Tahira Naqvi's short story collection entitled Attar of Roses was published in 1998 and her second collection of stories Amreeka Amreeka is scheduled to be published soon. Her short stories have been widely anthologized and her translations from Urdu of noted Indian and Pakistani writers have been published in the United States, Europe and Asia. Naqvi is currently working on her first novel as well as translations of the Pakistani writer Ismat Chugtai's non-fiction writings. She has also translated Chugtai's novel Terhi Lakeer into English. Naqvi, originally from Pakistan, now lives in the United States with her husband and three sons. Educated in Lahore and the United States, she currently teaches English at Western Connecticut State University. 

[Interviewer's note: In our interview with her, Naqvi told Monsoon Magazine that she "rarely wanders into the realm of analyzing my own work." Tahira was, however, most gracious, cooperative and insightful when forced to discuss her stories in a critical light. We conducted this interview partly through e-mail and partly through telephone conversation. As in her stories, Tahira expresses herself clearly and passionately and talked at length about the ideas and issues that move the writer in her.]

Tahira Naqvi: Gayatri, first, let me thank you and Shikha for giving me this opportunity to look at my work in an entirely new way and share my observations with you. And thanks for all your wonderful comments. I am a great believer of spontaneous writing so that when I'm not impelled I don't push myself to write. In other words I will never sit before a blank monitor and gaze at it expectantly. Because of this I have rarely wandered into the realm of analyzing my own work. But having been forced to do quite a bit of it recently, I admit I am now having fun. But you know, as a reader and perhaps as a writer too, that you can't always put faith in what a writer says about his or her work simply because so much of writing, especially good writing, comes from inner springs of the mind, the heart and the soul, and how can anyone ever gauge the depths of these springs or fully understand how they work? Anyway, let's see what I can come up for you. 

Gayatri Devi: Let me begin with the story A Peephole Romance. Nothing much happens in the story in a traditional sense. A young girl watches her potential grooms through a hole in the door. When the story ends she is madly in love or infatuation ( we are not sure which) with the strong arm of the latest man who has come to view her. She is in love with the arm because that is all she can see through the hole in the door. It is a marvelous story. What I really liked is the way you direct all your descriptive and analytical powers, so to speak, to bring up the psychological dynamics, if we may use that word, of such moments. It is almost like what lyric poetry does--concentrate on a 'moment' more than anything else. Tell us something about such stories--what attracts such story-telling to you? What was the genesis of A Peephole Romance? Are they born with a character or a moment or a problem of some kind? 

TN: I'd like to make a small correction here Gayatri. What Shama sees through the peep hole is first the back of the young man's neck which has tendrils of hair curling over it and then she sees his 'hand,' not his arm. There's a big difference. 

GD: Thanks for pointing that out, Tahira.(Arms are my own weaknesses--a Freudian slip there perhaps!) But tell me, why in terms of significance, it is the 'hand' and not the 'arm' that is more in tune with the character of Shama and that of the story? 

TN: First of all, the protagonist Shama, is the sort of person who might regard a man's hand to be an indicator of the kind of individual he is. Then of course there are all those interesting sentiments and emotions associated with hands: you touch with your hands, you feel and show affection with your hands, your hands hold, your hands grab, they slap, they hurt, they crush. Personally, I am a lot like Shama; a man's hands can excite me or turn me off completely. 

For me everything that I write always begins with a deeply compelling idea that may be disturbing or exciting in some way. There have been instances when the idea comes with its own format thus enabling me to proceed with relative ease. At other times a character or two will accompany the idea and once I start writing other shapes and forms will emerge in relation to my involvement with my characters and their relationship to each other. My work is also very autobiographical and memory plays a very important role in everything I write. In that sense my fiction is autobiographical, but what I like to say always is that everything that happens in my story happened but none of it is true. There was a peephole in our house and my aunts did worry about me a lot. But I wrote this story after I came across (Chitra) Divakaruni's Arranged Marriage and I thought, with some anxiety, that someone should tell readers about other kinds of arranged marriages as well. In much writing about South Asian women we see only pictures of misery and despair and you and I, and others like us, know there's a lot of joy and fulfillment in our lives as well. 

