![]() Remember that awful foreign-policy shorthand? You enact violence upon a people when you tell a single story. After 9/11, the West wanted “answers” to questions like “Why Do They Hate Us?” from writers from “Af-Pak”. ![]() It’s the only way to write! But, yes, I was sick of those single-note stories about Islam and terrorism. I didn’t have a readership in mind - I write only about what intrigues me, or sparks my interest. Did you have a specific readership in mind? They break away from the mould the West has cast Pakistan in and are also unburdened of any effort to present a particular image of Pakistan to the West. Like those of Daniyal Mueenuddin and Ali Akbar Natiq, your stories present a picture of Pakistan that is close to reality. In a spiteful world, they find safe harbour in each other. But is their marriage a cycnical arrangement? No. Similarly, in Tomboy, Zarrar and Asha decide to marry each other in order to keep their sexualities a secret. Her use of “one” - “One has vastly improved the lives of the poor” - paints her with tragi-comic faux gravitas, but she also cares about the women of Maujpur, because her own ambitions were, as we later learn, thwarted by her father. And, yet, a lot of people have written to me to say that ZB is their favourite character! She’s real, she has problems, but she’s also constantly trying to do better by herself. The younger generation, Kashif and Farah, critique ZB for her hypocritical ways. A Life of Its Own (Part I) is a story about generational conflict, and change, and the slow march of progress. The intersection of class, sexuality, and power intrigues me. Did you set out to work on these stories with a broad thematic range? Most of these stories are steeped in the ideas of love, sexuality and class. There are few things worse than your body and your life - decisions around who to love, whom to marry - being policed by the State, or by controlling or manipulative family members (who wield a lot of power in South Asia!). In the process, unlikely friendships and allyships emerge little ecosystems of resilience. My book is about characters improvising identities as they go along as a form of survival, protection, and creativity. If I had to coin a genre for the title story, it would be Surveillance Romance. It’s one of the central tensions in the book - characters navigating the expectations placed on them by society, by parents, by a large surveillance State. How important was it for you to dwell on their quests for individuality and autonomy, to portray them as trying to emerge from the straitjackets imposed on them by the conventional society? Your characters, both women and the young, struggle to navigate the challenges of a conservative and patriarchal society, sometimes at great personal costs. It was much later, after I’d finished the first draft of Breezy Blessings, that I began a Microsoft Word document and began taking myself seriously as a writer. I used to email myself thoughts and observations and placeholder openings. I flew back to Lahore, opened up my laptop, and feverishly wrote down a few lines that would later become the heart of the story - the friendship between Roshan and Mehak. I wrote Breezy Blessings after doing my first drama serial in Karachi. It took me five years to write this book. How did you arrive at these stories? How long have they travelled with you? The stories in Are You Enjoying? read like a kaleidoscope of contemporary Pakistan, with their characters walking the tightrope between tradition and modernity.
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