The realities in Kashmir exist beyond newspaper headlines. Shahnaz Bashir, the author of a novel and a collection of short stories, writes about these grim realities. The way Bashir structures his stories not only keeps readers engrossed, but also makes it imperative for them to ponder over the underlying ideas. Bashir is a self-taught writer and his writing springs from the well of knowledge, imagination and observation. His priority is clear: He wants to be known as a serious writer.
His debut novel, The Half Mother (Hachette India, 2014), won accolades for depicting the suffering of a mother whose son disappears in army custody and the meanings of loneliness and uncertainty it triggers. The critically acclaimed novel highlights the continuous psychological and physical trauma that the families of those who disappear in custodies go through and the political structures that work behind their sufferings.
Bashir is a writer who doesn’t believe in the insanity of following one’s passion. When he is not busy writing, he spends time with his family, friends and students or indulges in household chores. He also likes to travel and sing. But when he is writing, he writes with the “seriousness and nervousness of a murderer”.
Educated in Kashmir, Bashir is a professor of media at the Central University of Kashmir, where he teaches narrative journalism and conflict reporting.
Bashir’s latest book Scattered Souls (Fourth Estate, 2016), a collection of interlinked stories, has recently been published. In a review of the book in The Hindu, Janhavi Acharekar, author of Wanderers, All (a novel) and Window Seat: Rush-hour Stories From the City (a collection of short stories), wrote that Bashir’s writing bore shades of the great short story writer Sadat Hasan Manto. In its January issue, Kashmir Life, a popular local weekly, called him as a “difference-maker among 12.5 million population of the state of Jammu and Kashmir”. Bashir is also the winner of the Muse India Young Writer Award. He is currently working on his third book.
Excerpts from an interview:
UBEER NAQUSHBANDI: Congratulations for your second book, Scattered Souls. This comes within two years of the publication of your first novel, The Half Mother. That’s being quite prolific. How do you approach writing? What does it mean to you?
SHAHNAZ BASHIR: Thank you. Well, I’m not a fervid writer. I prefer writing to affect my relationship with the life at large. To write well, I always need to look elsewhere for sometime, go away from writing and do something else. I’m mostly a flâneur. I idle consciously, procrastinate, and, in the meantime, turn my story ideas upside down in my mind and then back down-up, take interest in changing diapers of my kids or do any household chore randomly.
Busying oneself so deep in passion is not unnatural, but it’s just a thin line of luck that sets apart a passionate writer from an insanely passionate writer. Yet, when I’m writing, I become so serious that I cannot tolerate any disturbance. When I write, I write with the seriousness and nervousness of a murderer. I don’t see anything except the world of my story.
UBEER NAQUSHBANDI: From someone who started from scratch, you have come a long way. Tell us about your struggles as a writer?
SHAHNAZ BASHIR: I’m no different from any other struggler around. The only thing associated with my struggle that made me what I am today is that I had been very keenly focussed on becoming what I have become. I wanted to do both — teach and write, and that is precisely what I am doing.
I grew up in this small suburb of Srinagar called Natipora. My parents had everything: a couple of small farms, happiness and innocence. Unlike people who are born in protective, privileged, affluent families — born of parents educated enough to be oblivious and prim about the realities of the ground — my kind of familial and social backgrounds were different. My background provided me a chance to look elsewhere too. It allowed me to be intimately grounded in the ordinary.
I grew into an earthy boy, with a sharp sense of textures, tastes and scents. I have not learnt as much at my school as at the local baker’s, the barber’s and the butcher’s shops. These were the real places of knowledge and learning. Listening to the conversations of adults at these places would transport me from one world to another, from one reality to another, one experience to another.
