Many years ago, an editor at Critical Muslim asked me to contribute an essay to an issue she was preparing, on the wide-ranging theme of ‘Relations’. I decided to write a memoir about a writer I’d known who had been both friend and mentor: but I wasn’t a practised memoirist, and I kept wanting to adopt a fictional register.

I abandoned the piece and turned to a subject with whom I felt more comfortable, the great novelist Qurratulain Hyder; her works in English had inspired me early in my career; her writing in Urdu had actually drawn me back into the language which should have been my first, but had effectively been my second all through my sentient life.

I wasn’t going to produce a critical piece; I had already written introductions to two of her books and wanted to pay a personal tribute to the influence she’d had over two decades of meetings and letters, on my development as a reader and a writer. It wasn’t a hard piece to write; I didn’t have to consult my diaries as memories came easily, of conversations and letters. All I wanted was to be as honest as I could, without the fiction writer’s privilege of embellishing fact or reinventing anecdotes or episodes. It was the second long autobiographical piece I had ever written.

Shortly after it was published, I was working on Hermitage, a new collection of stories, with Shahbano Alvi of Ushba books. I was experimenting with a variety of genres: fable, parable and historical anecdote, along with more conventional fictional forms. At some time during the process, Shahbano read my piece on Annie. She suggested we include it in my collection.

But it isn’t fiction, I said. Her response was that some of my other pieces veered close to memoiring, as they borrowed freely from episodes of my life; as a short story writer I’d used narrative techniques, notably in my use of dialogue and shifts in time, that brought the piece close to some of my fiction. After all, she said, truth or fiction, it was a story.

So is there more ‘truth’ in my fictions, or in my attempts to document what I classified as ‘real’? As I grow older, I find that my imagination has retreated. I’ve found myself drawing more and more on memory — often, though not always, on very recent memory — for my fiction.

Later, a teacher of literature wrote a review in which he described it as semi-fiction. I’d tried to adhere to the facts; but how closely can one remember conversations? Is there always an element of invention in recalling the past? In many parts of the story, I’d left out years in between for which I had no written record; if it had been a work of fiction, I could have used my imagination to fill in these gaps, or merely assigned years to meetings I remembered but couldn’t date.

What I did realise at the time was that I had a puritanical attitude to what was classified as autobiography: if I was writing it, that is. (Years before, I’d written ‘Electric Shadows’, a piece about my Karachi childhood, which in her review of my collection Turquoise critic Maya Jaggi had described as resembling a memoir: in fact, though I hadn’t intended to write a memoir, it was as close to real life as I could possibly make it, because I hadn’t needed to invent any episodes, only to recapture pictures of my past that were vivid and, to me, poignant.)

Writing about the writer Rafi Ajmeri, my mother’s maternal uncle who’d been an acclaimed young writer in the 1930s of the last century and died at the age of 33, was more complex. I’d told Asif Farrukhi about this relationship when he first interviewed me in Karachi in 1996; the following year, he sent me a photocopy of Rafi’s only book, Kehkashan. Almost two decades later, he planned to publish a small selection of Rafi Ajmeri’s stories. He asked me to write an introduction.

However, information about his life was scarce; adolescent when he died, my mother didn’t remember the exact year of his death. We rang up her brother in India for more details. My piece was a patchwork of hearsay and their memories. Drawing on the recollections of others to memorialise the life of a relative who died nearly two decades before your birth is another trajectory entirely from arranging your own reminiscences in a cohesive pattern. Asif never completed the selection, but I did publish the story of my search for Rafi in Dawn. Shahbano chose to include this too in Hermitage.

‘The Lady of The Lotus’, another piece in Hermitage, draws on a journal my mother kept in 1962; she writes of her singing lessons and the time she felt she needed to purloin her social and domestic life to dedicate to her art in a milieu that didn’t quite understand her passion. Again, my purpose was to be faithful to her written words and, at the same time, to build a frame that would highlight her voice and also create a text that was evocative of a life, a time and a place. It was — and is — read as fiction, though at times I want to protest that I haven’t tampered with my mother’s words or embroidered my own memories: she read, and approved, of the story.

So is there more ‘truth’ in my fictions, or in my attempts to document what I classified as ‘real’? As I grow older, I find that my imagination has retreated. I’ve found myself drawing more and more on memory — often, though not always, on very recent memory — for my fiction. But when asked to write a memoir, I feel it’s easier to write about important others, and my encounters with them, than about my own experiences.

When asked to write about my memories of leaving places, people and loves for a recent anthology, I was faced with the dilemma of self-repetition: I’d already used the raw feelings of joy and loss I’d experienced in my youth, often by giving them to characters very different from myself. Today, I’d rather remember the people I’ve known and the places I’ve seen than revisit situations and traumas I long ago concealed in dusty and sometimes unwritten diaries.

The columnist is a London-based short story writer and novelist

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, September 28th, 2025