Your novel This Is Where The Serpent Lives can be read in so many different ways. It’s a portrait of the Punjab province in Pakistan. Some readers might look at it as stories of inequalities and social mobility. I read it as a novel about masculinities. All the men in it start off as lone pups and their lives are defined, even transformed, by the compassion and camaraderie they find in each other. Was this meant to be a novel about complicated masculinities?
I was very conscious that I was going to be writing about power, and about power and status. I guess I haven’t thought of — I mean, in Pakistan, power is mostly exercised by men or is exercised by women through men. It’s the same in India, I suspect. There are, of course, women who are powerful, like, say, Benazir Bhutto, sort of an honorary man. And she was there in place of her father in a certain sense.
So, I guess I was conscious that I was going to be writing about male power and that therefore I’d be writing about masculinity. I hadn’t really thought about it as being explicitly about masculinity. I was thinking more in terms of describing the structural qualities of the place. I was much more concerned with the individual personalities rather than their symbolic meaning as types. I think, for me, these are much more a bunch of individuals who are shaped by a very sexist culture.
I read Shahnaz as a kind of kingmaker figure who shapes the lives of many men in the novel. Like you, she is the child of a diplomat. Where do you think her power comes from — and did you draw some of her from your own self?
{{/usCountry}}I read Shahnaz as a kind of kingmaker figure who shapes the lives of many men in the novel. Like you, she is the child of a diplomat. Where do you think her power comes from — and did you draw some of her from your own self?
{{/usCountry}}She’s not very much like me. For one thing, Shahnaz never has lived inside of Pakistan until she marries Hisham, so she’s very much an outsider.
And, I think, in a way, I’ve a little bit cheated with her. I think that it would be very difficult to find a person who had lived outside Pakistan as much as she has who understands it as well as she does. But I think partly that is a function of the fact that she is a woman and therefore she is accustomed, even as a child, to understanding her world as a daughter of a presumably overbearing Pakistani. There’s a sameness to life outside of Pakistan for the daughter of a diplomat to the life that she has back in Pakistan. In each case, she’s going to be experiencing it in a way, through a male figure. And therefore, there’s not that much difference between the way she’s performing in Pakistan than as she would have as a child with relation to her father. So, I guess that, to some extent, can explain why she’s so good at doing, why she’s so well able to make the change to living in Pakistan.
There was no model for Shahnaz in my mind. If you were to ask me, who is Shahnaz based on, there are a number of women who I’ve known who I might refer to. But much less than some of my characters, she’s somebody I’ve put together piece by piece. She’s a composite.
The novel comes together as interconnected stories. Who and what did you start with?
It was two characters: Rustam who’s more or less based on myself and then Bayazid who’s based on a man who still works for me.
He started working for my dad in 1973, I think. I had always known I would write about him. He’s just a walking short story. I have not even begun to exhaust all the stories that might be written about, if I were to go in that direction. He’s a wonderful character and I know a great deal about him because he’s a very, very, deep, intimate friend of mine as well as my employee and we’ve had lots of adventures together.
And then the Rustam story, I had written tiny bits of that way back... There’s a section of the Muscle story in which they’re sitting at the police thaana, and the DSP [deputy superintendent of police] goes and pees in the corner. That’s a true story. I own a farm in South Punjab... and that exact thing happened to me. This was in 1987-88. He looked at me, he knew who I was, but he was trying to insult me. So, he did that. He actually went and peed in the corner. So that got written way back then. I’d written just that one scene because I thought it was so funny.
I have lots of little pieces of things that I’ve written that I keep in various files so that I can use them in stories later. So, you could say that these characters have been floating around in my head for a while, and then I just pulled these guys out and started moving them around.
Shahnaz credits her understanding of running an estate to Russian literature. She tells Hisham, “I keep my eyes open, but most of all, I study the Russians. Turgenev. Joking aside, you should try it.” People compare your work to Chekhov and Tolstoy all the time. Do you turn to Russian literature to also manage your farm?
I wouldn’t advise anybody to try to learn how to run their farm in Pakistan by studying the Russians. However, once you are in Pakistan running your farm, I would advise you to read the Russians: A, because it would be good for your mental health and B, because there are useful similarities in terms of how the places are structured.
And certainly, in terms of empathy. That Russians teach you empathy — and empathy from people in the kinds of relationships that I’m describing in the book. So yeah, reading the Russians is not unhelpful, but it was meant more tongue-in-cheek.
This book comes 17 years after your first book, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders. When did you start working on it?
