Interview: Mohsin Hamid – ‘Trying to act like you are normal is abnormal’

The Last White Man, your new novel about a white man waking up to find that his skin is dark, has Kafkaesque undertones. It’s unlike anything you have written. And yet, this novel — laced with loss and rediscovery — seems to be in a continuum with your previous novels. Did it spring from the personal like some of your earlier work?

This novel sprang from an experience I had myself. Having lived in the US, I had experienced some degree of discrimination, but it had not been particularly pronounced. It was not something that had a major impact on my life. I lived in liberal cities, went into reasonably good universities (Princeton University and Harvard Law School), and I had a well-paying job. By large, discrimination was not one of the major problems I faced. And, then, after 9/11, something changed. Suddenly, I found that I was being pulled aside at airports and held at immigration for hours. People would get nervous if I came onto a bus unshaven with a backpack; I had somehow become an object of suspicion and fear. And I started to feel that I had lost something. I wanted to go back to the way things were before. What was it that I had lost? It occurred to me that what I had lost was a partial whiteness that I — a brown-skinned man with a Muslim name — had benefited from, or being allowed to, in the past, to a certain extent. And it was this that I wanted to come back to. And now that had been taken away. Initially, I wanted all that to come back. But then I started wondering what it was that I had benefited from. Was it that I was complicit in something? What did it mean to participate in that or was it right of me to do that? And those thoughts led me to the novel, The Last White Man, where a man who used to be White wakes up one day to find he has grown dark and has to grapple with that reality.

It is a surreal world which you portray, with elements of speculative fiction, which will delight an SF reader. Besides Kafka, who do you feel yourself in conversation with in this novel?

I feel in conversation with early and mid-20th century modernist writers, who were bending the conventions of how fiction works: writers like José Saramago, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino and Virginia Woolf. I also feel in conversation with an older Sufi tradition that uses love as a way of thinking about the transcendence of a mortal life, finding a way to escape the predicament of a temporary life. I am also in conversation with Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Chinua Achebe, Edward Said, and Saadat Hasan Manto. They are the literary ancestors that I look up to. I feel that reality, when we think about it, isn’t entirely real. I think we make up reality to a significant degree. So, in my fiction, I often try to slightly skew what you call the sense of reality and then see what happens in the fertile space that I get after that.

The highlight of the novel for me was the architecture of your well-crafted sentences, which hold a multitude of complex thoughts without getting the reader bogged down.

The sentences are particularly important to this book. They are long sentences in which perspective changes; a sentence begins with Anders’ perspective and then soon changes to his father’s; and then it becomes the omniscient third-person narrator’s; all, this in one sentence. And that creates a feeling that perspectives can shift; they are fluid. This is exactly what happens to Anders. It also offers a fertile space for the readers to occupy, and be open with the notion of their own perspective. Also, the sentences are built by trying to suggest an idea, and then another idea, and then another idea. An assertion is made and then we realise that maybe that’s not quite right. That is actually how we come to think. As soon as we say something, we think that’s not how it was. We are constantly evolving our thoughts on things. But when we tweet or write something, it gets tied to a view we held in the moment of writing. And then we have to defend that too and align ourselves to that view. Our more instinctive relationship is to say something, question it, change it, and say it again. In this novel, I was trying to do that. Partly, the way these sentences work is that they rely on commas, more than on full stops — the place where we get to stop and think about why this is happening here. The comma is more forward-leading; it keeps you going. And that’s useful because the reader hopefully just goes along; they go from one idea to the next and next without being able to pause. Like a river, a comma is able to carry forward different waves of thinking.

We are also constantly changing ourselves; we never remain the same for a long period of time. Do you see The Last White Man as a novel about transformation, both external and internal?