GD: You write another kind of story as well--I am thinking here of stories such as Love in an Election Year, and History Lessons and Atonement. These stories show a powerful and creative response to the historical milieu which surrounds your characters. You seem to combine the introspection of lyrical moments as in A Peephole Romance with certain very incisive and particular social, political, historical, national issues. These issues are never far away from the lives of your characters. For instance, even in such a lyrical story as A Peephole Romance we hear Shama saying that one of the prospective grooms lost his chances because he criticized Mrs. Bhutto and Shama's family were ardent Bhutto loyalists. And History Lessons and Atonement are both powerfully critical of social evils. As is A Woman of No Consequence. How important are such issues to your writing? Do you see yourself as someone who is driven to write about social issues? Covertly of course. Tell us something about the above stories in the light of this question. 

TN: I won't say I view myself as someone who is driven to write about social or political issues, because I have written about love and marriage and motherhood and a host of other subjects as well. But the comments you have made regarding the political and historical subtexts have been made repeatedly by others as well. I have now realized that all this time I have been weaving these contexts into my narratives without conscious effort. Perhaps this is because in Pakistan politics and social and historical changes affect our lives so deeply that we're never really far from them at any time. They encroach upon our lives and have tremendous potential for changing/altering them. 

Love in an Election Year came out of my disappointment with Benazir Bhutto's failure to fulfil the promise she seemed to have made to the nation's women. And then of course, story-telling being such a complex process, Fatima Jinnah jumped in because she was a woman who also failed but for other reasons. The story is about betrayal at different levels. In all of this there is failure at love. Romance among cousins is an integral part of Muslim societies, especially in India and Pakistan, and as I have often told my students here, we are not all hijab-wearing, persecuted, inexperienced, naïve women as the world would have us be. We do get to have some fun! 

GD: Which brings me to a related question--Going back to the story of the peep-hole romance and the new story about getting lost in the market place--and perhaps others as well--you have these women characters who unabashedly 'gaze' at men (as we often do but rarely gets documented perhaps!). And while you have the man in Attar of Roses spot the flawless skin of the feet of the woman in the veil, you also show men as objects for looking, even ogling, by women. This is a nice reversal or perhaps a nice balance of power between the sexes. You talk about it with a sense of mischief, of playfulness because these emotions are often carried by young girls in your stories. And in A Man of Integrity we even have a woman who would in America perhaps be labeled a 'stalker.' Could you tell us something about the role of sensuality, of sexuality and other forms of engagement and interest in men that your women characters possess? The openness about sexual matters, in the company of women, we should emphasize perhaps, even bawdiness, occasionally, is something that gets lost in most outside views about cultures such as that of India and Pakistan--cultures that are seen as traditionally 'primitive' by more 'advanced' cultures. Could you comment on that? 

TN: This is a complex issue and one not easily explained or understood. Women in South Asian societies live in segregated worlds for the most part and since they are constantly in the company of other women --these being older, younger, same age, relatives, siblings, cousins, servants, neighbors, friends etc., a special camaraderie develops among them that could never be completely grasped by people who are in the position of 'viewing' them from the outside. It is only in the context of this milieu that we can explain the 'bawdiness' and 'openness of sexual matters' that you refer to. The women talk about sexual experiences, share personal histories, often sing songs that are full of sexual innuendo and insinuation, and are frank, open and bold. There is no reason not to be; there are no men around. They also comb each other's hair, massage and are massaged, lie next to each other, sleep on the same bed sometimes, etc.,  But that is not to say they are 'lesbians', an inference too easily and loosely made by those who are on the outside, looking in. An incorrect judgment, since it has been made out of context. 

Now for the first part of your question. I have never consciously thought of introducing sexuality in any story simply because that might be useful in one way or another. In other words, whatever you see is woven into the texture of the lives of the characters and as they are unraveled and their narratives proceed, their sexuality is engaged not as if it were something extraneous to them, but as though it were only one of the many pieces in a complex puzzle. 

GD: I felt there was a similar problem with Deepa Mehta's movie Fire. Almost all the external requirements for such intimacy among women are shown in that movie but how that leads to a lesbian love relationship is left unexplored, I felt. Did you see Fire? What did you think of it? 

TN: I thought that it was not as well made as it could be. There wasn't enough chemistry between the two characters and their sexuality is not developed. It took the society of women and traditions of women's friendships and somehow took isolated customs and made it palatable to the west--because these patterns mean something else here. The movie and the relationship felt contrived to me. 

GD: Yes, I thought that the movie suggested that lesbianism is the default state when men are so lousy as they all are in Fire. It is a naive way to look at lesbian relationships. But coming back to the stories, tell us about the writing of Atonement--a fun, if somewhat different, cricket story. 

