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IFTIKHAR DADI: Good afternoon. My name is Iftikhar Dadi. I'm the director of Cornell's South Asia Program. It's my very great pleasure to welcome you today for the South Asia program's Annual Tagore Lecture. This is one of our favorite events in the program. I'm especially pleased that after two years of pause due to COVID, we were able to finally have the lecture in person starting last year and again this year. Welcome back, everyone.
In the late 1990s, Cornell Professor Emeritus of Operations and Industrial Research Narahari Prabhu and his wife, Mrs. Sumi Prabhu, initiated a generous gift to Cornell University, establishing the Rabindranath Tagore endowment in modern Indian literature. The endowment was created by Professor and Mrs. Prabhu in order to honor Rabindranath Tagore, a celebrated writer, and musician, and one of the great luminaries of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
In addition to their endowment, Professor and Mrs. Prabhu sought to, and I quote, "to take a strongly positive image of South Asian literature and books, including non-fiction, or prose, poetry as the restriction from India and other locations in South Asia in both national and English languages."
As our former program director, Professor Alaka Basu and her husband, Professor Kaushik Basu, wrote-- and I'm quoting. It's a long quote by Professor Basu, Alaka Basu and Kaushik Basu, "Professor and Mrs. Prabhu deserve deep appreciation and thanks from the Cornell community for this generous gesture. We are very fortunate that they decided to share their near obsessive love of literature in general and Tagore in particular by endowing this lecture series."
For those like us who know them personally however, the lecture is just one thing. What we got to appreciate and enjoy over the years are the long discussions on arts, culture, and literature that they were obviously [INAUDIBLE] to begin and to keep going. And it's particularly striking how this love of literature has made them good human beings in the best sense of the word, open to their worldviews, tolerant of other viewpoints, interested in other people and other people's stories." In these times of intolerance and violence, it is wonderful to find in the Prabhus this eagerness to know and to understand the variety of human experience."
The Prabhus to attend our annual lectures. But Mrs. Prabhu passed away a few years ago. And Professor Prabhu passed away just last October. So this is the first lecture that we are having after their passing away. And so it's a especially important one for us. I know that Professor Prabhu and family would have been deeply pleased to make possible today's lecture, Kamila Shamsie, who joins an impressive list of Tagore lecturers.
And I'm just mentioning the names of some of our past lecturers-- writers including Sunil Gangopadhyay, Kiran Nagarkar, Christi Merrill, Tahmima Anam, Ahmed Chaudhry, Mohammed Hanif, Ranjit Hoskote, Shyam Selvadurai, Neel Mukherjee, Anupama Chopra, Anuradha Roy, and Cheran, last year.
So now it's my great pleasure to introduce Kamlia Shamsie, who was born in Karachi, where she grew up, as I have also. It's especially important for me.
[LAUGHTER]
She has a BA in creative writing from Hamilton College in Clinton, New York and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. While at the University of Massachusetts, she wrote In The City by the Sea, which was published in 1998. This first novel was shortlisted for the John Llewelyn Rhys Award in the UK. And Shamsie received the Prime Minister's Award for Literature in Pakistan in 1999.
Her 2000 novel, Salt and Saffron, led Shamsie's selection as one of Orange's "21 writers of the 21st century." With her third novel, Kartography from 2004, Shamsie was again shortlisted for the John Llewelyn Rhys Award in the UK. Both Kartography and her next novel, Broken Verses from 2005, won the Patras Bokhari Award from the Academy of Letters in Pakistan. Burnt Shadows, from 2009, is Shamsie's fifth novel, which was short-- which was listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction and won an Ainsfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction.
A God in Every Stone was shortlisted-- which was 2014, was shortlisted for the 2015 Walter Scott Prize and for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. Home Fire was released in 2017 and was winner of the 2018 Women's Prize for Fiction, finalist of the 2019 International Dublin Literacy Award, and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. And her most recent novel is Best of Friends from last year. Her books have been translated in over 30 languages. Copies of Home Fire and Best of Friends are available outside the hall for purchase and courtesy of Buffalo Street Books.
Kamila Shamsie is the daughter of literary critic and writer Muneeza Shamsie, herself a renowned critic and writer, and also the niece of the celebrated Indian novelist, Attia Hosain, and the granddaughter of the memoirist, Begum Jahanara Habibullah. A reviewer and columnist, Shamsie has also been a judge for several literary awards.
For years, Kamila Shamsie spent time between London and Karachi, while also occasionally teaching creative writing at Hamilton College. She now lives primarily in London. A Vice President of the Royal Society of Literature and Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Manchester, she was one of the Granta's-- and I quote-- "best of young British novelists," end quote, in 2013.
In spring of this year, she has been a Belknap Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and at the Department of English at Princeton University. The lecture will be followed by a reception. So please join us for that. Today, Kamila Shamsie honors us with her presentation at the South Asia Program's Annual Tagore Lecture. Please join me in welcoming her.
[APPLAUSE]
KAMILA SHAMSIE: Thank you for that. And thank you to all of you who have chosen to be here when you could be in the sun. I'm going to be talking about and reading a little from Best of Friends, which, as Iftikhar mentioned, is the novel that came out just a few months ago. There's a question, which is so often asked of writers, it's become something of a cliche, leading to an eyeroll from people in the audience and sometimes, it should be said, from the writer herself.
The question is, where do you get your ideas from? The eye-rolling treats this question as though it were literal, asking for a particular location-- a treasure box of plot and character that a writer can scurry up to an attic somewhere when it's time to write the next book. But in truth, it's sort of unfair, the eye-rolling, because it's only the formulation of the question that allows us to respond in that way.
If you rephrase the question as, how do you know you have the start of a novel? Or can you tell us the points of origin for this or any other novel? Then the question reveals itself to go right to the heart of the whole mysterious business of creativity-- where it comes from, how it develops. If we ought to roll our eyes at that one particular formulation, where do you get your ideas from, it's because it possibly assumes a greater degree of control over the process of starting a novel than many of us possess.
"Where do you get" assumes action and purposefulness when, in fact, beginnings often come to us in a sort of hazy, amorphous manner, or at least to me. A kernel of an idea appears in the brain. You think, that's interesting. Sometimes, it disappears. Other times, it sticks around. And if it sticks around, other ideas both attach to it and spring from it. And that is the closest I can get to describing the process in a kind of general and abstract way.
But with my most recent novel, Best of Friends, the more often I've been asked how the novel started to take shape, the more I started to become dissatisfied with my own response. It's a novel that is primarily or centrally about a childhood friendship that advances into middle age. And I can't answer to my own satisfaction questions about why I became interested in writing about childhood friendships and how they shift with the passage of time.
But it's also a novel that starts in Karachi in 1988. And the question that I've increasingly wondered about and asked myself in the last few months that I've been talking about the book isn't why did I write about Karachi in 1988, but why did it take me so long to write about Karachi in 1988. For those of you who weren't alive 35 years ago or have a hazy memory of what might have been happening in Pakistan in that particular month of that particular year, let me explain.
On 17th August, 1988, Zia-ul-Haq, the military dictator who had ruled Pakistan for 11 years, was killed when a bomb went off on the plane in which he was a passenger. This, of course, is the central event in Mohammed Hanif's great novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes. I was 15 at the time. And I could only dimly remember a Pakistan before Zia. So this is my memory, not fictionalized except in the way that memory fictionalizes things. This is my memory of that day.
I was at home. The phone rang. These were the days when we only had landlines, of course. And it's sort of interesting now from that moment, where the phone rang. And it could be for anyone in the house. And it could be anyone. And you had no way of knowing these things until you answered it. I went to answer the phone in the hallway. There was another extension. But I remember this detail. It's clear in my memory.