My father was a small government employee. He struggled to provide us, me and my younger brother, as good education as possible. But parallel to his efforts, I started supporting myself much earlier in life when I was a teenager. I’d make paper carry-bags from old newsprint and sell them to a local chemist. I’d even make kites in autumns with my cousins and display them on the facade of our house, magnetise the neighbourhood kids, sell the kites and earn enviable profit. And later in life, when I was in college, I started teaching at various schools and private tuition centres in Srinagar. The first school I taught at was in the foothills of picturesque Braine in Nishat, Srinagar, fifteen kilometres from Natipora. I’d change two buses and walk three kilometres — from the last bus-stop on the main road, through vast swathes of paddy fields — to the roofless school. My monthly salary was Rs 1,200. That was a decade ago in 2001. Afterwards, during my university years, I did private tuition, teaching kids of opulent families in their lavish drawing rooms in the evenings.
My parents wanted me to become a doctor. I also misbelieved myself in that regard. I attempted the medical entrance examination twice and brought disappointment both times. Because in those days, when it was a fashion to become a doctor, I was interested in reading Shakespeare’s sonnets than spend time in solving the indecipherable numerical problems in physics. I had started writing during my college days only. But the university years brought a hiatus. I took a diversion to learning and knowing history, philosophy and politics. That helped me accentuate my understanding about things and enabled me to shape my worldview. Eventually, I worked in local newspapers without salary for months together. Then, I was selected for teaching at a university in Hyderabad. I was very reluctant to go so far from my parents, but they insisted I go. After spending a few years in Hyderabad, I was invited to establish the journalism department at my current university. Through all my college years, I kept writing. Finally, I began getting published and I’m here now. The struggle never ends.
UBEER NAQUSHBANDI: When did you decide to make writing your way of life?
SHAHNAZ BASHIR: The day one of my teachers, who used to give me private tuitions, announced his appreciation for my responding to the textbook questions in my own words —which was against the established tradition of rote-learning — something inside me said that I could write myself. I don’t remember exactly when, but it was sometime in my seventh or eighth standard. And afterwards it only kept burgeoning.
UBEER NAQUSHBANDI: What prompts you to write?
SHAHNAZ BASHIR: My instinct. It’s the only expression I can give to my consciousness. And then, it’s anger and helplessness that really prompt me to write, rather compel me. I don’t know any real happiness. I have not travelled much. I was never encouraged to write or read or taught to write. None of the educational institutions in Kashmir have I found inspiring. My inspiration is the life around me here in this small, strife-torn place called Kashmir.
UBEER NAQUSHBANDI: How would you define your writing style as?
SHAHNAZ BASHIR: Deterministic. The stories would determine the way they can be best told. Elfriede Jelinek once said that language should be tortured to tell the truth. And Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek explained it by adding to what Jelinek said: It should be twisted, denaturalised, extended, condensed, cut, and reunited, made to work against itself.
Primarily, I’m fond of experimenting with diverse formats. I so admire Borgesian style sometimes; fictious reviews of imagined books would make a short story for him. Then the way people like Studs Terkel, Peter Carey, Svetlana Alexievich bring about characterial realism into their works by giving raw voices, fraught with ungrammatical and leitmotif mannerisms, speeches and narrations, to their characters.
I also like to punctuate the narration with real elements like a letter, an ad, a song, a poem, a list, a symbol and so on. I don’t like tight climax-plots, but loose-ended plots to my stories with a multi-plot embedded throughout. I like a matter-of-fact, poetic, stream-of-consciousness, compact narration generally and above all. My stories would stand alone as well as converge, with certain elements, into each other. I am fond of nouns and verbs mostly, in verbing of nouns and adjectives as tiny metaphors. I don’t approve of fiction which is written only to explore the possibilities of language and not ideas. I don’t like too much of aesthetic that fails to torture the language and holds it back from telling the latent truth.
UBEER NAQUSHBANDI: Are there particular themes that fascinate you?
SHAHNAZ BASHIR: Death, loss, loneliness, helplessness, meaninglessness, guilt, confusion and many other serious issues.
UBEER NAQUSHBANDI: What is the element you want to see in all your characters the most?
SHAHNAZ BASHIR: Paradox, irony, dilemma; I don’t like absolutism in characters or plots when everything in life is relative within and without.
UBEER NAQUSHBANDI: What do you not like about contemporary writing?