The social world Anders, the white man, lives in suddenly stops seeing him the way he sees himself. But when the social world stops seeing him the way he sees himself, what Anders discovers is that he is not unchanged; he does change. So, at first, he tries to hope that this transition hasn’t happened; it’s just his imagination. Then he hopes that maybe it’s not of significance and nobody will believe the colour change. Then, he thinks that it’s after all only skin: “If I just act like Anders, people will understand it’s me.” He discovers that trying to act like himself makes him feel very self-conscious — it makes him feel not like himself. And then he thinks he should act like other Whites; he should behave White. But then he finds that trying to act White is the opposite of Whiteness. Trying to act like you are normal is abnormal. Once you have to act to assume the default setting, you don’t know where you belong in the default setting. As the novel progresses, it becomes clear to him that although he has only changed on the outside — the only thing that has changed is how people perceive him — it sets in motion an interior change. And he does change on the inside. So this sense of change actually has a much deeper impact. The change of the surface side changes how he views himself.

Most of your novels show us the various ways love could be transcendental. This novel, too, is about different kinds of love.

The love story of Anders and Una is at the heart of the novel. But this is also conveyed through other important love stories: there is also the love that Una has for his mother, and Anders has for his father. And then there is the love that Una’s mother has for her, and Anders’s father for his son. In a way, the novel is built upon three love stories. There are two stories of parental love and one story of romantic love. Love really is, in a sense, a human capacity to go beyond the self. There is this possessive idea of love — I love you, therefore, you’re mine — which doesn’t really help us as much. But there is another aspect of love: “I love you, therefore, you are of great significance to me; you matter.” What that means is that “I” here is of less priority. This is a strand that emerges in all of my novels; they all explore different variations on love — Moth Smoke, Reluctant Fundamentalist, How To Get Filthy Rich in Asia and Exit West are all love stories. They are different kinds of love stories, but they are all love stories. In that sense, there is, for me, a strong attachment to the Sufi literary tradition which takes on so many different ideas, but looks at them through the lens of love stories; of the love of the moth, for example, for the flame of the candle. What is that? The idea that even if the self is lost, the love is so strong that the lover wishes to go there. So, yes, the idea of different kinds of love, and the power and potential of love as a human emotion in the face of dramatic transformation, is of great interest to me.

You have mostly written short novels, but this one is particularly sparse. And the setting is an unnamed city. What led you to these choices and what did they help you achieve?

This novel is designed with lots of gaps: there are gaps in terms of names — only Anders and Una have names. There is a gap in terms of geographic specificity; we don’t know where exactly it takes place. It’s a short novel; many things are not explained. We don’t have much in the way of dialogues, for example. It’s very interior. And the reason it’s written like that is that these gaps create space for the readers to imagine their version of the novel. A novel doesn’t look anything like the world we inhabit. It’s not like film or television, which portray a world familiar to us. A novel is a way for readers to imagine something that looks and feels like the world. And the reader really makes the novel. In itself, the novel that I write is a half novel; the reader animates it in their imagination to make it the full novel. I try to write novels that are open to readers doing this. And, so, the brevity and the avoidance of specific places and names and dialogues in what might be like in a film or a TV show is intended: it’s a novel that needed a different kind of vocabulary since it takes place in the interior. Leaving the space open for a reader to create a full experience is something that I try very much to do.

In your fiction, you capture the pulse of modern society. Where the world is going: Do you see this as an area where your preoccupation as a novelist lies?

I have always been interested in where the world is going, but not as an academic exercise. I am interested in it because I suppose I feel very exposed to it. It’s like if you have very bad allergies, you’re interested in the amount of pollen that is in the air in the way somebody with less allergies isn’t. When the flowers start blooming, you know that you’re going to have a runny nose or you’re going to start sneezing. As I have lived between different cultures, I have become a mongrelized and hybridized human being — mixed, of different things. That has made me very sensitive to the rise of intolerance and of anti-migrant feeling, of fetishization of purity — who is a true Pakistani or a true Indian or a true American or a true British person? Because these pure images never really include people like me. If there is a pure Pakistani or American or British person, it certainly isn’t me. So, my sensitivity to these trends and developments has to do with a feeling of precariousness and self-preservation. I am not comfortable with the world that isn’t comfortable with people like me. In that sense, it’s my lived experience that finds its way to fiction, in which what I try to do is lean against these trends. And to make the world more comfortable for people like me: people who are migrants or of mixed cultures, and not from dominant groups. It’s my way of being in a world that very often seems to be opposed to people like myself.

