November 2, 2003

Uzma Aslam Khan has received considerable acclaim for her two novels and her second, Trespassing, which was published in Britain this summer, is being translated into ten languages, including Spanish, Italian, Greek, Dutch, Portuguese, French and Swedish. Set mostly in Karachi, the plot revolves around three young people: Dia, the daughter of a silk farmer, Daanish, a Pakistani student in America and Salaamat, the son of an erstwhile fisherman. The whole is knit together by wonderful, finely observed details of natural life: sea shells, sea creatures, turtles and particularly, silkworms, which are used as a metaphor and as a device to impel the story forward. The descriptions of the natural world act as a foil to a claustrophobic society and a violent city and also illuminate the impulses which overtake her characters in their search for meaning and self. The quiet, chilling undercurrent of violence running through the narrative provides an incisive look into the brutalization of Pakistan in the wake of the Afghan war.

“I lived in Karachi during the turbulence of the 80s and early 90s, which is when the book is set,” Uzma says. “The experience must have left a deep mark on me. But I didn’t know I was going to set the novel during that period when I started writing the book, while I was living in Morocco. It just took that turn on its own. The beauty of fiction is that you tap into something visceral and at some point in the process of writing, the writer stops inventing the rules. She has to surrender to the book’s own rules.”

Uzma Aslam Khan provides a very vivid portrait of Pakistan’s drug-and-kalashnikov culture of the 1980’s, which sucks in the impoverished Salaamat but is linked to global politics and the first Gulf war which so preoccupy Daanish as a student of journalism in America. Salaamat’s displacement from his fishing village and his search for livelihood of Karachi leads him into the city’s bus addas and the underworld. Salaamat also provides the book with its strongest character and some of its most powerful passages.

“I made visits to bus body making workshops both in Karachi and in Lahore,” says Uzma. “I couldn’t have written those scenes without observing the work firsthand. I did a lot of research on the arms trade. I don’t know how Salaamat came about, but his sections were the ones I revised the least — maybe just a sentence here or there. I knew him intimately and vividly right from the start, when he’s beaten as a teenager in his village, and throughout each one of his many trials.”

Trespassing is a multi-layered novel, with some really exciting imagery. The narrative moves in and out of time to portray the conflicts of two generations, who try to break the rigid rules of society. The earlier lives of Daanish and Dia’s parents are closely interwoven with unexpected consequences for Daanish and Dia and their clandestine love affair.

The relationship between the outspoken and rebellious Dia, and her submissive England-returned friend Nissrine also provides an interesting comment on migration and society’s traditional expectations of women. On the other hand, Dia’s dynamic mother has empowered herself by becoming a successful entrepreneur. Her silk farm some miles from Karachi, is pivotal to the plot, as are the silkworms she breeds.

“Once I knew silkworms belonged in the story, I began doing a lot of research on silk farming,” Uzma says. “Some of it was through books, but I also visited a silk factory, and, most enjoyable of all, I kept a few cocoons in my room. Most of what Dia and Daanish describe in the book I myself observed close up. The cocoons DO move. And this is creepy, as I just don’t know how they know they’re being watched. Obviously they’re watching too. The reddish-brown liquid that oozes is incredibly foul smelling. It permanently stained my table. But I’m fond of the stain. And the moths that emerge — well, they’re just beautiful.”

In the novel, Dia has been deeply scarred by the brutal murder of her father and meets Daanish at the funeral of his father. Through the character of Daanish, the novel shows very clearly how an unhappy and possessive mother tries to use age-old customs to tie her only son to her irrevocably. The novel also explores issues of political and individual freedom through glimpses of Daanish at his college in America. There he discovers during the first Gulf war, that a journalist’s right to “freedom of expression” has limitations.

Uzma observes, “When I started writing the book, I was carrying a scene from my days at the University of Arizona — a character called Daanish, a student in the US, during the 1991 Gulf war, as I had been. I was obsessed by the way Americans swallowed everything they heard in the media, because I had found it impossible to talk to anyone in the States about the war. I started reading and researching and tried to make sense of it — and didn’t realize that this is what my character Daanish was doing, as he felt exactly as I did. So the evolution of this book began from that, though it was not linear. The original scene is no longer there.”