It was an aunt of mine-- not an aunt by blood, but an aunt by affection, an auntie-- who asked to speak to either one of my parents. What was her tone of voice? Perhaps excited, perhaps overwhelmed, perhaps shocked. I don't remember that part. I told her they were both out. And she said, tell them Zia-ul-Haq has been killed. His plane exploded over Bahawalpur. My aunt's family lives in the city of Bahawalpur. I said I would tell them and hung up.
I don't know what time this was. But I have a feeling of strong daylight attached to the memory. Zia's plane went down at 3:51 PM. Sunset in mid-August in Karachi is around 7:00 PM. So let's say I answered the phone somewhere between 430 and 5:30. My parents returned home. Time passed. The sun set. I don't know this for a fact. But I know there is now a feeling of darkness outside and of light on in the house when we come to the other part of the memory, which has my mother running into the TV room where my father and I were sitting.
Probably I was reading because that probably was what I was doing at most times of my life at that point. Probably he was, too. Or perhaps, we were playing a card game, maybe Rummy-- if my sister was in the room, possibly 3 to 5, which was the game the three of us played together. I don't know any of that. I do know this. The TV wasn't on. I worked this out much later. If the TV had been on, we would have seen that regular programming was suspended.
And a sign filled the screen to say something both bland and ominous, something like normal service will resume later. My mother came running in and said, Zia is dead. And I said, oh, and repeated the details of that phone call. I can't fully recall the astonishment and disbelief of my parents. But I do remember one or maybe both of them saying, why didn't you tell us? Well, because she's always full of tall tales, I said, which was true. And my parents conceded this was true.
And for years, this was my story of the day Zia-ul-Haq died. Then in 2020, I was writing the scene in Best of Friends that takes place when Zia died. So here it is seen from the perspective of Zahra, one of the two protagonists of the novel. She's 14 at the time, as is her best friend Maryam, who enters the scene later. I was just a few days into 15 at the same moment in history. So this is from the novel.
"Her mother shouted for her father. Zahra ran out of the room in time to hear, 'he's dead,' her mother's voice giddy. 'Someone finally killed him.' 'What?' her father said. And her mother said, 'His plane exploded.' Her father, 'A rumor?' Her mother, 'No. It's confirmed.' They hadn't said his name. But there was only one person they could be talking about, holding onto each other's hands. Zahra said, 'He can't be dead.'
Her parents turned to her, each of them letting go of a hand and extending their arms towards her, so she could walk into their embrace. 'My God,' her father said, 'today of all days. Thank you, Allah. I'm a believer again.' But what will happen now? She didn't know why they didn't seem scared. Without the dictator who had ruled almost all her life, who could know what would happen? 'Now, you see, her father said, 'Now you'll see what this country can be.'
Her mother said the unimaginable words, 'Elections, Benazir.' Her father began to cry in a way that told her that all the tears he wept when Pakistan beat England in cricket were just practice for this moment, this turning of history towards the light. Zahra held her parents close, not wanting to be the one to tell them that they were wrong. None of this would happen. How could it? There would be another dictator. And he might be worse.
Her father switched on the television. The screen was taken up by a message saying normal transmission would resume shortly. Zahra and her parents stood and looked at it. And then her father opened the cabinet drawer, brought out a camera, and took a picture of the screen. The phone rang. And it was Maryam. 'Did you hear?' Maryam said. 'Yes, just now.' Speaking about it to Maryam made it feel true.
And the unspoken agreement to discuss it on the phone without naming it let her know that Maryam, like her, understood that the rules of the world hadn't changed and probably wouldn't. 'Sad for his family,' Maryam said. 'Yes,' her tone trying to suggest she had been thinking this, too. 'I hope things don't get too unstable.' 'Is that what your parents are saying?' 'My father and grandfather,' Maryam said. 'My mother, she's thinking about her old school friend. But no one really believes that's going to happen.'
Maryam's mother had been to school with Benazir Bhutto. But Zahra had never heard the word friend applied to her before. 'My father is upset that he may have to cancel his 40th party,' Maryam said. 'That's too bad.' Zahra's father slid open the glass door that led to the balcony. And the sound that came rushing in was a wedding song playing loudly through a car speaker-- no, two car speakers, three, the synchronization just slightly off. Her father clapped his hands and snapped his finger. Her mother responded in kind. And then they were dancing, laughing together. 'What's that noise?' Maryam said. 'That isn't noise. That's music.'"
I was drawing, in part, on my own memories for that scene. My first response was, yeah, that really was a fear of what terrible thing might come next, better the dictator you know. The possibility that one dictator might not be followed by another dictator didn't occur to me in that moment. But it was only when writing this fictional version of 17th August, 1988 and Zahra's feelings of disbelief that I rethought for the first time my response to the aunt who called and told me Zia was dead.
Why hadn't I repeated it to my parents? Yes, my aunt was known for exaggerations and tall tales. But I should have known that, in those days, when we were all so careful about what we said about the government on the phone, always aware that someone could be listening in, either through the crossed lines that were common place of our phone calls or a more insidious system of wiretapping by the intelligence services, that you simply assume to exist if you live in a dictatorship, I should have known that for my aunt to call and to say that a bomb explosion had killed the president was mind-bogglingly bizarre and could only be explained if a bomb explosion had killed the president.
Yes, she sometimes exaggerated. But a bomb is a fact, not an exaggeration. A dead president is a fact, not an exaggeration. It was only after I wrote Zahra saying, "He can't be dead," that I recognized I hadn't told my parents what my aunt said because I couldn't believe it. Since I was four years old, Zia-ul-Haq had been the all-powerful dictator in my mind. Out in the world, he might have died in an instant. But in my mind, that sudden extinguishing of his life simply wasn't possible.
By the time I sat down to start writing my first novel, In The City by the Sea, in 1994, I had been living for six years with a certainty of Zia's death. Yet, it wasn't his death, but his life that my mind went to when I started to put together pieces of that first novel. In The City by the Sea is set in a nameless city, in a nameless country, in an unspecified year. But it's also quite clearly a likely fictionalized version of Karachi in the 1980s with the figure of a military dictator looming large. He has no name and is only called the president.
The novel centers around an 11-year-old boy, Hasan, whose uncle is the leading figure in the pro-democracy movement in this nameless country and who spends almost the entire novel under arrest. Here is a strange thing I must confess. It was while writing this lecture that I realized I had no memory of what happened to the president at the end of that novel. I knew that dictatorship ended within the novel. But I didn't remember how. Did I kill the president in my novel?
I literally actually-- this is not a novelist's invention. I literally had to go back to the novel and look at the end to discover that a combination of factors, including the growing popular movement against the dictatorship, forced the president to seek asylum abroad. I do know why I didn't kill the president in the novel, even though the plotline plays with the idea. In fact, the 11-year-old boy dreams of that happening. But it's a dream that is both terrifying to him and implausible to us, the readers, which is to say the storyline within that novel first veers towards, and then away from the assassination of a president.
The reason I didn't kill the president in the novel is I didn't dare. Six years on from Zia-ul-Haq's death, enough of the terror of saying anything against him remain lodged in my brain that I didn't want to write about a president being killed and my characters celebrating the fact. This wasn't a fear that I followed to any logical conclusion. I didn't think if I write this, such and such terrible consequence will follow. I simply allowed that deep down fear of speaking out against Zia that I had grown up with through childhood and adolescence to guide the direction of my plot.