TN:  Atonement was triggered by the extremely funny (funny for me, very serious for those who were involved) news that I was getting on the internet newspaper sites. A story is never just one thing. My own sense of loss at having lost a culture and a country, my diasporic isolation fed into the narrative as well. And my mother is always the call I could not heed, although I try so hard. 

GD: Yes. I really liked how you juxtaposed your sense of disappointment in not getting all of your mother's attention with the euphoria of the India-Pakistan cricket match. It shows the reader the all-consuming obsession that parochial hostilities can turn themselves into. And I especially liked the rather blunt way in which you remark upon the absurd celebration in Pakistan of Sri Lanka beating India after India beat Pakistan--"the enemy of my enemy is my friend" or something like that. 

TN: Thanks. The other story you asked about--History Lessons is a very old story and was written during the military rule of General Zia. We (Pakistanis abroad as well) were so frustrated and angry and felt helpless and impotent. I think that's what translated into the events in the story and became the protagonist's dilemma. I have incorporated this narrative into the novel I'm writing which seems to become more and more of what you say! I have to mention here that I always hated politics and knew very little about it when I was younger. But the world has changed and we live on the edge of hatreds fueled by sudden political upheavals that affect our lives deeply. 

GD: This is a digression--but I couldn't help but notice that so many of your characters are high-school teachers--both men and women. Why such a love for the school? This is a subculture that is rather under-represented in much fiction. But these school teachers, their extra-curricular duties, their bonds with the students etc that you talk about--these are all so real and intimate in my memories as well--my mother began her teaching career as a high-school teacher. And your teacher characters are wonderful human beings. Tell us something about your choice of locations and characters and their lives and preoccupations. 

TN: I wish I had a clever answer for you. I really don't know why there are so many teachers in my fiction. Let's make some conjectures. I am a teacher myself and two of my favorite aunts were teachers. Male teachers are usually very frustrated because their intellect makes leaps across their social and economic boundaries. Teachers are powerful individuals. Teachers can be many things at once - poets, artists, musicians, philosophers, friends, mentors. And finally, my oldest friend is Mother Andrew, the nun at the Convent of Jesus and Mary in Lahore where I spend some of the happiest years of my life. And, I love the dynamics in the classroom. Locations in the stories are nearly always based in actual places in Lahore (sometimes I'll go elsewhere, but not often). Lahore is deeply etched in my mind and the city breeds stories for me in ways I can never fully fathom. 

GD: This is an interesting problem in much of South Asian writing. Very often there are certain formulaic expectations readers have of writers. And for South Asian writers writing in English, one of the more popular ones is that there has to be a certain "diasporic" vector to the stories. There is even a school of thought that believes that stories written from memory in English about matters of the old non-English speaking country are nothing but 'sentimental nostalgia,' a particular point of view that caters to the English-reading public etc. At its most unkind moment, these stories are sometimes labeled 'exotic.' In short, not 'serious' literature. Or not serious enough. What is your response to such expectations and criticisms of literature? 

TN: I have learned that one man's serious literature is often another man's rubbish so I try not to put too much faith is this sort of commentary. However, I will say that for me, literature that touches deeply in some way and leaves behind an indelible impression, one that I will carry with me forever, is serious literature and I believe that stories and poetry that are connected in some way to nostalgia -- the past, the places one has left behind and knows well, the people one has loved and can no longer be with, memories of childhood, of dreams realized and forsaken -- are 'serious.' They deal with a sense of loss and apprehension, joy and despair and are rooted: rootedness makes for wonderful writing. 

GD: Neatly put. This sense of rootedness, this sense of place comes across in the title of this collection of stories as well: Attar of Roses and Other Stories of Pakistan. Except for the couple in New Beginnings who has a son abroad and the narrator in Atonement almost all other stories are Lahore stories or Pakistan stories. In quality as well as quantity you seem to prefer Pakistan as the environment for your stories and not the diaspora. Could you comment on this preference if at all this is an accurate reading? 

