by the form of the novel: Dr. K is essentially rehearsing the long conversation that he wants to have with his estranged daughter who lives in the U.S. But being both protagonist and narrator, he also anticipates her answers, or the questions she may ask, which was both fascinating and challenging for me, as I had to get those looping mind-rehearsals right.
None of it is real, of course, because it’s all in his head, and the question then was: can he get it right, how can he get it right? Equally, he’s meticulous when putting down the facts of his life. He wants to give Sara an honest account of his life, his savanah-e-umri — ‘the occurrences or accidents of one’s life’ (novelist Nadeem Aslam’s translation).
By the time I finished a third draft of the novel, my own daughter, who was born around the time I’d started making notes for the novel, was nearly four. Her presence kept me calm.
I was often racked by self-doubt but then again, show me a writer without self-doubt. My family have always been more than supportive and mostly know when to stay out of my way — except the little one, of course. I wrote when she allowed it. This is also the first novel that I asked my wife to read before I sent it out. Novelists Kamila Shamsie, Mohammed Hanif and Alex Preston read an early draft and their words provided a dose adrenaline at the right time.
Within months of your book’s release, Kashmir was bifurcated and locked down. I know from your social media posts how angry you are. Will you write about it? Will writing help? Can literature impact politics?
I am still angry with the Indian state for its actions in Kashmir and I think I’ve written a few times about how I feel about it all. Literature helps us make sense of ourselves and of our world, which is shaped by politics whether we like it or not, whether we acknowledge it or not. And, of course, literature sheds light on the world in a way no amount of instant news or social media can; it shakes the lid off the darker aspects of our world. Fiction, however, takes time to gestate, to ripen, if I may.
Yes, I will write about it. In what form and shape, I do not know.
Do you divide your time between Srinagar and London? Which city would you rather live in, other things being equal? Especially now, as the world battles a pandemic and the Valley is still denied 4G services.
Srinagar is the city of my birth and youth. Even if bruised and brutalised, for me it remains the “emerald city”, as a visiting Japanese photographer called it in the 1970s. London is in some ways the capital of the world, a great city like no other, and I quite like it here — despite the wound of Brexit. Since my children were born here and I stay and work at home, I can’t live away for long periods. My heart, however, remains split. There’s also Delhi in the middle, that mad, cruel and yet magnificent city, where I lived and loved for some years as a young man. The recent dance of death in the city broke my heart.
What are you working on now?
I am trying to write about children and trees. Trees and children. That’s all I know at the moment.
vaishna.r@thehindu.co.in