So what took me so long to write about August 1988? Well, the answer seems to be the very first novel I wrote was an end of dictatorship novel. But at the same time, I simply wasn't removed enough from that dictatorship to write too closely to the facts themselves. I was 21 years old when I started the novel. Half of my life had been spent in terror of saying something I shouldn't say about one man. Perhaps it isn't so surprising that I both couldn't not write about Zia and couldn't write about Zia.
What's more surprising is the second event from which the novel veers away. Hasan's uncle is the leading figure in the movement for democracy. But the novel ends before the elections that might be assumed to bring him to power. We know, by the end of the novel, that the elections are coming. But the novel doesn't take us to them. It wasn't just August 7, 1988 I was writing about and not writing about, but also 16th November, 1988, when general elections happened, and 2nd December, 1988, when Benazir Bhutto was inaugurated as prime minister. So here's a scene from Best of Friends, in which I finally, more than three decades after the fact, set a novel during those days.
"At first, hope approached falteringly, now tangible, now a mirage. There would be genuine party-based democratic elections. There would not. Yes, there would. The elections would be timed to ensure the pregnant Benazir Bhutto was giving birth unable to campaign. No, Benazir outwitted them all by wearing voluminous clothing that made it impossible to know if she was in her second or third trimester, and then had her baby in September, well in time to take active part in the November elections.
There would be orchestrated violence that would require the military to step in for the public good. No. Instead, there was a giant party that transformed Karachi into a city of galloping hope and frenzied nightlife. The frenzy started every evening along the beachfront outside Zahra's flat and continued into the early hours of the morning. Its soundtrack was composed of election songs, and car horns, and voices learning their own power for the first time, calling out [SPEAKING URDU].
It didn't seem to matter, in that moment, which party you supported. Zahra and Maryam had been caught up in two public rallies while in Zahra's car with her father, one for Benhazir's PPP, one for Altaf Hussain's MQM. And both times, they were swept along in the music and jubilation of it all, taking hold of party flags that shining young men on motorbikes handed to them through the rolled down car windows, singing the party's election song, calling out the slogans as though they had never believed anything more profoundly or unshakeably.
And Zahra's father, who would in any other circumstances have issued a look of warning to young men on motorcycles approaching the adolescent girls, added his own cry, 'Pakistan zindabad,' which was taken up by the shining boys and raised through the rallies. At school parties, Madonna's primacy in drawing people to the dance floor was replaced by Shabana Noshi, the singer from a part of Karachi that neither Zahra, nor Maryam, nor any of their friends had ever ventured into who sang Benazir's catchy, joyous campaign song, [SPEAKING URDU].
A young Englishman at one such party was heard saying, 'I can't imagine teenagers in London going crazy to a long-lived Maggie Thatcher song.' And this confirmed what all of them already knew. Everywhere else was to be pitied for not being Pakistan in the winter of 1988. The November night when everyone waited for the election results that would tell them if they'd merely been living in a dream state, Maryam was staying over at Zahra's.
Maryam's house, tucked away in a quiet street, couldn't hear the heartbeat of the city as Zahra's flat by the sea did. And also, once her mother's attempt at rekindling a school day friendship that never was with Benazir had proved fruitless, the enthusiasm for democracy had waned in Maryam's household for everyone but Maryam herself, who saw in Benazir an idol she hadn't known she'd been waiting for.
Even her younger sisters, 8 and 10 years old, were given to saying things like, 'How can that girl hope to rule?' which they'd heard from their father. Maryam understood that the word 'girl' had nothing to do with Benazir's age, which, at 35, was only five years short of her father's. 'Is that what you're going to say when it's time for me to take over the company?' Maryam had said. And her father spread his hands in a way that said, there, the situation was far from ideal. There simply weren't any sons.
Her grandfather, walking in just then, said, 'You're not a girl. You're a force of nature.' Her grandfather had little time for democracy, which brought too many variables into play. But he was certain that the people that Billoo the Phone Call worked for would be significant in the new democratic setup. And it would prove more invaluable than ever to have below on the unofficial payroll. When the around the clock coverage of election night began, Maryam and Zahra were together in Zahra's living room, legs drawn up to their chests, gripping each other's knees.
Zahra's parents were across the landing, watching the news with their neighbors. So the two friends had the flat to themselves. They devised an election scorecard with a complicated color-coding scheme, played Snap in the coverage longueurs, sang 'Dilan Teer Bija' when the first win for the PPP was announced. The night stretched on past the point when cards or ice cream could keep them going. So they took it in turns to fall asleep and wake each other up on the sofa in front of the TV. That way, there was no moment of history that at least one of them didn't witness.
In the early morning, Zahra's parents came home and said the results were clear. And it was time for everyone to sleep. Maryam and Zahra said no. There was something important for which they still needed to stay up. The adults, smiling and indulgent in a way that was new, didn't argue. At dawn, the two girls stepped out onto the balcony to watch the sun rise on a democratic Pakistan, which would soon have Benazir as its prime minister.
'How can you think about living anywhere else, Zahra?' Maryam said. This is where we belong. The world had new role models now, rendering those of a few months ago irrelevant. Benazir herself, Shabana Noshi, she everyone who had faced down tear gas, and batons, and prison sentences, and exile for the sake of a democratic future that Zahra hadn't believed possible. It was to them that this day truly belonged. The ones who hadn't given up when the world told them they were fighting a losing battle, when their daughters told them there was nothing to gain from courage. Next time, she promised herself, she would be among their number.
So why didn't I write any of this in In The City by the Sea? Why end my first novel before all that hope, all that expectation? I can only guess that it was hard to conjure up the image of Benazir Bhutto, that hope-brimming figure of 1988, when the Benazir of drawing room gossip and newspaper headlines at that point, in the mid-'90s, was a tarnished politician in her second term as prime minister.
It was really only in 2007, when Benazir was assassinated, that the version of her I remembered from 1988 became completely vivid again. And it was possible to think of what it had meant to be a young girl in Karachi when a 35-year-old woman came to power, how it transformed the imagination and expanded the boundaries of the world-- of the word, "possible." So here are Zahra and Maryam, the night after Benazir has been sworn in to power.
A few bits of information to help set up the scene-- Saba and Baber, two characters I mentioned, are both classmates of Zahra and Maryam. Hamad is an older boy. He's 17 to Maryam and Zahra's 15. And he's a bit of a thug. Zahra both disapproves of him and is a bit drawn to him, although she would never admit this to Maryam, who in turn hasn't been telling Zahra about all the after school meetings and phone calls she's been having with him. It's the first real rift in their friendship. I promise you this is not one of those novels where there's this great friendship, and then a boy comes along and the friendship falls apart. This is not that novel at all. But this scene may seem to gesture towards it.
"The night after Benazir was sworn in as prime minister, Zahra and Maryam arrived at a party in Giza thrown by Saba's older brother, the school's star athlete. Saba had invited a number of her own class fellows, including Zahra and Maryam. But her brother had come up to Maryam in the schoolyard and made it clear that she was on his guest list, too. And he really hoped she was planning to be there. He barely glanced at Zahra until Maryam said, I'll come if Zara is coming. And then he said, 'Zahra, be a sport.'
Maryam's new driver had taken them to the party. 'You know you're not to wait, yes?' Maryam said to him, as they got out of the car. 'There'll be plenty of people here to drop us,' she said to Zahra in explanation, raising her voice over the music coming at them from the dance floor. There was no need for Zahra to ask if Maryam had lied and told her parents that Zahra's father would be picking them up from the party to take them back to Zahra's. Even though she told Zahra that her father shouldn't bother, she'd tell her driver to wait for them.
Zahra had been too pleased when Maryam suggested a sleepover to wonder about her motives. Now, she watched with silent disapproval as Maryam pulled off her oversized turquoise blouse and placed it in a polythene bag that she stuffed into the back pocket of her jeans. Beneath the shirt, she was wearing a white tank top, clearly inspired by Whitney Houston on the cover of her Whitney album.
