When did you start to write, and what made you start writing? ​

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I read my first novel, a part of our school curriculum, in class five, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and then whatever I read, was mainly a part of mine or my sibling’s school’s syllabus. Some really good writings, that made the foundation of what I write – Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vikram Seth, Nissim Ezekiel. Then I left my city, Lucknow, and went for senior secondary schooling in Aligarh, where my days were spent mostly at the central library, they have more than hundred thousand books, all the world’s literature translated into English. In that library I spent six years, from early morning to very late in the night, reading Sartre, Camus, Kierkegaard, Chomsky to Edward Said. I discovered Naguib Mahfouz in that library. Then I wasn’t writing yet, just a nibbling here and there, often a love poem.

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It was during my masters at Aligarh University that my writing started seriously. By then I had read and reread everything by Franz Kafka, some ideas came into my head, of writing a few novels like Kafka, but there was no confidence, and no idea from where to begin. The confidence came only when I was done with reading Sartre and Camus, mostly Sartre’s Nausea, that experimental kind of writing, where he describes the mundanity of life. I thought I could write something like that, a journal of my loneliness. Those two years of my masters, I just wrote novels, many novels, all of them had love stories at the centre, but none of them were good. 

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It was the accidental discovery of Borges that changed everything. I never thought one could write literature like that, and there are such possibilities, creating that labyrinth of writing, the metaphysics, it was then I tried my hands on stories. I wrote many stories, many dozens, till I wrote that story, ‘The departed’, which became my first publication.

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Are there particular kinds of stories that you like to write, and what do you like to explore in them?

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My stories are about my city. Borges is a big influence; he is my teacher, though I think we never met. Our similarity is our love for our city, the love he had for Buenos Aires, and I have for Lucknow. I am trying to create a personal history, an alternate history, a very private literature, a very intimate one. My city which is now in complete ruins, the older parts, the Lucknow of my childhood doesn’t exist anymore. There was a girl I loved when I was a young boy, she died of cervical cancer. We used to like each other, she was my sister’s friend, but I never got to tell her, I think of her even today. My writings are about places, people and relationships that don’t exist anymore. 

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Could you elaborate more on the title of your story – ‘The children of Kafka’ – and the relationship of your story to the works of Kafka?

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My life at Aligarh mostly revolved around the library and the auditorium, where every day something exciting was happening. It was at the Kennedy Auditorium, once, they were distributing some flyers, about a writer whose name was very intriguing, Franz Kafka sounded as if he were some Moroccan or Algerian who had an Arab father or maybe a French mother, which his Wikipedia page told me that he wasn’t. Through Wikipedia I got to know that this Kafka was an admirer of Dostoyevsky’s work, one of the writers whom I had discovered after high school when I skipped class for almost a year just to read his work at the library. Very bleak, little difficult to read, like a priest’s confession. 

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I remembered the writer’s name, and that summer vacation, I luckily downloaded a book called The metamorphosis. That afternoon, lying on that bed that I shared with my brother, reading that book, amid the sound of clanking utensils in the kitchen, while my mother guided the maid how to mince the meat for the kebabs, I think everything changed for me. I think I became Gregor Samsa that day, an insect lying on the bed reading books or maybe eating. There is no life for me outside my bed, outside books. Since then, more than what I have consumed by reading and writing, I think they have consumed a share of what has remained of me.

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I really like the way you weave different kinds of relationships in this story: male friendship, love, marriage, relationships with parents. Could you say a little bit more about the ideas for these relationships as you wrote them into this story?

 

All my stories are about relationships, one reason may be the huge impact of the Arabic literature I read, where friendship and love were common themes. Even a very short story that I would write, somewhere the protagonist has a friend, real or imaginary, whom he loves, who doesn’t love him back, or when she loves him back, he has already left the story.

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The relationships I write about are related to my personal and intimate life and experiences. I have a very difficult relationship with every person I know, including my parents. Parts of these difficulties are reflected in the relationships described in my story. 

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Right now, I don’t have a lot of friends. As I delved deeper and deeper into literature, I started losing interest in people. Now I can connect more with a nineteenth-century writer, than my colleague at the office where I have my day job. Sometimes I write jokes, I tell them to friends in my head. I have been in love many times, but never confessed it, most of the things I keep in my head, and if I find something or someone intriguing, I sit and write that down.

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Finally, you recently got a prize, congratulations! What are your next writing projects and plans?

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Thank you. I have written a collection of stories called My house, my ruins. It has around twenty stories, all set in Lucknow, about houses that don’t exist anymore. I am looking for an agent and a publisher. I also have drafts of two novels. Let’s see how everything pans out.

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