Omair Ahmad is the author of ‘Encounters’, ‘The Storyteller’s Tale’, ‘Tall Tales by a Small Dog’, ‘The Kingdom at the Centre of the World: Journeys Into Bhutan’ and ‘Jimmy, The Terrorist’, which won the Crossword Award for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize. He is also a prominent columnist and a political and social commentator. In this conversation, he discusses his latest novel, ‘Homecoming’. Excerpts:Q: How did this book come about? A: The genesis of this was when I was in DC. I just finished my second master’s and I was missing home. Being a brown guy with a Muslim name in America, just when the war on terror was at its apogee leaves you a little off the place. And I hadn’t been able to travel home since I’d gone, which was in 2001. So I met this person, a friend, and she invited me to a book club and everyone was writing little bits and they asked me to write something. And so I wrote the beginning of this novella, which is no longer the beginning. Much has changed, everything has changed. But there is a strong emotion behind it and I think that has carried through even now… My wife says it’s about love, loss and Lucknow. I’ve gone very much for mood and the feel of a place. So there’s a bit of history, there’s. But it’s largely about people. So there’s characters I’ve known, characters I’ve imagined, bits of stories that I’ve heard about Lucknow. Q: It is a form of storytelling which is disappearing as we are moving more and more into very nuclear and urban families. A: This was one of those things that I really struggled with. The novel as a form is very much a product of the European enlightenment pathway. It has the individual at the centre… If you pick up most novels, it’s a very narrow thing of who they are. But for me, as a product of this country, of this culture, I always wanted to know what’s behind them. Because we always understand people as being part of this family, this mahalla, this web of relationships. No person just is a person standing on their own… They are so much more than a person. They’re also part of the past. They’re also part of the relationship in their environments… The idea of the novel as a European construct and the way that we communicate is sometimes different, and we think that that’s wrong. But I think one of the things which I have improved on is I’m no longer very apologetic about that. This is who I am. This is who we are. This is how we tell our stories… We are multilingual people. We talk in lots of languages. Even like, say, the Urdu or Hindi that I use at home and on the street and with elders versus young. These are all almost different languages. The way we use them, trying to transpose that into any language.. you’re really struggling, because the forms aren’t there. There’s no correct way to go about it… I know that while I’m writing in English, I’m not necessarily thinking in English when I’m writing. And I’m writing about people who will be only partially thinking in English, if at all, or speaking in it. And so it’s guesswork. It’s just trying to bully my way through somehow to make this language work like that. Q: There’s a sentence you use: Memories are such flimsy things. A: Things are clearer in our memories than they were in real life. And if you ever had an argument with anybody, you know this true. Because in your memory, your argument is very clear. And in their memory, the argument is very clear. The reality is it was never clear. It was always messy.
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But there is truth there. And memory is important for us, especially as a country where so much of our history is actually oral history. And so much of our history has been badly reinterpreted by colonial administrators for their own design, and that we have swallowed wholesale. And then we spend our whole time… like how you take fish bones out once you’ve taken a bite… But I struggle with this because I don’t know what is true in all of this. And I wanted to register that little thing that, yes, we think our memories are clearer than what is recorded, but should we be that trusting of our own memories or other people’s memories as well?