She placed the polythene bag behind a row of flower pots, ran her fingers through her hair that had acquired a feathery fringe and bounce in a salon earlier that day, and said, 'Come on,' without looking at Zahra, who had been feeling stylish in her unbuttoned denim shirt with rolled up sleeves over a striped shirt, but was now conscious that her red pumps were scuffed at the toe and her legs were too long for her acid-washed jeans.
A group of older students called out to Maryam. But when Zahra kept on walking towards a table at the far end of the garden with its steel basin of iced drinks, Maryam followed her. They stood side by side, unspeaking, sipping Pakola from bottles through plastic straws that collapsed in on themselves if you sucked up the liquid with too much vigor. Night-blooming flowers fill the air with heavy perfume. The trees were strung with fairy lights. And the verandah had been transformed into a dance floor, where an invisible line-- an invisible demarcation line separated the class 10 students from the A-level ones.
There was a chill in the air that made Maryam's tank top even more infuriating. Hamad approached, all leather jacket and gelled hair and that cologne again. 'Dance, he said,' without acknowledging Zahra, and taking hold of Maryam's hand, as if that were the most natural thing in the world, led her to the dance floor, where she walked past her classmates without looking at them. Zahra stood alone in the garden. She couldn't join her classmates while they were all watching Maryam and whispering to each other.
And it would be desperate to attempt to interpose herself into the group of older students. But worse to spend the evening standing here by herself, while Mariam danced closer than she should to Hamad. The cold was beginning to raise goosebumps on her skin. And she wondered if it would be fatally uncool to roll down her sleeves. Surely the world shouldn't still be this. Benazir was prime minister. She had taken the oath of office in a bright green shalwar with a white dupatta, the colors of the Pakistan flag, and made the men rounder look like pygmies.
Military men and bureaucrats, the old guard, and now here they were, administering the oath of office to her, saluting her. Military officers saluting Benazir, you could cry remembering it. And perhaps no matter how long you lived on this Earth, would always cry remembering it. They'd hang her father, put her in prison, gas her into exile. And now, they saluted her, this woman of only 35, because millions upon millions of people went to the ballot box and said they must.
Zahra brushed her hand across her eyes. Why did all this matter? The school cliques, Maryam's awfulness, Hamad's inattentiveness, the scuffed toes of her shoes. Why should any of this matter when the world was transformed? How does it feel to become unglued? Babar was walking straight across the garden to her. His blue button-down shirt had a rough patch near his heart, where he'd unstitched the fashion label's logo from it.
Boys who went abroad and bought expensive shirts could unabashedly also wear the knockoff stuff locally, he said. But if you wore the imitation without being able to afford the real thing, you'd get looked at like a wannabe. He'd explained this to her some weeks earlier when she asked about the red marks on his finger, where he'd clumsily pricked it with a needle. She had been both attracted and repulsed by the way he told her this, as if confirming a shared understanding about both their lives.
'Maryam and I aren't glued,' she said. 'I thought you weren't coming.' 'I wasn't. But then you said you were.' She saw his hopeful smile, the way his shoulders filled his shirt, the perfect straight line of his nose. So much more handsome than Hamad, she thought, and tried to make that matter. Sipping on her Pakola, she looked across to the dance floor. Maryam and Hamad had disappeared somewhere in the mass of bodies. But she caught Saba's furious stare.
'Go dance with everyone,' she said to Babar. 'You'l have to come with me. Or I'll go and standing here, making you feel awkward.' He made it easy to join their classmates who had stopped their whispering, even though they clearly remained aware of Maryam and Hamad. Saba was so glad to have Babar dancing in the same mass of bodies as her that her smile reached out to envelop everyone, even Zahra. Soon, everything disappeared except the beat of the music, thudding within Zahra's heart, and the occasional not accidental brush of Babar's arm against hers.
She closed her eyes as she danced. It wasn't Babar's arm. It was someone else unknown, the familiar stirring inside. They danced and danced. Maryam left the floor and sat down on Hamad's lap in one of the plastic chairs in the garden, his jacket draped over her shoulders. Saba gave Zahra look that said she should drag her best friend away from the scandal that would follow her into the schoolyard tomorrow. But Zahra just closed her eyes again, let the music move her body and obliterate everything else.
People moved on and off the dance floor. Babar asked Zahra if she wants to go and get something cool to drink. But she said no. So he stayed. Saba's brother started to dance behind Zahra, his wooden movements more than offset by the glory of his athlete's physique. And three, times she leaned back and her shoulder touched his bicep. The third time, he apologized and moved away. The music changed to 'Fast Car.' And everyone who wasn't part of a couple made a sound of protest.
The dance floor half emptied. But Saba stayed where she was, dancing slower now next to Babar, who danced slower next to Zahra. Hamad and Maryam came back to the floor. Hamad had his arms around Maryam's waist. And she clasped his back, their bodies moving together. Tracy Chapman's voice pierced Zahra, cut open her heart, and showed her how much longing was in there. Babar moved closer. And she closed her eyes again.
An arm touching her arm, the back of a hand against the back of her hand, fingers on the verge of entwining with her fingers. Saba caught her by the elbow, pretend friendly, and pulled her close, arm around Zahra's shoulder, so they could move together in time to the music, facing Babar, who looked crushed, but gamely danced on. Zahra turned her face the garden so she wouldn't have to see any of the slow dancing couples. It wasn't just Hamad and Maryam. Every boy holding a girl around her waist made her feel the same emptiness.
Beneath the frangipani tree, a group of boys stood together, a flash of silver that was a hip flask adding something to their bottles of Coke. Everyone wanted something more than school rules allowed. It wasn't just her. It was the slow-dancing couples, the hip flask boys. It was Saba. It was Babar. Everyone, all of them, why did they have to be so constrained, made drab in their school uniforms, forced to walk on the right-hand side of the stairway, going up at the start of each day? Why couldn't they be allowed to break free? The world was new and different now. How could any of them stay the same."
I know what I haven't done. I haven't entirely answered the question, why didn't I write about Karachi in 1988 sooner? I've talked about why I didn't write about it when working on my first novel in the mid '90s. I've talked about why I didn't write it prior to Benazir's death in 2007. But there followed another dozen years before I first started to think of the opening pages of Best of Friends. Why? At some point, the stuff of your childhood starts to cede space to the concerns of your adult life.
There were new things in the world I wanted to explore. And fiction was my way of exploring them. After writing four novels set not only in Karachi but in the tiny world within Karachi in which I grew up, I wanted to write differently. My fifth novel, Burnt Shadows, which I began thinking about in 2005, started with the bombing of Nagasaki and ended in New York and Afghanistan near the start of the war on terror.
The sixth novel started in 515 BC in the ancient site of Caspatyrus near what is now Peshawar, and ended in 1930 in roughly the same terrain. The seventh allowed me to turn my attention to London, the city I had made my home a decade earlier. In every one of these novels, Karachi appears, but sometimes only for a page. It had gone from a starring role to a cameo appearance.
I thought I was done with my Karachi novels. And certainly, with the Karachi novels, that took me back to the schoolyard, and neighborhoods, and fast food joints in which I'd grown up. And then cricket happened-- the game, not the insect. This is a sentence you never have to announce anywhere in South Asia. A few years earlier, the wonderful cricket writer, Osman Samiuddin, knowing of my love for the game, had told me that one day I had to write a story about the history of women's cricket in Pakistan.