How does your mongrelized and hybridized character influence the landscape of your fiction?

It’s hard to know what determines your writing when you are at it. Moth Smoke (2000), in many ways, was an attempt to look at and reflect on Lahore, with the urban South Asian lives of young people as the background in a way that I didn’t see much representation in fiction and storytelling at that time. In the 1990s, much of fiction writing was in a different domain than the one in Moth Smoke. Also, Moth Smoke was written from a somewhat hybridised perspective: it looked at Lahore from the vantage point of the narrator’s experience. The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) was the reverse: it looked at New York as a place where I had worked and lived in, but the vantage point remained the same: of a partially Pakistani.

In How To Get Filthy Rich in Asia (2013), I came back to Lahore. But I was looking for Lahore now not as a way to describe the city to the rest of the world, but to say: What if this place is like the rest of the world? What if every city is like Lahore? What if Lahore is the universal city? What if every city has a claim to imagine that it’s the universal city? And it’s not just New York or Paris or London that can be the universal city. Maybe Lahore and Delhi and Bangkok could be the universal cities, too. They should be. If any city can be, then every city can be. So, it was arriving at a different vantage point. But, also, it was a desire not to be cast in the role of representing and reporting from Lahore because it’s an uncomfortable position for me. Who am I to do that? What is the need for me to claim that? In Exit West (2017), it was a feeling: what if one has to leave this place? What if Pakistan or the country you live in becomes inhospitable for your kind of people? What do you do? When do you flee? How do you flee in a world where people are increasingly becoming hostile to migrants and refugees?

The Last White Man became a response to that narrative we had in recent years — from the dominant anti-migrant narrative of Trump to Brexit and Hindutva. In fact, we see populist leaders in every country — be it Russia or Turkey or Brazil or Philippines or Pakistan — doing the same thing. So, in many ways, I am reacting to the things that are bothering me. Things that are opposed to how I see myself and how I see the world; and that opposition gives me the instinct to write these novels.

In what other ways do you see yourself processing contemporary political realities in your fiction?

At a fundamental level, I try to say what I think (about political realities) in my non-fiction writing. In my fiction, I try to do something slightly different. I try to invite the reader into the game of playing make-believe together. It’s like two children saying: “Okay, let’s be pirates. And this tree is the master of a ship. And those leaves or the grass are the fins of sharks. And we have to not get eaten. And we have to say this to the other tree, which is the other ship.” And then they start playing this imaginary game. That’s very different from telling a child that pirates are bad or sharks are dangerous. In the imaginative make-believe world that we enter as children, many things become possible. It’s a very fertile place. And, in my fiction, what I try to do is to create that kind of fertile place where readers get to enter into a game of make-believe: they are actively into the make-believe situation, and the events and dynamics around the story. And, when they finish, they are left with a sense of wonder at what they have been a part of. So, the novel, in a sense, is less about conveying a message and more about finding a fertile space to allow ourselves to feel differently. I try to build novels that are open to be read in different ways — novels that leave a lot of space for readers to imagine, and focus much less on conveying a specific message. It has to be more about allowing the reader to enter into an imaginative experience where they get to reimagine things for themselves. And, hopefully, that has an impact on the reader. That’s what I am really trying to do in my novels.

Do you see the potential of the novel’s form, in any way, getting diminished in a world full of distractions?