TN: This is a long story but I'll try to make it short. I started writing in 1983 and the stories I produced all dealt with immigrant experience of some sort. The characters were Pakistani expatriates or their relatives and friends and even though some of the stories were set in Pakistan they were, technically, 'immigrant' stories. These were written over a period of six or seven years and every single one was anthologized. Then, my children grew up and life changed. I changed. It no longer seemed important to write about the 'immigrant' experience. Instead Pakistan beckoned and with it all the tales told and untold. I began writing as if I had never left, but of course I had, so I wasn't really writing as if I hadn't left. Anyway, those are the Attar stories, which, ironically and because of publishing glitches, have been published first in a collection, while the stories I wrote first will be coming out as a collection in the spring of 2000. This collection, tentatively titled Amreeka, Amreeka is host to Lost in the Marketplace. What has happened is that the Diaspora and the homeland have become the same place. 

GD: You write about marriage--its ritualistic aspects, the sensuality of it all, the celebrations, the excitement of brides and grooms etc., of youth--but the most serene but sad love story in this collection was A Matter of Togetherness for me. The story of the Christian woman and the Muslim man, a long-married couple, and their decision to stay together even in death and burial. But as you make it clear in the story, this decision turns into a 'betrayal' by her husband--who decides to convert her 'dead body' into his religion so that she will be buried close to him. There is something sad and loving yet selfish and easy in the husband's decision. In almost all other stories the women seem to lose out something in the bargain. They are refined characters but there is something melancholic about them all. What patterns, what essences of man-woman interaction are you trying to discover through these stories? 

TN: I am concerned about the way women are treated in all societies. In India and Pakistan we are still struggling to be masters of our own fate and our lives are determined not so much by what we want and need but by what 'our' men want for us. Recently a brother-in-law told me that his daughter has to be married soon-she's eighteen and has just started college and is eager to finish - because we 'must make hay while the sun shines.' This is cause for sadness. My heart breaks when I hear such things. I think that it is this underlying sadness and also helplessness-I can't do anything for the young girl except talk to her father-that is perhaps transformed into the tone of melancholy you see as an undercurrent in the stories. A Matter of Togetherness came out of an old memory of my English teacher Mrs. Kabir who was Christian and was married to a Muslim. The hypocrisy of conversions of convenience has long bothered me. 

GD: My favorite story in the collection is The Notebook. The rhythm of that story is perfect. You show the slow awakening of the woman Salma as a organic process--it is something that is born from burnt spinach and rotis and lovingly crafted verses and secretly hidden treasures and so on. So when she finally walks out and calls out to the sabziwallah for fresh cauliflower, we believe in her escape--we don't fear for her safety and sanity anymore. It is a perfect short story. I would like you to talk about the writing of that story. 

TN: Gayatri, this is my favorite story too. In Urdu poetry we refer to a phenomenon known as amad [aamud] in which verses just come naturally to the poet. This is a story that is pure amad. I did not make too many changes in it nor did I have to edit it much. The poetry is my sister's, who writes in Urdu, and the translations, of course, are mine. A question frequently asked at readings is: "Why doesn't Salma leave her husband?" I try never to answer that definitively. But I do say that perhaps she doesn't want to; after all, this is her house too. 

GD: This is an important point indeed. So do you think that literature can have the power to create empathy where there is none? Can it aid those who are free to liberate themselves and to aid in the liberation of others? In many ways The Notebook is one such allegory. The woman with the notebook is the survivor. Her art empowers her and makes her figuratively tower over her puny husband. Do you think that literature has the power to bring about evolutionary changes in individual and social lives? 

TN: At readings people respond to this story in such interesting ways. The women are always moved, some to tears. The men, somewhat nervously, comment on the descriptions. Such empathy or such unrest are perhaps what good stories are capable of producing in the reader. 

GD: My reaction was pretty much the same as that of the other women. The notebook is almost an animate, sentient being, a repository of consciousness. Her consciousness. So that when you write that he threw the torn notebook at her and "it fell in her lap like a wounded bird," we sense the full atrocity of his actions. It is a beautiful story. A related question: you mentioned that the verses in The Notebook were written by your sister. Do you belong to a writerly family? 

TN: My sister Zahira writes amazing Urdu poetry though she has a masters in English. My father, a physician by profession, has also a great love of literature and writing. He is a poet and writes in Urdu and Farsi. I often use his poetry in my stories as well. 

GD: Earlier you mentioned that you wrote A Peephole Romance in response to some of the traumatizing arranged marriage stories written by Divakaruni. Such stories as being only part of the whole truth. Who are some of the other South Asian writers that you think address similar issues but in a wholesome manner? 

