She used to be the queen of similes. There was a time when she, on average, came up with half-a-dozen comparisons on a 30-line page. A couple of examples:

“He stood there like a blind man waiting for someone to help him cross the road.”

“He is as eloquent as the undead Polonius.”

An award-winning novelist finds it difficult to retain her charm after 20 years

She could do that at will. Words stood before her with folded hands, at her beck and call. Not anymore.

Arjumand got the title of the queen of similes after her first novel won The Prize. The decision in her favour was unanimous. The judges had hailed her writing for its linguistic inventiveness. The fact that all her schooling and university education was done in Pakistan had pleasantly surprised them. “How can someone write such sparkling English when they have never even been to England or America?” Another exclaimed, “There are so many astounding similes in the book. She is the queen of similes!”

Her novel was titled I Have Beautiful Eyes And Curly Hair. Set in the picturesque Kaghan Valley, it revolved around a married couple trying to break the shackles of their colonial past. The couple has twins, a boy and a girl, who love the game of cricket, but don’t realise, until the end of the story, that cricket is a colonial evil spirit conjured to put a whammy on the subcontinent. One of the twins, the boy, falls in love with the daughter of the owner of a sportswear shop who belongs to a rival ethnic group. The families don’t allow his love to blossom, and the boy commits suicide. “His life proved as useless as Rahman Baba’s poetry in modern-day Pakistan.”

Once the novel won The Prize, Arjumand became an instant literary sensation. For a couple of months, she did nothing but give interviews to national and international news networks. She spoke with clarity and a sense of purpose, using one turn of phrase after another, bedazzling her listeners, prompting one of them to chant, “She is women’s answer to Julian Barnes.” As a natural follow-up, invitations to read papers on contemporary trends in fiction at literary conferences came her way, thick and fast. She didn’t refuse any. And within a year, Arjumand Khan was the most sought-after keynote speaker in the world.

Her keynote addresses mostly centred on the subjects of art for life’s sake, literature as an agent of social change, and the interrelatedness of the various genres of art. She backed up her powerful speeches with insightful articles written for reputed international dailies and magazines. It didn’t take long for her attention to switch seamlessly from literature to the burning political issues of her time.

Arjumand always knew there were many things that had gone awry in recent years in the country of her birth. Addressing her young readers at the London School of Economics (LSE) she bemoaned that fundamentalism was Pakistan’s Frankenstein; illiteracy was making the abhorred monster’s work easy; poverty had already shrunk her countrymen’s souls to ghostly thinness. The consensus at the LSE was that she had expressed her concerns with poetic grace.

Arjumand was able to draw the attention of the international community to these pressing issues like never before. Almost all of her fans and a section of the people of Pakistan, those who were familiar with the English language, hung on to every word she wrote, each syllable she uttered. But in her country there were those as well, in big numbers, who had harboured misgivings about her from the moment she acquired global recognition. They thought she was an imposter, a Western agent, a global spook, Mata Hari.

This made Arjumand’s resolve steelier. She was the torchbearer of truth, a writer whose speeches and essays held a mirror up to society.

But society, her society, was not interested in telling things as they were. It wanted fiction. It fed on stories that had meat and words peppered with ‘like’ and ‘as’ — tales told with a plethora of similes. For them, fiction was greater than truth. Fiction made them feel grand. It made their past sound like a dream with a happy ending; and their future, a carnival.

On the other hand, Arjumand had, by now, become inured to telling the truth. As a famous responsible citizen of the country, nay world, she felt obligated to point out what was wrong with society. After all, her international audience had grown exponentially. Her fan base in the developed countries had widened so much that her talks would have lecture halls bursting at the seams. The lecture organisers were left with no choice but to turn the talks into ticketed events. To boot, she kept churning out one essay after another for Western newspapers, and occasionally for publications of her own country, highlighting the plight of the underprivileged and the disenfranchised, not sensing that the disenfranchised had other fish to fry. They wanted their warrior instincts to be recognised and feted. For them the past was their ever-present. They didn’t mind seeing blood flooding their streets.

It took two decades for Arjumand to realise that she was essentially the queen of similes — a decade too late, though. But her fiery speeches and masterful nonfiction, socially-conscious, politically-charged prose had enslaved her. She had no clue how to get out of their clutches. She had been using for far too long words such as injustice, oppression, extremism, fundamentalism, and human rights — words that fiction writers avoid in order not to sound pedantic. She had been writing articles and giving interviews to celebrity talk-show hosts and academics for 20 years. She was getting a bit jaded now. But how could she put a halt to her noble activities? She liked, but never publicly acknowledged it, when journalists and social commentators addressed her as a political activist. The word ‘activism’ brimmed with meaning. She was active, she was an activist and she represented activism.

Twenty years after her debut prize-winning novel, the urge to retrieve her stature as a novelist began to bug Arjumand. She felt as if she needed the potion of fiction to reclaim her youthful narrative. So, she decided to write another novel. She had a plot in her mind.

She started, but couldn’t complete the first sentence to her heart’s content. She deleted the line and rewrote it. Didn’t find it good enough a construction from a winner of The Prize. She waited for a few minutes and then resumed writing her second book of fiction. Nothing doing. She decided to wait for a few days until she found a good, solid beginning to the story. She shouldn’t hurry.

During that period, Arjumand did a few things. She inaugurated a bookstore in Sydney, delivered a speech at the convocation of an Ivy League university and recorded her thoughts on the Geneva Conventions, in London, for a documentary on torture on prisoners of war. Doing all of that, she was unable to get her mind off the new novel.

After nine-and-a-half weeks, she was finally able to write her first sentence. “The day he blew himself up was the day his cherubic baby girl was born.” She was fine with the opening. She thought about changing the word cherubic as an adjective, but since it had religious connotations, she decided to keep it. She was now up and running. She phoned her agent and told him she’d be able to round off her second novel in two months, and would be happy if it got published before year-end. She wanted the book to hit the newsstands before her fiction writing hiatus entered its 21st year. Two decades sounded newsworthy. ‘Famous author Arjumand Khan’s second novel in 20 years creates excitement among her readers.’

She returned to her computer to finish chapter one. She was into her third paragraph when she came up with the line, “His two-day-old daughter’s face was as innocent as… as… as…” She couldn’t find the right simile to describe the infant’s face. After struggling with the sentence she decided to drop the simile and keep the sentence simple, “She had an innocent face.” She wasn’t totally satisfied with it, but the beginning was fine enough for her. “Well begun is half done” was her favourite idiom.

On the third page, Arjumand confronted another simile, “The woman’s clothes were as tattered as… as… as…” She stopped. She felt a cold shiver down her spine. Beads of sweat made a tiny elliptical line on her creasy forehead. “Oh God,” she said to herself, “I’m no more the queen of similes.” She dialled her agent’s number with her hands shaking like autumn leaves in a stormy wind.

Published in Dawn, EOS, June 25th, 2017