He said, it's an amazing story. Someone has to tell it. I think it should be you. It had been at the back of my mind for a while. And then I found myself, in 2019, with the time an opportunity to write it. I didn't know when I set off on that project that the story of the National Women's Cricket Team in Pakistan started in December, 1988, just as Benazir came to power. So you thought you were getting reading from fiction. But in fact, you're going to get some reading about cricket. So I'm going to read an extract from that article, which was entitled "Strong Arms."
If you want to know what hope feels like, imagine being a teenage girl in Karachi in the winter of 1988. After 11 years of repressive military rule, the death of the dictator, Zia-ul-Haq, led to elections that were won by a 35-year-old woman, Benazir Bhutto, who had spent much of the previous decade in prison, or house arrest, or exile. As winter brought with it the cool breezes from the Arabian Sea, Karachi streets were filled with a life and energy that had been missing for years from this, Pakistan's most populous cosmopolitan and vibrant city.
If there was a soundtrack to those days, the foremost song on it was "Dian Teer Bija," Benazir's campaign song, which had its origins in Lyari, one of the city's poorest areas from which Lyari Disco originated, fusing disco beats with traditional Afro-Baloch sounds. Change and hope were almost tactile creatures in those days, knocking against our heart with a Lyari disco beat, altering the shapes of our dreams.
Among the teenage girls who found their dreams newly shaped that winter were the Khan sisters-- 16-year-old Sharmeen and 19-year-old Shaiza. The daughters of an affluent carpet merchant, the Khan sisters were, simply put, not like other girls. Broad shouldered and big boned, they moved through the world with confidence and intent, dwarfing many men around them in size and attitude. Shaiza, a born leader, almost never drew breath when speaking, as if there was too much the world wanted her to do for there to be time for any kind of pause.
And what the world most wanted her to do, she knew, was start a women's cricket team in Pakistan. The country was already cricket mad. And the country really does mean both men and women. During the dire years of General Zia in particular, Imran Khan's sides brought light, and victory, and hope to the country. And the sport's popularity was widespread across genders. But while women watched cricket and even wrote about cricket in the otherwise male-dominated sports pages, they were not expected to play cricket.
In good part, this was because cricket was played largely on the streets. And the streets were public spaces from which women were excluded, not the Khan sisters. Although their family home was vast enough for a swimming pool and a tennis court, they grew up playing on the street outside with their brother. Through most of the Zia years however, they did their playing in England, where they were at boarding school.
And then Zia died. The world changed. And the sisters returned so that Shaiza could start a Pakistan Women's Cricket Team. That winter in Karachi, the sisters found other women who were ready to play and announced a match against a team of former men's internationals, including the Pakistani great Zaheer Abbas. Death threats followed. The religious right had been battered in the polls that brought Benazir to victory. But that had only increased their determination to show they could still muster street power.
Karachi's police commissioner warned Shaiza of riots and instructed her to call off the game. Shaiza tried to argue that if Benazir could run the country and sit around the table talking to men, why couldn't a women's team play against men? But that argument was never going to appease groups who had campaigned against Benazir becoming prime minister on the basis of her gender.
With newspapers running stories claiming that the religious groups were going to storm Shaiza and Charmin's house, their father told them they should play against a women's side instead they agreed but the level of hostility against him was so high the police felt it necessary to provide them with security at their home the night before the game and accompany to the stadium where, according to Shaiza, there were 8,000 police personnel on hand and no spectators were allowed in. As soon as the match ended, Shaiza and Sharmeen boarded the plane and returned to London. Their father told them to stay there. And when this country is ready for you, then you come back."
I wrote all that as nonfiction. But as I wrote it, I felt a tingling in the fingers and down the spine that I knew by then how to recognize. Here's my tip for all writers and aspiring writers-- pay attention to the tingling of your fingers and spine telling you there is something here. I already had an idea in mind about a childhood friendship that develops a terrible, possibly fatal fault line decades on from childhood. But it was a vague idea, untethered from time and place, and really from specificity of character.
But as I wrote that cricket article, it was clear. The novel would start in 1988. And wasn't inconvenient, in fictional terms, that the period between Zia's death and Benazir's inauguration, August to December, almost exactly overlapped a Karachi school term? It felt as though it had been waiting for me to write it all along. But what about the stuff of your childhood ceding space to the concerns of your adult life?
Well, this was 2019. Some of the concerns of my adult life were intimately connected to the word democracy. People were going to the ballot box and voting for Brexit, voting for Trump, voting for Modi, voting for Bolsonaro. People voted for hatred. They voted for promises of cruelty to minorities. They voted for men who are willing to burn down any institution of state-- its laws, its precedents, its checks and balances to grab all the power they could get.
The word fascism was increasingly to be found in conversations about Democratic regimes. The phrase death of democracy made its way into newsprint. And in this moment, I found my mind going back to those weeks in 1988, where it felt like the dawn of democracy, exactly where I was standing, 15 years old, and ready to believe any new truth the world was going to throw at me. What I wanted to write about was then from the vantage point of now.
I didn't write in order to make a point or to present a thesis. I never write because I have answers. I write because ideas come together with a particular charge and something is sparked. I thought of the Khan ancestors, and the hope that sprung from having a woman prime minister, and how that hope led them to actions that taught them how much the world hadn't changed at all. But even so, their sense of the possible had expanded.
And when they got onto that plane to leave Karachi, it was the end of a chapter, but not of the story. And so I found myself thinking of two other girls, Maryam and Zahra, and what it would mean to live through 1988, and feel their sense of the possible expand, and how those expanded possibilities might look in the cold light of 2019. And that's where I get my ideas from. Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
And I'm happy to entertain any questions.
IFTIKHAR DADI: [INAUDIBLE].
KAMILA SHAMSIE: Yes. Farrah?
AUDIENCE: That was my question [INAUDIBLE].
KAMILA SHAMSIE: We had lunch together, and Farrah joked and said, should I ask you, where do you get your ideas from? And I said, well, maybe you won't want to.
AUDIENCE: So now, I have to ask a less grand, metaphysical question. I have two intertwining questions. One is the novel takes you all the way to 2020. But even though I read it in a very fast three days, I don't think I read about the assassination. And I wanted to-- I wonder why that-- you know, they come of age in a very powerful moment, through her inauguration. I can see that as political or-- a change in trajectory, it's in some ways rooted in that moment [INAUDIBLE].
She didn't actually believe her-- she didn't understand her father's political [INAUDIBLE]. And then she sees her getting up. And she sees no love lost. And the fight's never really lost.
So by that, the many falls of [INAUDIBLE] was not Both the Imran Khan [INAUDIBLE] fall. And then intertwining. It's going to be crude. But I never really understood the [INAUDIBLE] what happens that night. I thought, yeah, it was scary. Yes, it was terrible. But I thought, [INAUDIBLE], why are you so hung up on this terrible night? I'm sure--
KAMILA SHAMSIE: So I'm not going to answer that question because it's too spoilery.
AUDIENCE: No, no, my question is related to it. [INAUDIBLE]. It's why-- I thought maybe part of the reason is that it happens on the night where the inauguration happens. So this sense of possibilities are opening up. But in some ways, it's also the night where they become aware of being woman. And then there are [INAUDIBLE] possibilities, but there will always be hunger and constrained by gender.
KAMILA SHAMSIE: I always like when people say "I didn't understand," and then they give you a really beautiful answer that explains it.
AUDIENCE: Oh. [CHUCKLES] No, but I also wonder, in some ways--
KAMILA SHAMSIE: I mean, there are more than one ways of reading it. And the one thing I don't ever want to do is to interpret my characters for the audience because I'm aware that there are various possible answers to that, which are all seeded in the book. And which ones my readers pick up on, or if they come up with another one entirely, is always a matter of interest to me. But I don't answer that question. But I can go to the first one. There is a reference to Benazir's assassination. But it's about four sentences. And you read the book in three days and skipped them.