I starting thinking about it in 2020-21. I had been working for 10 years on another book. It was a gradual period where I came to accept that I wasn’t going to be able to finish that book. It was a book about my mother and was set in America and it never came to anything. I wrote several drafts of it and finally just put it aside. There was this period where I was still working on that one and starting to work on this one, during COVID times, and then I said, ‘poof,’ and put that down and moved on with this one.
What does it take to put aside something you’ve been working on for 10 years?
Of course, it was painful just because of the amount of time that I put into it. But that book was about my mother’s death. My mother died under very complicated circumstances. And I had a very intense relationship with her, very close. She was the person who helped me to become a writer.
So, those 10 years weren’t wasted. I was writing all the time. I wrote a huge amount. I think if I hadn’t been able to write, it would have been very, very difficult because there’s nothing for a writer more painful than not being able to write. I’ve been fortunate. I’ve had moments where I could find it difficult to start a piece, but I’ve never been blocked.
But it was difficult and I kept having to throw it away. At one point this thing was 600 pages and I could tell it was all crap, it wasn’t working, and I threw away all of it. I went back to just this little bit of it that I thought, ‘Okay, I’ll build out from this one section,’ and I tried and it just didn’t work. And so, it was very frustrating because I couldn’t get it to work.
There were long periods and I thought, ‘Hey, this is working well.’ I look back at my journals, and I can’t believe how much of the time I’m delighted with what I’m doing and thinking it’s so great.
At the end, it was complicated to tell myself and my publisher and other people that I’m not going to publish the book right now. Obviously, that’s not an outcome that you want. But then it was also very exciting because then I was like ‘Oh, great. Now I can actually sit down and do something I really want to do.’
Life is complicated and things happen. And I think just being resilient is the key for a writer or for anybody. Sometimes you fail at what you try to do, but then try to make that failure into the part of the next success, which I think is the case here. All of the writing I did in that book and all of the emotions that I had in the course of preparing that book, all of that went into this. So, this book follows on from that in a certain way.
The novel opens a few years after Partition and maps six decades of Pakistani life. Tell us about your relationship with Pakistan.
I’m sure Indians have the same thing. It’s a mad relationship we have with this country. It’s my country, I love it. It’s where I was born and bred and where my family history is. And I’ve spent most of my life in Pakistan. And yet, it’s a very frustrating place, but then every place is frustrating. I mean, if you were an American right now, you’d be beating yourself in the head. So, it’s not like it’s easy being from any place. It’s easier being from Norway. My kids are in school here, and therefore I see Norway very intimately through them. It’s a much better run place than most, but there are many ways in which it’s very challenging to live here.
Pakistan is like a very powerful drug. I find that once you’ve taken it, everything else seems bland. When I’m in Pakistan, I’m mostly out in the countryside where life is even more dramatic. So, when I come abroad, I find life here very pale and without much interest. It’s like it doesn’t have enough salt in it.
I love Pakistan and yet I’m so frustrated by Pakistan because nothing is done right. And it’s so frustrating that nobody will get together and help each other and try to do things properly and therefore make a better country. Everybody is pulling in their own ways.
There’s a scene that I remember telling a bunch of people asking about Pakistan. I’m a mango grower. I grow mangoes — we do everything, Sindhri, Chaunsa, Safed Chausa, Dussehri, Langra... So, a few years ago, I was trying to create relationships when the arhtis (agricultural middlemen) in the bazaar in Lahore. We were selling it to these guys. So, I said, I’ll go and meet the guys in the arhat in the androoni shahar, the old city of Lahore where they do the arhat. They do the nilami — sell the stuff — very early in the morning. As we were driving in, there was a donkey that was obviously very sick. He was lying there, sort of braying and making all this noise. And I said to the guys, ‘Arre khota idhar padha hua hai,’ and they said ‘Ji ji usko utha ke le jayenge.’ So anyway, I went and met this guy and we chitted and chatted. And I was driving out, the donkey is still lying there, still alive. He was sort of raising his head and making sounds and some guy was pouring water on him. Then, for some reason that evening I had to go again. So again, I put on my shalwar kameez and we got in the car and go to the androoni shahar and the donkey is still lying there except now it’s dead. The place where they do the arhat is a big square as you’re driving into the arhat. I had to take my car around it to go past this dying donkey. It was six in the morning and it’s now six in the evening. 12 hours later, the same bloody donkey — it was dying there; now, he’s dead. Who knows how long he’s been dead for? Nobody’s thought to move him.
This is my version of why things in Pakistan don’t work.
All these arhtis, who are these zillionaires, they’re much richer than I am, who have these shops around — all they have to do is hire some guy to come and occasionally clean the donkey off the thing. It’s just lying there, probably still there.