Nailing books, saving words

Nadeem Aslam’s newest novel is a miniature painting of a universe of experience, says SALIL TRIPATHI

Photo: Jerry Bauer

NADEEM ASLAM’s apartment has Zen-like simplicity. The walls are white, the home uncluttered and open. There are books everywhere, arranged neatly, in piles, each pile a purpose. One has WH Auden at the top, another, a survey of the North-West Frontier. There I see a volume of Tyeb Mehta’s art. On another pile is a book on Persian miniature paintings.

Books are important in Aslam’s life. For Aslam, the creative process has a transcendental quality. It is a quest to share the fruits of that process with the wider world.

Books matter in his new novel, The Wasted Vigil, as well. It is set in contemporary Afghanistan, where the rulers of a village may change each season. The shadow of the Taliban is omnipresent, as they haunt the lives of a few individuals living in a house in ruins. The home’s matriarch is now dead, and before she was killed, she had lost her wits. But she had enough sanity to realise that books were special, and to prevent the Taliban from making a bonfire of her books, she nailed her books to the ceilings of her house. As if that would keep them safe. Agonising over those nails, Aslam writes movingly of “a spike driven through the pages of history, a spike through the pages of love, a spike through the sacred. I had them nailed because it is such a strong image, of fixing them, imprisoning them, gluing them to the house.

If, in his novel, the matriarch destroys the books to save them, in an ironic, postmodern twist, Aslam suffered a somewhat similar fate recently. He had shipped dozens of books, many of them hardbound, from Pakistan. Pakistan’s customs officials tore open each cover to see if drugs were hidden within. He shows me a volume of the stories of Intezar Husain, with a grievous wound across its face. “The authorities tore apart the spines to see concealed drugs, even as drug smuggling goes on openly elsewhere. They destroy the beauty of the book because they are trying to protect us from terror.”

Aslam spent hours tending to the wounds, reattaching the limbs, using industry-strength glue. The West and its allies are supposed to fight for the readers, for the pluralists, against the demagogues who believe that all the world’s wisdom is contained in one book. The one-bookwallahs would burn other books. But before they can get their hands on them, the West’s allies tear the books apart — to protect the West’s way of life. The image of a Vietnam War-era colonel triumphantly proclaiming that he has destroyed a village in order to save it comes to mind.

Aslam crafts his words like a miniature artist. He casts his light on one area and describes it in great detail, and through that detail he squeezes an entire universe of experiences. The comparison with miniatures is instructive — Aslam also draws and paints. “Every writer has failed at something else — you want to be something else first. I am a failed painter,” he says. On his wall are two large unfinished canvases, on which he has painstakingly recreated Qajar miniatures. “I wanted to understand the paintings better, and I thought the best way to do it would be to magnify them, and draw what the artist drew.

Aslam does not spoonfeed the reader with history lessons. He allows the hoofbeats of the horses of Alexander, the Tatars, the Mughals, to resonate in the background, even as his characters are condemned to repeat history, as a supine Buddha lies in the backyard of the house, with an eternal, fixed smile on his face. The Wasted Vigil is suffused not only with history, but also with fictional characters like Prospero, ancient writers like Virgil, and Russian poets like Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva.

Aslam’s father, Mohammed, was a committed Marxist, a filmmaker, who had celebrated the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. “His great grief was that Soviet communism disgraced itself,” Aslam says. His father found it very hard to understand the break up of the Soviet Union. “If you live in a village as a peasant in Pakistan, the landlord owns you, he can rape your daughter when he wants, he can get you killed, and then you are told that communism will sweep aside all this — well, my father was attracted to it.”

Nadeem was the second of four children, and the responsibility of bringing them up meant his father, who was a poet, could not pursue his writing. He wrote his poetry under the name Wamaq Saleem. “There’s always a wound in my father that his real life did not happen. He wanted to be Wamaq Saleem.” In all his novels, Aslam makes room for a character, a great poet, called Wamaq Saleem. The Aslams moved to Britain in 1980, as General Zia began his crackdown on dissidents. “People like my father were saying — don’t support the Mujahideen, but billions of dollars and weapons were given to them. Those who opposed, like my uncle Mukhtar, were tortured,” he adds.

The astonishing aspect of Aslam’s poetic prose is that when he came to England at 14, his English was rudimentary. “My full

sentences were like ‘this is a cat’ and ‘that is a dog’.” Aslam studied biochemistry at Manchester University. He chose science because it did not require you to be good at English. But by his final year at university, he was confident enough to ask his parents’ permission to take time off to write fiction. Aslam told his anxious parents he would give his first novel 18 months; if it did not work out, he’d return to biochemistry. He wrote Season of the Rainbirds (1993) in 11 months. He had no idea how to get a book published, but as he liked the kind of authors Andre Deutsch published — John Updike, Timothy Mo, and Gore Vidal — he sent his novel to them. An editor wrote back, inviting him to London. Aslam had no money; the editor laughed, said he would, of course, reimburse him. And the novel was accepted and won the Betty Trask award in 1994.

IT TOOK HIM a decade to write his next novel, Maps for Lost Lovers (2006). The novel chronicled the agony of honour killings in

THE WASTED VIGIL Nadeem Aslam Faber And Faber 372 pp; Rs 1,132

magical prose. It won the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Prize and the Encore Award. A Lannan Foundation fellowship followed, which helped him complete The Wasted Vigil.

The recurring theme in Aslam’s writing is his intense disapproval of fundamentalism. He says: “Radicalisation among British Muslims did not begin in a big way until the Bosnian war and The Satanic Verses affair. I felt it unusual that Ian McEwan got into trouble for saying he hates Islamists. I hate them, too; I know them. I have written about an uncle who breaks toys because toys are idols. I had an uncle like that. He was a Wahhabi and came as a tableeghi to teach Islam in Europe, and went to the Dewsbury mosque in the early years, where the July 7 bombers were radicalised.”

Aslam got interested in Afghanistan because the Urdu press wrote extensively about the conflict. He kept a notebook, writing down details of the emerging narrative. In 2006, he went to Afghanistan, accompanied by journalist Salman Rashid. “He has a unique historical perspective: when we looked at a hill, I’d be thinking of a battle in 1995, he was thinking of Alexander’s pathway that ran through that area.” Aslam’s characters lived through that history. But the history was not one of dates, but of memories you glimpse, feel, or smell. The politicians want to erase our memory, Aslam says. His job is to embed it in our thoughts, making it difficult to tear apart because it has been squeezed and miniaturised; it has become a tight ball — but it contains an entire universe.

The book will be released by Faber in India on Oct 16, and Nadeem will be touring India in the first week of November.