TN: Anita Desai comes to mind immediately though not for this specific reason.. I have an affinity with the way she approaches life. Also Amitav Ghosh and Rohinton Mistry. All of them depict South Asian life and people with compassion and understanding and try not to exoticize people and places. Their stories touch you in some way or the other. I also like R. K. Narayan--he is unselfconscious and funny. These are hard qualities to come by--those who are are. Those who aren't, try. And end up contrived. Salman Rushdie is an interesting and exciting writer who has done a great deal to bring us out into the mainstream. And made our language comfortable in English. But the problem with Rushdie is that he goes beyond exoticization--he puts us on the billboard, so to speak. All this popularization of culture, a sort of caricaturing that he fills his writing with gets tiresome after a while. I cannot read too much of him, he doesn't move me any more. 

GD: Talking about popular culture, I guess one of the reasons why I am so drawn to your stories is that I am a film lover, a film-songs lover. All of my personal references for anything are drawn from movies and film songs. Your characters show the same kind of involvement and excitement at the stories of Raj Kapoor and Nargis and Dilip Kumar and Waheeda Rahman, Madhubala and Kishore Kumar. How important was popular culture to you while you were growing up? Particularly film and film songs? 

TN: You know, I am so bothered by the term 'Bollywood' for Indian cinema. Indian cinema is wonderful. I grew up with it and it distresses me to see Indian cinema satirized by these 'Bollywood' figures that fail to reveal its beauty and its compassion. My idea of Romance emerged from Indian movies. It was the particular ethos of the period that I grew up in. Cinema created images that were beautiful and original. And of course in Indian movies music and movies go together. Fifty or sixty years ago, as we were about to emerge from the cocoon of colonial rule, like literature and art, cinema too was filled with rebels whose stories affected our lives and from whom we vicariously derived our dreams and strengths. My husband and I are great film buffs and we love to watch old Indian movies, our interest ranging from the films made by Bombay Talkies in the twenties and thirties to Ray, Benegal and Muzaffar Ali and others like them. Indian cinema is very complex. When you go back to the times that produced such movies as Bombay Talkies and to the time of directors such as Himanshu Roy--those were extraordinary times and extraordinary movies. It was almost like there was a parallel to the German realism movement in Indian cinema. That part of Indian cinema has largely been ignored today I think. 

GD: But isn't there a charge as well that those early films of Meena Kumari and Nargis etc--well, perhaps not Nargis--powerfully typecast women into traditional submissive roles? 

TN: What would be an example? 

GD: Say, Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam for instance? 

TN: Actually to me, Sahib Bibi or Ghulam is an unprecedented movie. Though it shows repression and oppression, Meena Kumari's character is a forceful one--a woman who dares to be different from the other women in the family, who makes her husband love her--though it is at a terrible cost. I find it a complex movie with psychologically complex characters. And Nargis--I think Nargis changed the representation of women in Indian cinema in a way no other actress prior to her could. It was a wonderful, beautiful revolution. 

GD: Do you still watch Indian movies? 

TN: Yes of course. But we will see either the art films - there are so many I realized recently as I was making a list for someone - or go over the old films again and again - they're like beautiful paintings that you never tire of looking at - and lately we've watched Mani Rathnam's films with interest. However, I am not that familiar with all the new Khans and Govindas so popular these days. 

GD: I read that you are working on a novel. What is the novel about? Can you tell us something about it or is it a secret? 

TN: No, it's no secret at all. The novel began as a love story set in the turbulent times that have beset Pakistan of late and is now turning itself into a story about love and other things. It is a dark novel. You might have noticed that there is no death in my stories. But this novel is about death and pain and other dark emotions. Actually I haven't done much work on it lately. I lost my mother in February. She was the spring of my creative life. I don't know when I will write again the way I used to. 

GD: I am so sorry. Sometimes writing is the opposite of therapy. 

TN: Actually whenever I get stuck in such a situation I do a lot of translation work. For me, translation and fiction go hand in hand. I am currently working on a great collection of essays, non-fiction essays, by Ismat Chughtai. Ismat was briefly associated with the Progressive Writers Movement in India and has written complex, acerbic, sometimes funny sketches and essays about the times and the lives of many of the people who were her contemporaries and were famous writers, actors, poets or film makers. Kali for Women is bringing out this collection in 2000. 

GD: Thank you, Tahira, for this marvelous conversation. I and Monsoon Magazine want to wish you every success with your novel and your other writing projects. We look forward to reading more stories from you. 

TN: You're welcome and thank you. 

Gayatri Devi teaches for the Adult Literacy Program in Dallas, Texas.