KARACHI: Listening to Muneeza Shamsie and Shahbano Alvi discuss the latter’s third book, a collection of English short stories, A New Pigeon on the Block & Other Stories, at the Liberty Books flagship outlet on Friday, was like taking a peak into the author’s mind which carries many precious memories of people, places, friendships and challenges, well, as much as she allowed you to see.

Shahbano Alvi is a multi-talented writer, poet, visual artist, filmmaker, director and publisher, who picked up the pen again some eight years ago, in 2017, after a long gap from the time when she used to write Urdu poems in the 1990s. In 2017, she started writing short stories, which were a reflection of the life she had lived, her travels and the emotions she had seen others display.

“Suddenly, I had so much to say that my words used to spill over on paper,” Shahbano told Muneeza.

“Whether I was writing about people here or anywhere else in the world, I had realised by then that emotions and human nature were similar. I already had a collection of memories from my own life. Then all I had to do was mix and match the characters to be placed in different situations and settings. My writing was very cathartic for me. On paper it took its own shape,” she explained.

Author Shahbano Alvi says title of her third book inspired by a pigeon seen during lockdown

The Covid-19 pandemic also effected Shahbano’s writing. “I was taking a lot of photographs during that time. There was an online competition of posting a picture a day during the lockdown. That’s when I realised how many birds and butterflies had started coming here. Maybe we had the time to watch nature or they came out more on finding no humans around,” she wondered aloud while sharing that her book’s title, which is also the title of one of the stories in the book, came to her after seeing a new type of pigeon during the lockdown.

On Muneeza’s asking Shahbano, about her inspiration to write, said that she has been an avid reader though out. “I spent a part of my childhood in East Pakistan, from the age of nine to 13. I shared my love of reading with my parents. They used to order books from West Pakistan. My mother read both Urdu and English literature and my father was more into other type of books and travelogues.

“Exposed to a huge variety of reading material at home, I was also introduced to Bengali poets such as Rabindranath Tagore and Nazrul Islam by friends. I may not have been old enough to understand the depth of their poetry back then but I absorbed it all to come back to it later on,” she said.

She also shared how she got into book publishing before writing. “There came a time in my life when my husband had heart attack at the age of 39 and my mother-in-law was battling cancer. I was going through so much then when a friend suggested I get a job to take my mind off my problems for a bit to keep my own sanity. That’s when I got a job as the design department head at Oxford University Press [OUP]. I enjoyed it very much,” she said.

Shahbano left OUP in 1999 and she set up her own publishing house, Ushba, in 2001, which kept her very busy. After her husband’s passing, in 2015, she started writing by fictionalising her time spent in East Pakistan and Lahore after she returned from there.

She writes in Urdu as well as English but feels that when writing in Urdu she is afraid she may give away too much of her personal feelings as Urdu happens to be her mother tongue with which she is too comfortable.

“With English, my second language, an acquired language, I still feel that I can control the emotions and not give away everything that is going on inside my head, which is too personal to share for now,” she explained.

Published in Dawn, October 11th, 2025