[LAUGHTER]
But I'll tell you what it was. But it's sort of a--
AUDIENCE: I don't think I skipped them, actually.
KAMILA SHAMSIE: It's a moment where they refer to the fact that Zahra moves into the apartment. There's a scene inside the apartment. We're told that she moved into it. And when they were moving things in, they get a call to say this has just happened. So I didn't want to not acknowledge that. But also, the book is happening in 2019. I wasn't going to restructure the whole novel to create a 2007 section.
And in 2019, I had to be with where they were in 2019, which is 12 years after that event of 2007. So it wouldn't make sense to-- it would be very false. It would be a very false novelistic thing to say, well, we're 2019. But we're going to make this whole story about 2007 because you, the readers, have read 1988. So the way that would function instead is you see where they are with the hope and idealism that Benazir is representing in 1988.
And you see where they are with that in 2019. And that was the continuous thread that I wanted to pull on. And also, I didn't-- the reason why it's not there isn't a big deal about Benazir and there isn't a big deal about Imran is because the second half of the novel is no longer a what happened to Pakistan's democracy novel. It's a what is going on in the world and how we-- those people who lived through a different kind of moment, what did living through that moment do?
What did living through the disappointments, if there were any, of that moment do? And what is 2019 now? So if this was a book set in Karachi, it would have been a different kind of book. And there would have been-- Imran probably would be a bigger thing. And Benazir's party would be a bigger thing. It would be a very different book. But it's a book that is-- the first half is Karachi. And the second half is London.
And there are certain ghosts that are between the sentences. And Benazir's is certainly one of them. But that had to be how that functioned. So assassination is mentioned so that for anyone who doesn't know, they know that, from that moment in 1988, this is where we got to. But it was a novel that was not about her, but them. And they moved somewhere else. But they took that version of themselves from December 1988 and everything that happened in December 1988 into that London of 2019. Yeah, Assia.
AUDIENCE: Thank you for that lovely reading. Really enjoyed it. And congratulations for this book. [INAUDIBLE] ask why you set the novel in 1988, but what is very interesting to me and why I enjoyed as a reader is that this is a time when there is a change from a very deeply patriarchal dictatorship to a whole [INAUDIBLE]. And at the same time, these two girls [INAUDIBLE], they are in [INAUDIBLE] where they are accepting [INAUDIBLE].
And there were so many levels [INAUDIBLE] this [INAUDIBLE] and the space. [INAUDIBLE] political landscape or whatever, these two girls kind of [INAUDIBLE] father and accepting that womanhood, even though he says that she might need some new clothes to be bought from Oxford Street [INAUDIBLE] decent on her body.
So that acceptance-- [INAUDIBLE]. So there's also, on those two levels, the way they're juxtaposed, [INAUDIBLE] really enjoyed that [INAUDIBLE]. So I was wondering if you could [INAUDIBLE].
KAMILA SHAMSIE: One of things that I did want to talk about within the novel is that what happens in that period of adolescence where you go from being a child to you're not quite woman, but something is shifting. And for different adolescents, it shifts differently. And that coming into awareness of being observed, that sense of knowing yourself as someone who is living with the male gaze on you, and to be aware of your body.
But to do it within a world where these things aren't talked about. So everything is closed in a kind of a secrecy and assertiveness, even a shame. But there's also a kind of excitement in there. And I wanted that to also be at this moment where this woman has coming to power. And you're starting to think for the first time about what it means to be a woman. Because until then, you've been a child. And your gender has been not that particularly relevant.
And now, suddenly, it's really relevant. And you see this woman. And it means something that you don't really fully have the words for. But you know the fact that you are feeling yourself becoming this thing. And you're identifying in a way with a woman as you wouldn't have two years earlier when you were still a child. And also, I wanted through what is going on with them, and their bodies, and men, and their own secrets-- I did also want to be talking about the fact that they're 14, 15. And they think a woman is power.-- is in power, so the world has changed.
And in fact, the world hasn't changed. The world is still a very deeply patriarchal place, which is something Benazir has to contend with. And there's something that the girls have to contend with. And they also have to see if there are ways they can work it to their advantage and the ways in which they're going to mediate the idea of femaleness, body, power, sexuality, how all of that is going to work together.
So it was something I was very interested in. And it's not unrelated to the question I'm not going to answer about what that evening means, in terms of a sort of understanding of what is possible, but also what is taken away from. And there's a phrase that Maryam uses which comes up in the book a few times, just girl fear, which is that fear, particularly of that recognition that you live in a body that, because it is female, you start to recognize it or think of it as a place of possible violence. And what it means when that moment when that is really activated in you. And it's always been there. But there's a moment in which it's activated in a particular way. And I wanted to write about that as well.
AUDIENCE: Thank you for coming. Thank you for this talk and reading. I'm interested in knowing what writers shaped you as a writer growing up.
KAMILA SHAMSIE: When I was 20, I would have answered that question. And today, I can't because at 20, I would have been just telling the writers I love. And now, I recognize the writers I love are not necessarily the ones that shaped you. Influence is such a hard thing to talk about. I do know it was-- I was very lucky to be of the generation I was because, by the time I was 14 or 15, I was really interested in reading not just books for kids, but adult stuff.
The anglophone novel had expanded. And so I was reading Anita Desai and Attia Hosein, who is my great aunt, and Salman Rushdie, and a few years later, Amitav Ghosh and Rohinton Mistry. And that was really important to see actually the novel doesn't have to be-- because when I was a child all the books that I read all the children's books. None of them were set in a place that was anything like the place I was growing up in. And I just think that fiction was about other places. Even if you're reading fantasy, the fantasy is so European. Tolkien's Middle Earth is not Pakistan anywhere.
And so I think it was very, very important to have that understanding. And also writers like Ishiguro, Peter Carey, I mean, just the sense that actually there's an expansiveness that's possible. You can write from anywhere in all kinds of stories. That was important. If I would talk about one person who was more important than anyone else, it was the Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali, who was quite literally my teacher when I got to-- I was at Hamilton College, not too far from here.
And it was the most amazing thing to land up on this campus on a hill in a village in the middle of a snow belt to find this brilliant poet from Kashmir. And Shahid was wonderful for many reasons. One of them was his attention to language. We had a class with him. And the first day, he said, my aim is to make each one of you so attuned to language that you won't be able to hear a single word without feeling a response to it.
And if you hung around-- he was always listening. You'd be speaking to him. And he'd say, oh, that was a line of pure iambic pentameter. Or there's a great internal rhyme in that. And when you started doing that, you just started-- I started listening differently. I started listening to words differently because of Shahid. But the other part that was really important is that Shahid was someone who was absolutely committed to the rigors of poetry.
I mean, he would sit and he would work forever on getting the meter right on this line or saying this. And he was also writing about what was happening in Kashmir. And he was so clear that you can't let the weight of the subject carry the poem. You know that you have to and he would say the reason he took several books before he wrote The. Country Without a Post Office, which is the first of his great-- he said I wasn't ready for-- he said I wasn't a good enough poet to take on the subject matter, you know? And he would really dislike the laziness of people who would sort of play something dramatic or awful that happened somewhere in the world in their text and think that'll give the work weight.
He'd say you have to-- and he also talked about how, when he wrote [? for Kashmir, ?] he put the most stringent formal constraints on his poetry. So he would write sestinas and villanelles, and ghazals, and forms that were very, very complicated.
And he wanted to make sure that at the poetic level, he was being as demanding of himself-- at the aesthetic level, as demanding of himself as possible. And he also said if there comes a moment when there's a choice between the politics and the poetry, you choose the poetry.