I grew up in a time where I read a lot of books. In California, I watched a lot of television. But I read a lot of books as a child in California. And, then, at the age of nine, when I came to Lahore, there was very little TV: there was only one channel and that too for only a few hours a day. There would be only one American TV show in a week which I would wait to watch for the entirety of the week. There were also wonderful Urdu dramas that I would watch. But that was, maybe, an hour a day. It was not an endless amount of online entertainment: There was no internet. There were very few films in the cinemas that I would go to see. And most Western films either didn’t make it to Lahore or came very late. Many cinemas were either shut or closing down. And, so, basically, books were what I read for the imaginative experience and they shaped me. Young people today have so many other places they could go to for imaginative experiences: they could go to TV or the Internet or cinema or books. I was shaped very much as a reader. And I found the form attractive because one person could make the book; it didn’t need to have billions of dollars and 200 odd people it takes to make a film. It’s just one person writing by himself.

I found that books could penetrate. Even in the time of Zia-ul-Haq, when so many things were banned, Pakistan’s streets were full of books; somehow books lived through. I was very attracted to the world of books and it’s a domain that I found myself inhabiting. Maybe, someday, will I try other forms? Possibly. Will I try television or film? Or some other art form? Maybe. But at this point, I have become deeply involved with writing novels and am focused on that. And since I am 51 years old, it’s where I’m probably going to stay. I don’t think that the potential of the form is being exhausted. If anything, I think it can’t be exhausted because human beings keep changing. So, a world in which television and cinema are by far the dominant mass-producing storytelling media — far more dominant than novels and literature — is also a world where novels can do different things. Maybe we don’t need the specificities of the visual and the stereo. Maybe in a novel you can enter into a more interior space, maybe you can allow the reader to be more participatory. The fact that the world of the readers is changing means that the world of the novel has new potential. I don’t think that everybody is reading fiction or that everybody cares about novels; they don’t, but then they never have. We never lived in a world where everybody read novels. It’s like anything else: it’s something that certain people are drawn to, enter into and find meaning in. And that’s good enough.

Nawaid Anjum is an independent journalist. He lives in New Delhi.

The Last White Man, your new novel about a white man waking up to find that his skin is dark, has Kafkaesque undertones. It’s unlike anything you have written. And yet, this novel — laced with loss and rediscovery — seems to be in a continuum with your previous novels. Did it spring from the personal like some of your earlier work?

This novel sprang from an experience I had myself. Having lived in the US, I had experienced some degree of discrimination, but it had not been particularly pronounced. It was not something that had a major impact on my life. I lived in liberal cities, went into reasonably good universities (Princeton University and Harvard Law School), and I had a well-paying job. By large, discrimination was not one of the major problems I faced. And, then, after 9/11, something changed. Suddenly, I found that I was being pulled aside at airports and held at immigration for hours. People would get nervous if I came onto a bus unshaven with a backpack; I had somehow become an object of suspicion and fear. And I started to feel that I had lost something. I wanted to go back to the way things were before. What was it that I had lost? It occurred to me that what I had lost was a partial whiteness that I — a brown-skinned man with a Muslim name — had benefited from, or being allowed to, in the past, to a certain extent. And it was this that I wanted to come back to. And now that had been taken away. Initially, I wanted all that to come back. But then I started wondering what it was that I had benefited from. Was it that I was complicit in something? What did it mean to participate in that or was it right of me to do that? And those thoughts led me to the novel, The Last White Man, where a man who used to be White wakes up one day to find he has grown dark and has to grapple with that reality.

It is a surreal world which you portray, with elements of speculative fiction, which will delight an SF reader. Besides Kafka, who do you feel yourself in conversation with in this novel?

I feel in conversation with early and mid-20th century modernist writers, who were bending the conventions of how fiction works: writers like José Saramago, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino and Virginia Woolf. I also feel in conversation with an older Sufi tradition that uses love as a way of thinking about the transcendence of a mortal life, finding a way to escape the predicament of a temporary life. I am also in conversation with Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Chinua Achebe, Edward Said, and Saadat Hasan Manto. They are the literary ancestors that I look up to. I feel that reality, when we think about it, isn’t entirely real. I think we make up reality to a significant degree. So, in my fiction, I often try to slightly skew what you call the sense of reality and then see what happens in the fertile space that I get after that.