SHAHNAZ BASHIR: I don’t like non-serious and Anglophone writing. I don’t like literature on “vampire romance”, “call-centre sexual affairs”, “rules of love”, “religion bashing”, books that deal with superficial things or fashionable themes and so on. Literature is meant to be reformative and provocative, not entertaining.
UBEER NAQUSHBANDI: You were born and grew up in Kashmir. You received your education in Kashmir only. There is a perception that nothing can be done without exposure to the outside world. How would you react to that?
SHAHNAZ BASHIR: Of course, exposure to diversity substantiates our worldview, but I think that merely being exposed to something won’t do any good. I have known many who spent almost the whole of their lives abroad, but they are sometimes more insular than any average Kashmiri who has not even ventured outside the foothills of Banihal in Kashmir. The issue is not how much exposed one is to diversity, but how much will power and optimism one has to do what should be done. Many people inbox me every day, inquiring what should they do to become good writers. Now, in this regard, my job is to respond humbly and transcribe my learning to them. My first advice would go like: If you have seriously explored yourself and have arrived at choosing writing as your future, you have to demonstrate your passion for it. How? If you want to write one book, you should have read, say, at least more than a dozen. And hardly, one out of hundred inquirers would really act upon my guidance. People are desperate to become what they think they should become without working towards it. Everyone wants to become a writer without reading.
For 10 years after my school, I spent hours and days together studying dictionaries and books in bookstores, taking notes, because I couldn’t afford buying them. Sometimes some irritated salesmen would want me to vacate because they didn’t like me not buying anything, but just browsing their store.
I would sit for hours, quietly listening to the conversations of some of my intellectual elder friends and guides and then actualise certain takeaways from those conversations. I’d take certain hints about trends in serious writing, about greatest authors, about literary, historical and philosophical ideas. But people of my generation would not have as much patience as I had — I observe this now retrospectively and sincerely. Also, I took my difficult social, political and educational background as a challenge. One anecdote is that one January afternoon, I walked eight kilometres from Natipora to Lal Chowk and back, through a knee-high blanket of snow, to check if my article, that I had sent to a newspaper for publication, was published. The snow had closed down the roads, there was no transport. I reached Abdulla News Agency at Amira Kadal — my hands were chilblained, my feet fully soaked and heavy, and my breath was vapourous from walking through the slush — only to find that that the article had not been published.
UBEER NAQUSHBANDI: Did circumstances help shape the writer in you?
SHAHNAZ BASHIR: In a candid, personal essay on Lithub, a literary magazine, a young Yugoslavian writer Lidija Dimkovska very precisely writes about how the war in Yugoslavia shaped a generation of writers. Now, mind you, it is “shaped” not “made” here… a generation was shaped… What happens to you when you are a writer by instinct, finding yourself caught in a war or conflict situation?
She writes, and I quote, that “these traumatic events that occurred right before our eyes have deeply influenced our art, especially post-Yugoslavian writing. At the time war broke out, my peers and I were still at the beginning of our careers and so we have been indelibly marked by what we witnessed.”
Although Dimkovska writes from the perspective of a guilty Serbian national that she is but replace me here for a Bosnian and substitute Yugoslavia with Kashmir, and I will have to say exactly the same thing, word by word, that Dimkovska says. That the situation of suffering and oppression in Kashmir shaped my writing into what it is.
UBEER NAQUSHBANDI: Much has been written on Kashmir in vernacular languages. But still the world is considerably unaware about Kashmir’s problems. Is this the reason why you chose to write in English?
SHAHNAZ BASHIR: First of all, I didn’t have a choice. I grew up in times when Kashmiri was only spoken, but not taught in schools. My generation never read any of the Kashmiri literature or history or culture or even the language itself. I grew up learning to read and write in English and Urdu. I needed a language to write and I could do it only in English. And fortunately English is spoken, read and written-in globally, so it adds an edge of reaching to a reader anywhere. Otherwise, I’d have never written in English, but only and only in Kashmiri.
UBEER NAQUSHBANDI: How difficult is the transition of thought from Kashmiri into English. Would you tell us about it?