He said there will always be things you want to say, but if it doesn't fit in that work, you take it out. You'll find another place for it. You do something else, but every word, every line, every image has to be there because the poem needs it. And to learn that kind of thing at 19 or 20, I've never forgotten it. I often find myself when I'm teaching, I'm quoting Shahid.
So in terms of actually-- rather than being a book, but a person who sort of lived and breathed what it was to really have a commitment to the artistic practice and its relationship to the world, he was incredibly important.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] sorry, I didn't catch that part of the Kashmiri poet. Was he in Hamilton College?
KAMILA SHAMSIE: Yeah, he taught at Hamilton when I was there.
AUDIENCE: Question [INAUDIBLE].
AUDIENCE: Thank you so much. I'm entirely enthralled by this, and connecting to what you just said is one of the great lessons you learned was how you listen, right? Just hearing the scenes that you did with us, music and sound play these crucial roles are happening, either creating scenes, right? Or giving news, so my question is, how does sound work throughout your works, and how are you thinking about sound?
KAMILA SHAMSIE: In my previous novel, I actually have someone who is a sound engineer, and I'm often-- I have to remind myself to play sound in because it's so easy for me to just go to other details, but there was-- sometimes you learn from your professors, and sometimes you learn from your students.
So there was another time when, by this time, I was teaching at Hamilton, and I was teaching the Tim O'Brien story, The Things They Carried, which is, of course, about being in Vietnam, and I had one student who was an older student. He was, I would say, in his 50s, maybe even 60s, and had never finished college before, and had come back at that point.
And he was a very diligent student, and they had to write response papers to everything we were reading, and one week he came in, and he said I haven't written about The Things They Carried. And I said, well, you're allowed one week when you don't so that's fine, but can I ask why?
He said, I hated it. I said, OK. He said I hated it because it made me remember things that I don't want to remember, and suddenly, I realized this man had been in the war, and I had no idea. And I said, you don't have to come to class. You don't-- And he said, no, I'll come, but I'm not going to speak. I said fine.
Two weeks later, he came back, and he said, I wrote a response paper. I said, OK. He said because I realize-- he said it's a brilliant story. It evokes everything, but you know what it doesn't have? It doesn't have the smells.
And he wrote this response, which is just the smells of Vietnam that he-- which was brilliant, and he actually then ended up writing short stories and fiction about his time, then something different happened. But it did remind me, you bring all your senses into something, and I try very hard to do that.
And I mean, sound is-- it evokes so much. You think of a moment, and what was the soundtrack of that moment? And particularly that time in 1980, it literally had a soundtrack that you can't not-- and when I write, I do want to evoke place.
I don't want to do of paragraphs, and paragraphs, and paragraphs of description, but I wanted to evoke it, and I find that going to different senses is one of the ways in which that happens. And also, there's a difference between certainly in the last novel in Home Fire, there's sort of people who listen, but there are certain things they listen to really well, and other things they listen to really badly, and that, of course, for a writer is a sort of fun metaphor to play with. Oh, no, you had one.
AUDIENCE: OK, thank you. Thank you so much. I feel like I'm learning so much. I actually had a question about Home Fire, and I know that it's a retelling of Antigone. I'm thinking about retelling a story for my own work, and I was wondering how-- well, I guess this is maybe sort of a two part question.
Like how did you know it was the right vehicle for the story-- for you to tell the story that you wanted to tell? And if the idea within the vehicle-- I guess maybe this is like an incorrect metaphor, but thinking of the--
KAMILA SHAMSIE: Vehicles can have ideas inside them.
AUDIENCE: OK.
[LAUGHING]
It's all very hard. I don't know, but how faithful did you feel you had to be, and how did you negotiate that with a story that's already built [INAUDIBLE]?
KAMILA SHAMSIE: Right. It's a good question. So the first part is easy to answer. Someone else gave me the idea. There's a theater director in London who said, I like the way you do dialogue. Write me a play. I said, I don't know how to write a play. He said, I thought you'd say that. Why don't you adapt to play? Then someone else has already done all the hard work.
And then he said the Greek tragedies are having a real moment in theater right now. Something like Antigone or the Oresteia in a contemporary British Asian context because it was a British Asian theater. And I said, well, I'll think about it.
Actually, I was thinking, which one is Antigone? I had no memory. I had studied it as a freshman. Not a word that I remember. I wasn't going to tell him. And I got on the train to go home, and literally went to Wikipedia plot summary.
[LAUGHTER]
These are things you should never tell students, but there we go. And as I was looking at it, it was just so obvious to me that there were stories that were in the headlines right then. I mean, stories that-- papers were full of these stories of these young-- it was mostly young British Muslims who were going to Syria, and the government had just said those who go, we will strip them of their citizenship.
I had just become a British citizen, so this was all very fraught for me. What do you mean, stripped of citizenship? Like it's not safe? Like it can be taken away?
So I had been looking at those news stories. I had no thought that it would be a novel, but when I was looking at Antigone, I saw the ways in which we will strip them of their citizenship is, I thought, that metaphorically sort of you cannot be buried in the soil because you're no longer of this land.
I later discovered that actually, one of the rights that comes with citizenship is the right to burial. So when you strip someone of citizenship, you are quite literally saying you cannot be buried on this land, and the two just came together. It was, again, one of the spine tingling moments.
The other question, of course, was the one I think about, which is how much of Antigone do I need to be faithful to? And here, I was very helped by the fact that Antigone is enormous. Antigone has such a presence in the world, I don't have to be responsible to Antigone, right?
If Antigone were a very little known text that I was bringing into a world where she was not well known, it would be a very different kind of power relation that I would have with Antigone and would suffer. My power relation was, I'm tiny. This play has been around for 2 and 1/2 thousand years. People have been redoing it in all kinds of ways. I can do what I want.
And so I thought, I'm going to actually use it as the starting off point, and then I'll go-- also at some point, I feel that I'm writing this as a novel. I don't know how to write a play. I wanted this as a novel.
So I thought I'm going to really just-- I'm going to read the play. I'm going to read several translations, and then I'm going to put it aside and not look at it, and the novel will go in whatever directions it goes. The surprise to me was how much of the play remained in there.
There were any points I tried to turn away from it, particularly the ending, and the novel goes, no. The structure of it is so beautifully done, and there's a kind of inevitability and a pull that I just found myself going into.
And then there are all kinds of things that I was in no way aware that I was-- and then classicists come up to me and say, you use this rhetorical device from the Greek really well. OK, I don't know.
But also, moments like-- there's one moment where Isma's [INAUDIBLE] Aneeka, who is-- because she's the older sister, and she raises these twins because their parents die when the twins are very young. So there's one which she says, you know, she's my sister, almost my daughter, and people are like, oh, that whole Oedipus incest storyline. I said, I swear I didn't have that in mine, except obviously somewhere it was lurking in the unconscious.
So I think the truth of it is you read Antigone or enough translations, it works its way into your unconscious, and then all kinds of stuff come out, but it wasn't something I ever worried about. And I always gave myself the right to do whatever I wanted to move away from that original, to take out characters, to change characters around, and to add whatever I wanted around it. Yes?
AUDIENCE: I have so many questions. I guess we're maybe slightly running out of time, and I'll ask a fun question. I was reading an interview by [INAUDIBLE] yesterday, and the interviewer ask him what is your ideal reader? And he had a very funny answer. His answer was that, well, my ideal reader is me, younger, duller, more handsome maybe.
