[Continued from previous column]

“Take a slip of paper and write on it these words: I adjure you, O mice, who dwell here, not to injure me yourselves nor to permit any other mouse to do so; and I make over to you this field. But should I find you staying here after having been warned, with the help of all that is holy, I will cut you in seven pieces.”

This very fine recipe to banish field mice is to be found in E.P. Evans’s The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals, a book which covers the period from the 13th to the 20th century and is full of accounts of homicidal and reckless pigs, bulls, horses, donkeys, mules and cows and mischievous caterpillars, flies, moles, worms, snails and leeches. All of them were delivered a wide range of punishments and threats under the penal and religious codes, by both legal and ecclesiastical authorities, despite Thomas Aquinas’ interdiction that animals are not subjects of law, because they cannot understand words or think rationally.

I’m putting it all out there just to give you some idea of the fine works that made up the literature review for the project that was my first novel. And yet, the novel was not quite there. As mentioned in the previous column, the termites were helping connect the characters, but the bond was still ephemeral.

After the passage of so many years, I no longer remember exactly how I found a direction for the novel, or the mental process through which it came about but, finally, reading all those books paid off. Having written all the character sketches for my book, I could tell what would be interesting for the reader and that, without the slightest hint of nepotism, the novel’s leading protagonist should be my nana [maternal grandfather], a poet and a horseman whose health and circumstances had been considerably reduced and who, in his seventies, became obsessed with a female TV singer and finding himself a bride.

Every Sunday, he would sit with the matrimonial advertisements in daily Jang, and mark potential candidates with his red and blue pencil.

His eyesight was failing and, whenever he heard his favourites come on TV, he would get up from his chair and slowly make his way to the TV where, with his nose pressed to the TV screen, he could regale himself with her vision.

Every Sunday, he would sit with the matrimonial advertisements in daily Jang, and mark potential candidates with his red and blue pencil. One no longer finds these pencils in stationery shops, but there was a time when the half-red, half-blue pencils were widely available. Called checking pencils, they were traditionally used in editing. One used the blue pencil to write or mark material that needed to be inserted, while the red pencil was for content that should be deleted.

However, my nana had his own philosophy of usage for these pencils. He would first make a longlist of the potential candidates by circling the relevant ads with the blue pencil and, later, after a careful review, make a shortlist by circling them with red. What was the inspiration behind this philosophy, one does not know, although it might be helpful to mention that, during World War II, the blue-red checking pencils were also used to mark troop positions on maps.

Later, nana would compose his replies to these ads. A typical reply ran up to four pages. As my nana’s favourite, I was entrusted to post these letters and, ever the reader, I would often open these letters, and have my nana’s prose keep me company on my way to the post office. I remember a few things about those letters. That their prose was ornate and the approach poetic, in the sense that, when mentioning his age, he would exaggerate his youth by reporting himself 20 years younger.

Aware of nana’s doings, the family worried that one day his letter might reach someone in our circle of acquaintances, causing the family due embarrassment.

Alas, nana’s letters were not preserved by time, but I used the memory of my nana’s twin obsessions to create the fictitious singer Noor-i-Firdousi, and two letters that Salar Jang, the character inspired by my nana, sent her, one of which contained an ode.

An Ode to the Nightingale of the Battlefield
When the crow of war appeared cawing in the skies,
And on motherland’s unsullied virtue the evil eye cast,
Ere heavens sent a thousand armed seraphs to defend her throne,
The locks of fury spread out on her fair countenance, the Nightingale,
Rose in the spellbound heavens and mangled
the abject avis with her ire’s talons.
In her scorn his grave, and last perch the bird found.

Salar Jang’s obsessive, unrequited love for Noor-i-Firdousi became the novel’s driving force.

I also had a pet obsession of my own, which I wished to give full play in the novel as a secondary plot. This obsession had to do with the concept of infinite time and eternity. How to fathom time that has no beginning or end, and how to intellectually reconcile it with our notion of material time. This obsession was assigned to another character.

And thus, by slow degrees, the novel came together.

Some time after I had finished writing it, I remember visiting my former office, where I had worked as a sub-editor. Sitting there, listening to the editors and reporters discuss the day’s events, it suddenly occurred to me that I could seamlessly capture the whole scene with all its characters, and their gossipy, happy, boastful selves. From struggling to connect characters like the pieces of a patchwork quilt, I was beginning to see how I could weave lives together.

The columnist is a novelist, author and translator.

He can be reached via his website: micromaf.com

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, March 15th, 2026