SHAHNAZ BASHIR: Not only is it difficult but sometimes impossible to translate a feeling or observation or imagination into English. Each language has its own system and structure within which it works. Feelings are universal, but some of them work within their own cultural and linguistic systems and structures. When you write a Kashmiri feeling in English, it becomes a huge task. For example, there is no word for tsochwor in English; the closest it resembles is a bagel, but a tsochwor is not a bagel. In my childhood I would often forget to carry a bag to fetch tsochwors from the local baker, so in order to carry a lot of them in two hands was impossible. From the display tray at the baker’s, I used to choose those which were joined together from baking in the oven so as to carry them as a large bar of toschwors. Sometimes, the joint would weaken and the tsochwors would fall. Now, how would you tell this whole experience with a Kashmiri sensibility in English language to an American reader? The possibility is only from the possibility of translation. But that is something that makes your work original.
UBEER NAQUSHBANDI: In your writing, there seems to be a blend of history, philosophy and literature. There is a plot within the plot. Are you inspired by particular writers who have written in a similar vein?
SHAHNAZ BASHIR: That’s from Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. We have read them in translation by great translators like Richard Pevear and Larissa Volkhonsky and they read so great. How would they read if one knew Russian? Except the language part, the best about them is that they are master plotters and write serious ideas. Some of my writer friends have read them much more than me, but my reading is different. My reading is not cathartic, but instructional. I don’t want to loath and despair in Dostoevsky’s novels like his characters do and I don’t want to identify with them. That is something of a barrier between an inspiration and acting on it. I want to reduce this barrier and take away the inspiration to do the similar things in my writing, and not get stuck with the sad story, nor get lost in it. I want to depart immediately and look for my own sort of Anna Kareninas or Raskolnikovs. I want to see how it is done and not get rutted or never emerge. I don’t want to brood but marvel. I try to understand, realise and emulate (if I could) and not get lost. I’m not a literary critic per se, but a writer.
UBEER NAQUSHBANDI: Who are your favourite authors and why?
SHAHNAZ BASHIR: My most favourite authors hitherto are: Tolstoy for the spirituality, plot, characterial diversity and universality; Dostoevsky, for plot, for his inimitable understanding of sad human psyche and existential philosophy, his questions of the moral, social Marxism and so on; Chekhov for slicing lives and getting the pieces to stand alone as brilliant metaphors to the everyday issues, tragedies, paradoxes, ironies and so on; Kafka for his impossible characters manifesting serious questions of existence; J M Coetzee for his lucid tales universalising the raw African experience, the conflict and the problems of racism; Elena Ferrante for the depth of her consciousness of the simple and minute of the day-to-day life; Knausgaard for creating diverse meaning of a singular reality and interpreting it in various contexts of human experience; Premchand for his being grounded in the experience of the destitute existentialism; Daniyal Mueenuddin for the ease with which he portrays the country life in Pakistan and its relations to the world at large; and John Banville for his narration, his compact prose.
UBEER NAQUSHBANDI: The killing of the protagonist Yousuf in “The Transistor”, one of the stories in Scattered Souls, is suspenseful. We don’t know who kills him. Is that deliberate?
SHAHNAZ BASHIR: It is quite predictable and guessable who could have killed Yousuf, but I still leave it unsaid because I want the debate to last. Each guess you make would need a strong reason, more and more reasoning is important to understand a problem the better and better, and that cannot happen if you end the suspense.
UBEER NAQUSHBANDI: Which is your favourite story in Scattered Souls and why?
SHAHNAZ BASHIR: None, because I don’t prefer any one story in the collection over others. Each one is important because each one has an indispensable role in the whole.
UBEER NAQUSHBANDI: Your fictional writings bring the Kashmir conflict in all its horror — rapes, killings, tortures, extortion or other sufferings — alive. Would you call it “journalistic fiction”?