[LAUGHTER]
But I guess I was asking for you, like who would your ideal reader be? Especially because some things might not like translate super well. Like when you say the [INAUDIBLE] song, I know the melody in my head, but I don't know what it feels like for you and for someone who didn't grow up because I-- my, I guess, '88 would be like 2007 when [INAUDIBLE] fell and it felt like the world was opening, and then the world closed with Benazir assassinated.
Yes, I know that. I feel very sad for the 2007 lot because you had much shorter period of time to think, this is great, right? It just all went to hell very fast, but yeah. So who's my ideal reader? I don't know who I'm-- not thinking of a person, but what I know is that my ideal reader is someone who knows more than I do about everything I'm writing, including how to write a novel.
AUDIENCE: But that's--
[LAUGHTER]
KAMILA SHAMSIE: No, because none of you know-- because my ideal reader is not a reader in the world, but that's who I'm writing to. It's what is the direction of your writing? Sometimes I come-- very often when I do these events, there'll be someone from Pakistan in the audience who will say, but what do you do about-- so there's so many stereotypes about Pakistanis out there, and in your writing, the responsibility to take that on, all that.
And my response to that is if you are letting your imagination be guided by the ignorant, or the racist, or the Islamophobic, then already, it's game over for your book, right? So in a way, what I'm saying when you're writing, it's which direction are you writing in?
Are you writing with the sense of I have things to teach you, then you're writing down. Then you're assuming your reader knows less than you do. If you assume that your reader knows more than you do about all your subject matter, so they're not reading-- and they're going to read the book and still come away liking it-- that's a crucial part. The ideal reader has to come away liking it.
So I want to write for someone who knows Karachi of 1988, and I want to write for someone who knows London 2019, and I want to write for someone who knows what it's like to be a girl in an adolescent body, and I want to write for someone who knows how to write a novel, and what a good sentence sounds like, and I want to write for someone who understands cricket, and I want to write for someone who understands what venture capitalists do because there's one in my novel, and what do I know about it?
But I have to write in a way that someone who does know what a venture capitalist isn't reading my book and saying, well, that's rubbish, right? So it's always write in the direction, not of the ignorant, but of the knowing.
AUDIENCE: Good jump into that conversation.
AUDIENCE: Yes, perfect.
AUDIENCE: I think that's a wonderful response, and so there's my response because as a reader, I think what I'm looking for is to be respected, which is what I'm hearing you say. But on the other hand, as a reader, I'm interested in learning.
And so I do not know Karachi of 1988. I do not know London of 2019. Neither do I know anything about all the stuff that you've written about, and so it's an interesting time set up of dialogue between a writer describing it the way you are.
The only word that comes to my mind is sort of respect, I think, which one does feel. I too read Best Of Friends very quickly because, you know, I was like, I cannot meet this woman without having read them.
So I is reading the book and really enjoyed it, and of course, that sense of being treated with respect is definitely there. I think that's the word that comes to my mind. But I do question to do with the book. And so the way this book ended for me, these two [INAUDIBLE]--
KAMILA SHAMSIE: But is this a question that will give away spoilers? Because we can't have that.
AUDIENCE: No, no, it won't be a spoiler.
KAMILA SHAMSIE: OK. There is a famous case when Vikram Seth wrote A Suitable Boy, and the week it was launched in London, someone stood up and said, but in the end, why did she marry a name? And there were just these cries of agony, and someone in the front row cried out I'm on page 900. So, you know, we can't have that.
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]. You can yell over me and stuff. So there's this bookend-- I see this bookend by two sort of incidents, right? And so it's-- but the second one really-- I mean, so the first one, I kind of got what was happening in all the ways in which you describe what you're trying to do, the feeling of hope, the closing of hope, the question of gender, being the girl in the body, and all of those pieces. But that last one suddenly lands in London where these two characters are now British-Pakistanis, and it's a whole description of an immigrant life in London.
KAMILA SHAMSIE: It's a description of lives in London.
AUDIENCE: Lives. I mean, I take objection to description of immigrants.
AUDIENCE: Is it?
KAMILA SHAMSIE: Well, it's a description of their lives. It's sort of a category--
AUDIENCE: Of their life.
KAMILA SHAMSIE: There's a category of immigrant lives which just seems odd. It's London.
AUDIENCE: In London.
KAMILA SHAMSIE: Most people are there from somewhere else.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, I don't know London and I dislike England, [INAUDIBLE], but that's my own bias as an Indian, the first time I went, all the incidents that happened. So but putting that aside, so I don't know London. It's OK. [INAUDIBLE] immigrant [INAUDIBLE] an American thing as well.
But their lives in London, which I'm reading as an American Indian immigrant, you see this as making a life in London in a particular way, which is so very different from Karachi, and what struck me was talking about how your childhood obsessions get left behind and new obsessions begin to appear adult obsessions.
So I'm curious to hear a little bit more about London and life in London as a Pakistani from Karachi moved there. And all of these people who are in that novel, they're all from Karachi and moved there, right, grandfathers all knowing each other, and [INAUDIBLE], and everything else. And I'm curious about how that begins then to become an obsession or something that one is now engaging with and writing about?
KAMILA SHAMSIE: Are we talking about my life or are we talking about the novel? Because I'm not going to talk 0 my life obviously.
AUDIENCE: No, not your life. The lives in the novel.
KAMILA SHAMSIE: Well, in the lives of the novel, I think what happens is you move to a place and that becomes your reality. I mean, it's that basic. These are their lives. These are the networks within which they live, and some of that overlaps with what they knew in Karachi, but a lot of it doesn't.
But what I was actually interested in was there are so many books in which the migrant experience is written of as one of discontinuity, right? It's sort of, you're in this-- and particularly, if you're from somewhere like Pakistan or somewhere, the third world or whatever you want to call it, that you leave one place behind, you go to a new place, and then it's about the shock and the difference.
And there are a lot of very wonderful novels that are written in that vein, but what I was interested in actually was a story of the continuities. So you go to a place that is a different place, and yet there are all these connections, and threads, and continuities that are going on.
And some of it will be people, and some of it will be the entangled histories of England and Pakistan, and some of it will be the way class privilege travels, which people don't talk about enough, the way your knowledge of how to work the system to your advantage can travel from one place to another.
And so that was what I was interested in with the London of that second half is how so much of-- and it's also why I wasn't interested in writing this is when they first arrive in London. When we see them, they've been there decades. It's their home. They sort of know how it operates.
And so that was the story that I was interested in, is all that stuff from the first half that is still emerging or replaying in various ways within the second half. Yeah.
IFTIKHAR DADI: So we have a reception, and so we encourage you to continue the conversations [INAUDIBLE] reception [INAUDIBLE].
KAMILA SHAMSIE: Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
Kamila Shamsie reads from her new novel "Best of Friends." The novel required Shamsie to return in her imagination to her 15-year-old self who lived through a pivotal moment in Pakistan’s history (the death of the dictator, Zia-ul-Haq, followed by the election of a 35-year-old woman, Benazir Bhutto, as Prime Minister). She discusses how writing fiction about history can lay bare some of the fictions built around history, while also casting surprising shadows on the present. Kamila Shamsie is the author of eight novels, including "Burnt Shadows," "Best of Friends," and "Home Fire," which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, a Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature in the UK, she was one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists, and her novels have been translated into more than 30 languages. She grew up in Karachi, lives in London, and is a Belknap Visiting Fellow at Princeton University for Spring 2023. The Rabindranath Tagore Lecture Series in Modern Indian Literature is made possible by a gift from the late Cornell Professor Emeritus Narahari Umanath Prabhu and his wife, Sumi Prabhu. Inspired by Rabindranath Tagore’s expansive imagination, unbounded by geopolitical boundaries, the series has regularly featured prominent writers from across South Asia and its diasporas.