A slight, articulate woman, Uzma Aslam Khan lived in the Philippines, Japan and Britain as a small child, because her father was in PIA. However her family was mostly based in Karachi, where she did her O and A Levels, though she found the adjustment to Pakistan quite difficult at first. She had to adapt further when she joined a small college in upstate New York, which she remembers as cold and miserable. Her first year was particularly difficult. She was homesick, she missed spicey Pakistani food and lost weight. She found the pace of work very hard, particularly since her scholarship entailed earning and studying at the same time. She was constantly laid up by bouts of asthma and bronchitis too, all of which was “a nightmare”. She says her professors bailed her out, though it took her a while to appreciate and understand America. She believes that “small colleges in America are the best places” because the faculty and students have a close rapport. At college she was able to develop her interest in writing.

She graduated with a major in English literature and joined the creative writing programme at the University of Arizona in Tucson, a place she describes as “large and clinical”. She did not feel “as nurtured and cared for” by her peers as she had been at college and thinks she did not learn much either, but “the place was gorgeous”. She discovered she loved the outdoors, the colours of the sky, the cacti and the mountains and the excitement of bird watching. As a freshman, she also met a young American, Dave Maine, who was to become her husband and fellow-novelist.

At Tucson, Uzma began a story, which developed into her first novel The Story of Noble Rot, linking up the story of a child working in a carpet factory, with that of the factory owner and his wife. The story began with the image of the wealthy Mrs Masood walking into a small shop owned by the boy’s father, a carpenter.

“I never make a plot or an outline,” she says. “I begin with an image which provokes a set of questions: Who are the characters? Where are they going? Where have they been? Finding out what happens next is, I suppose, one of the things that motivates me the most — I’m like the reader in this way. I crave answers. This is what sets the story in motion.”

The Story of Noble Rot is a lively, poignant and accomplished first novel and received considerable critical acclaim, although it did not find a publisher for many years, until Uzma was recommended Penguin India. Uzma had finished Noble Rot after she and Dave left the United States and moved to Morocco. There she taught English as a second language, where she had “a wonderful set of students” She describes Morocco as a beautiful country with a “schizophrenic” society, which is more Westernized and less segregated than Pakistan, on the one hand, but because Morocco was known as a hippy capital, with rich Europeans, there was also a resentment.

Uzma and her husband were often shouted at in the streets, because she was mistaken for a Moroccan and people didn’t like the idea of mixed couples. Her husband was often pestered for visa, beers and money too. None of this has ever happened to them in Pakistan.

Four years ago, Uzma and Dave moved to Lahore. He is writing a novel too, though husband and wife have very different styles and approaches to work. Uzma needs to lock herself up and get “into a trance-like state” to write; Dave “can write sitting in a cafe” and likes music in the background. They also travel, listen to music, critique each other’s work and read. Uzma loves the novels of Louis de Bernieres, Charles Frazier, A.S. Byatt, Peter Carey and Matthew Kneale in particular. She conducted a creative writing workshop in Lahore for students from all over Pakistan, sponsored by the British Council, earlier this year.

“I focused on writing and reading because I felt schoolchildren in Pakistan are not taught enough about the craft of fiction. They’re not taught to understand that theme and plot evolve from the character, rather than imposing a theme on a story. I wanted them to have more compassion for the way writers work — it’s not a locked door, it’s a question of peeling layers like onions. The more you read, the more you understand. So we studied every word, every paragraph. I taught stories from the world over and they loved it. They said they had learnt to read better. We also wrote and critiqued each other’s work. The idea of peer critiques is alien here, but they liked that.”

Uzma has been invited to two recent literary festivals and is now launching her book in Europe, after which she hopes to go back to being “a caterpillar”. She says, “Writers are like silkworms aren’t they? When I write, I link threads and I don’t want anyone watching, or probing. I’m driven by an inner clock. And when I have something, it feels like a birth, a metamorphosis.” n

Trespassing is published by Penguin Books India and is distributed in Pakistan by Liberty Books (www.libertybooks.com)

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