The highlight of the novel for me was the architecture of your well-crafted sentences, which hold a multitude of complex thoughts without getting the reader bogged down.

The sentences are particularly important to this book. They are long sentences in which perspective changes; a sentence begins with Anders’ perspective and then soon changes to his father’s; and then it becomes the omniscient third-person narrator’s; all, this in one sentence. And that creates a feeling that perspectives can shift; they are fluid. This is exactly what happens to Anders. It also offers a fertile space for the readers to occupy, and be open with the notion of their own perspective. Also, the sentences are built by trying to suggest an idea, and then another idea, and then another idea. An assertion is made and then we realise that maybe that’s not quite right. That is actually how we come to think. As soon as we say something, we think that’s not how it was. We are constantly evolving our thoughts on things. But when we tweet or write something, it gets tied to a view we held in the moment of writing. And then we have to defend that too and align ourselves to that view. Our more instinctive relationship is to say something, question it, change it, and say it again. In this novel, I was trying to do that. Partly, the way these sentences work is that they rely on commas, more than on full stops — the place where we get to stop and think about why this is happening here. The comma is more forward-leading; it keeps you going. And that’s useful because the reader hopefully just goes along; they go from one idea to the next and next without being able to pause. Like a river, a comma is able to carry forward different waves of thinking.

We are also constantly changing ourselves; we never remain the same for a long period of time. Do you see The Last White Man as a novel about transformation, both external and internal?

The social world Anders, the white man, lives in suddenly stops seeing him the way he sees himself. But when the social world stops seeing him the way he sees himself, what Anders discovers is that he is not unchanged; he does change. So, at first, he tries to hope that this transition hasn’t happened; it’s just his imagination. Then he hopes that maybe it’s not of significance and nobody will believe the colour change. Then, he thinks that it’s after all only skin: “If I just act like Anders, people will understand it’s me.” He discovers that trying to act like himself makes him feel very self-conscious — it makes him feel not like himself. And then he thinks he should act like other Whites; he should behave White. But then he finds that trying to act White is the opposite of Whiteness. Trying to act like you are normal is abnormal. Once you have to act to assume the default setting, you don’t know where you belong in the default setting. As the novel progresses, it becomes clear to him that although he has only changed on the outside — the only thing that has changed is how people perceive him — it sets in motion an interior change. And he does change on the inside. So this sense of change actually has a much deeper impact. The change of the surface side changes how he views himself.

Most of your novels show us the various ways love could be transcendental. This novel, too, is about different kinds of love.

The love story of Anders and Una is at the heart of the novel. But this is also conveyed through other important love stories: there is also the love that Una has for his mother, and Anders has for his father. And then there is the love that Una’s mother has for her, and Anders’s father for his son. In a way, the novel is built upon three love stories. There are two stories of parental love and one story of romantic love. Love really is, in a sense, a human capacity to go beyond the self. There is this possessive idea of love — I love you, therefore, you’re mine — which doesn’t really help us as much. But there is another aspect of love: “I love you, therefore, you are of great significance to me; you matter.” What that means is that “I” here is of less priority. This is a strand that emerges in all of my novels; they all explore different variations on love — Moth Smoke, Reluctant Fundamentalist, How To Get Filthy Rich in Asia and Exit West are all love stories. They are different kinds of love stories, but they are all love stories. In that sense, there is, for me, a strong attachment to the Sufi literary tradition which takes on so many different ideas, but looks at them through the lens of love stories; of the love of the moth, for example, for the flame of the candle. What is that? The idea that even if the self is lost, the love is so strong that the lover wishes to go there. So, yes, the idea of different kinds of love, and the power and potential of love as a human emotion in the face of dramatic transformation, is of great interest to me.