SHAHNAZ BASHIR: Once in a letter to his friend Apollon Makov, Dostoevsky wrote, “Oh my friend, I have my own special view of reality (in art) and what the majority calls almost fantastic and exceptional, sometimes constitutes the very essence of the real…In every newspaper you come across reports of the most real facts and the most odd… but they are reality because they are facts. They occur every moment and they are not exceptional. Facts are “irrefutable, terrible, disfigured, implacable”.
I don’t have anything better to say about the role of reality in fiction — that you call “journalistic fiction”— than what the great Dostoevsky wrote to his friend. “In what ways are the ‘terrible and disfigured’ also beautiful? His books ponder over this question,” writes author Laurie Sheck about Dostoevsky in her essay “Reading Dostoyevsky as Thanksgiving”.
UBEER NAQUSHBANDI: In Scattered Souls, there is a story called “A Photo With Barack Obama” in which the protagonist stone-thrower is very eager to hear the word “Kashmir” from the American President’s mouth. Is this story moulded in a way to show the continuous silence of world powers over the lingering Kashmir issue that is consuming generations after another?
SHAHNAZ BASHIR: My job is to show what is happening in Kashmir from within. This particular story is especially for a Kashmiri reader who usually harbours false hopes and falls prey to miscalculations and doesn’t take the real politics into account. This story and others are to disillusion the Kashmiri reader.
UBEER NAQUSHBANDI: Many believe that you are the “narrator of pain”. How do you respond to it?
SHAHNAZ BASHIR: I think I’m not only a “narrator of pain”, but also a narrator of the politics that works behind the pain to cause it. I’m not a human rights violation writer, but using the violation element, I try to tell the “why” of it in “how”.
UBEER NAQUSHBANDI: “Theft” — a story about a salesgirl — in the collection is neither properly a monologue nor a dialogue narration and yet the story keeps a reader engrossed. What is the technique you have used in that story?
SHAHNAZ BASHIR: This story is written in an “assumed medium” where the sender and receiver characters physically exist near each other and yet do not talk directly to each other. The sender assumes that an imaginary double of the receiver exists in between them. It is this imaginary double who must receive on behalf of the real because the sender wants to make it clear that the receiver cannot have a direct dialogue with the sender because they are not on talking terms. In Kashmiri, each dialogue of the sender or receiver (if receiver too has to respond indirectly) would begin with a prefix word “dapus” (tell him/her). Him/her here is the imaginary double of the sender or receiver in the verbal communication.
UBEER NAQUSHBANDI: Can you tell us about your next book? How different it would be from your previous two books?
SHAHNAZ BASHIR: You’d find out once it is out. But, of course, it is going to be very different than my previous books.
UBEER NAQUSHBANDI: Your two books have been well received. Is it at all a concern how would people react to the third book?
SHAHNAZ BASHIR: I don’t plan writing and intend that it should entice people. If it entices, it’s good. If not, it doesn’t matter because I primarily write for my own self. I write to explore the possibilities of what I can write, why I’d write what I’d write and how would I write it all. To understand things better, I write them out. I write to propose and to argue both.
UBEER NAQUSHBANDI: To become a writer, must one necessarily be a reader?
SHAHNAZ BASHIR: Bad readers are bad writers, like those who end up writing call-centre romance-and-sex stories. And worst readers are those who don’t read at all and would make worst writers, meaning no writers at all.
UBEER NAQUSHBANDI: Besides writing, what are the other things you are interested in?
SHAHNAZ BASHIR: I love singing. I sing well. I also like travelling and I yearn for it, but I haven’t travelled enough.
UBEER NAQUSHBANDI: If you were to list 10 books that you have read so far, what would they be? Also, could you tell us about some books that you have got to read soon?
SHAHNAZ BASHIR: My ten most favourite books so far in no particular order are:
Inspiring interview. I'm intrigued to read Scattered Souls. Though I understand that it's important to read in order to write, I beg to differ when you say that 'worst writers don't read at all'. I am a bad reader. I barely read, but I am a writer. I know that. I am going to prove it to the world. There is no rule to anything. I believe more than reading, a writer has to observe life around him. You become a writer by learning through life, reading people and life around you.