You have mostly written short novels, but this one is particularly sparse. And the setting is an unnamed city. What led you to these choices and what did they help you achieve?

This novel is designed with lots of gaps: there are gaps in terms of names — only Anders and Una have names. There is a gap in terms of geographic specificity; we don’t know where exactly it takes place. It’s a short novel; many things are not explained. We don’t have much in the way of dialogues, for example. It’s very interior. And the reason it’s written like that is that these gaps create space for the readers to imagine their version of the novel. A novel doesn’t look anything like the world we inhabit. It’s not like film or television, which portray a world familiar to us. A novel is a way for readers to imagine something that looks and feels like the world. And the reader really makes the novel. In itself, the novel that I write is a half novel; the reader animates it in their imagination to make it the full novel. I try to write novels that are open to readers doing this. And, so, the brevity and the avoidance of specific places and names and dialogues in what might be like in a film or a TV show is intended: it’s a novel that needed a different kind of vocabulary since it takes place in the interior. Leaving the space open for a reader to create a full experience is something that I try very much to do.

In your fiction, you capture the pulse of modern society. Where the world is going: Do you see this as an area where your preoccupation as a novelist lies?

I have always been interested in where the world is going, but not as an academic exercise. I am interested in it because I suppose I feel very exposed to it. It’s like if you have very bad allergies, you’re interested in the amount of pollen that is in the air in the way somebody with less allergies isn’t. When the flowers start blooming, you know that you’re going to have a runny nose or you’re going to start sneezing. As I have lived between different cultures, I have become a mongrelized and hybridized human being — mixed, of different things. That has made me very sensitive to the rise of intolerance and of anti-migrant feeling, of fetishization of purity — who is a true Pakistani or a true Indian or a true American or a true British person? Because these pure images never really include people like me. If there is a pure Pakistani or American or British person, it certainly isn’t me. So, my sensitivity to these trends and developments has to do with a feeling of precariousness and self-preservation. I am not comfortable with the world that isn’t comfortable with people like me. In that sense, it’s my lived experience that finds its way to fiction, in which what I try to do is lean against these trends. And to make the world more comfortable for people like me: people who are migrants or of mixed cultures, and not from dominant groups. It’s my way of being in a world that very often seems to be opposed to people like myself.

How does your mongrelized and hybridized character influence the landscape of your fiction?

It’s hard to know what determines your writing when you are at it. Moth Smoke (2000), in many ways, was an attempt to look at and reflect on Lahore, with the urban South Asian lives of young people as the background in a way that I didn’t see much representation in fiction and storytelling at that time. In the 1990s, much of fiction writing was in a different domain than the one in Moth Smoke. Also, Moth Smoke was written from a somewhat hybridised perspective: it looked at Lahore from the vantage point of the narrator’s experience. The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) was the reverse: it looked at New York as a place where I had worked and lived in, but the vantage point remained the same: of a partially Pakistani.

In How To Get Filthy Rich in Asia (2013), I came back to Lahore. But I was looking for Lahore now not as a way to describe the city to the rest of the world, but to say: What if this place is like the rest of the world? What if every city is like Lahore? What if Lahore is the universal city? What if every city has a claim to imagine that it’s the universal city? And it’s not just New York or Paris or London that can be the universal city. Maybe Lahore and Delhi and Bangkok could be the universal cities, too. They should be. If any city can be, then every city can be. So, it was arriving at a different vantage point. But, also, it was a desire not to be cast in the role of representing and reporting from Lahore because it’s an uncomfortable position for me. Who am I to do that? What is the need for me to claim that? In Exit West (2017), it was a feeling: what if one has to leave this place? What if Pakistan or the country you live in becomes inhospitable for your kind of people? What do you do? When do you flee? How do you flee in a world where people are increasingly becoming hostile to migrants and refugees?

The Last White Man became a response to that narrative we had in recent years — from the dominant anti-migrant narrative of Trump to Brexit and Hindutva. In fact, we see populist leaders in every country — be it Russia or Turkey or Brazil or Philippines or Pakistan — doing the same thing. So, in many ways, I am reacting to the things that are bothering me. Things that are opposed to how I see myself and how I see the world; and that opposition gives me the instinct to write these novels.

In what other ways do you see yourself processing contemporary political realities in your fiction?

At a fundamental level, I try to say what I think (about political realities) in my non-fiction writing. In my fiction, I try to do something slightly different. I try to invite the reader into the game of playing make-believe together. It’s like two children saying: “Okay, let’s be pirates. And this tree is the master of a ship. And those leaves or the grass are the fins of sharks. And we have to not get eaten. And we have to say this to the other tree, which is the other ship.” And then they start playing this imaginary game. That’s very different from telling a child that pirates are bad or sharks are dangerous. In the imaginative make-believe world that we enter as children, many things become possible. It’s a very fertile place. And, in my fiction, what I try to do is to create that kind of fertile place where readers get to enter into a game of make-believe: they are actively into the make-believe situation, and the events and dynamics around the story. And, when they finish, they are left with a sense of wonder at what they have been a part of. So, the novel, in a sense, is less about conveying a message and more about finding a fertile space to allow ourselves to feel differently. I try to build novels that are open to be read in different ways — novels that leave a lot of space for readers to imagine, and focus much less on conveying a specific message. It has to be more about allowing the reader to enter into an imaginative experience where they get to reimagine things for themselves. And, hopefully, that has an impact on the reader. That’s what I am really trying to do in my novels.

Do you see the potential of the novel’s form, in any way, getting diminished in a world full of distractions?

I grew up in a time where I read a lot of books. In California, I watched a lot of television. But I read a lot of books as a child in California. And, then, at the age of nine, when I came to Lahore, there was very little TV: there was only one channel and that too for only a few hours a day. There would be only one American TV show in a week which I would wait to watch for the entirety of the week. There were also wonderful Urdu dramas that I would watch. But that was, maybe, an hour a day. It was not an endless amount of online entertainment: There was no internet. There were very few films in the cinemas that I would go to see. And most Western films either didn’t make it to Lahore or came very late. Many cinemas were either shut or closing down. And, so, basically, books were what I read for the imaginative experience and they shaped me. Young people today have so many other places they could go to for imaginative experiences: they could go to TV or the Internet or cinema or books. I was shaped very much as a reader. And I found the form attractive because one person could make the book; it didn’t need to have billions of dollars and 200 odd people it takes to make a film. It’s just one person writing by himself.

I found that books could penetrate. Even in the time of Zia-ul-Haq, when so many things were banned, Pakistan’s streets were full of books; somehow books lived through. I was very attracted to the world of books and it’s a domain that I found myself inhabiting. Maybe, someday, will I try other forms? Possibly. Will I try television or film? Or some other art form? Maybe. But at this point, I have become deeply involved with writing novels and am focused on that. And since I am 51 years old, it’s where I’m probably going to stay. I don’t think that the potential of the form is being exhausted. If anything, I think it can’t be exhausted because human beings keep changing. So, a world in which television and cinema are by far the dominant mass-producing storytelling media — far more dominant than novels and literature — is also a world where novels can do different things. Maybe we don’t need the specificities of the visual and the stereo. Maybe in a novel you can enter into a more interior space, maybe you can allow the reader to be more participatory. The fact that the world of the readers is changing means that the world of the novel has new potential. I don’t think that everybody is reading fiction or that everybody cares about novels; they don’t, but then they never have. We never lived in a world where everybody read novels. It’s like anything else: it’s something that certain people are drawn to, enter into and find meaning in. And that’s good enough.

Nawaid Anjum is an independent journalist. He lives in New Delhi.