'Very Difficult To Be Both Indian And Pakistani'

When did you come up with the idea of a book about your life?  

I have been trying to write a book ever since I was 21. I have one failednovel, which was a novel purely for the drawer. And I was well on my way to asecond failed novel. The second was dealing with this material (of his life) ina fictional form. I was working as a journalist but didn’t have my heart fullyin it. I was trying to pay my way so that I could write fulltime. Working in Timemagazine, I had reached a very frustrating point. My job as a reporter wasalmost clerical, I wanted very much to get out. The book happened because of anextraordinary set of situations. Time magazine brought out an issuecalled theSoul of Islam, and I did some reporting for them in the northern part ofBritain, I had interviewed Hassan Butt (a Muslim radical). Time magazineused one line of it! The interview was published by Prospectmagazine a year later, when I did my first cover piece for them. And then Igot this letter from my father (criticizing the piece) and that letterconstituted a kind of emotional shock. It seemed to bring together the differentstrands that I was working on.. I wanted to figure out how my father had actedlike a Muslim. How despite his faithlessness, total faithlessness, were theimpulses of the religion still in some way working on him. Why was he angry withme? The reason why I discuss his faith is that the other side of religion, thepractice, the belief, is totally missing in him.  

Why did the autographical novel fail?

The material seems like it is the stuff of books. But when material is tooparticular it can almost be harder for a young writer to try to work through.There is this extraordinary story but what does it mean? It’s not everybodyelse’s. That was actually quite a challenge…(But) it only half failed. Thepersonal bits in Stranger to History are taken almost directly from it.And they form some of the most important sections of  the book. So theearliest part of this book was written as long as five years ago.  

That was around the time you made your first visits to Pakistan. A strongsense comes through in your book of you always feeling like a stranger inPakistan…Why was that?  

It was a twin experience. It was familiar and it was unfamiliar. It wasalways to be a stranger and not. The reason for this is, India as a culture andcivilisation runs through Pakistan in every way, in ways they don’t even know.They are often talking about caste, they don’t know it…But it is notsomething for them to celebrate, it is something for them to reject, to feelembarrassed about, it undermines their mission for what Pakistan was meant tobe. I was Indian on one level, but there was also a part of me that had a deepattachment to Pakistan. And so, the distancing and alienation I felt because ofthe rejection of India was always upsetting. Hindus being cowardly, rejectingthe Hindu classical past, certain ideas about how Indians look, all those thingswere probably more offensive to me, maybe someone else could have taken themwith a pinch of salt. It was upsetting because it made it very difficult to beboth Indian and Pakistani.  

Do you think that because part of you was Pakistani that you had adifferent kind of access to Pakistan, that people were freer with you? 

Absolutely. When I left the Wagah border, they saw my PIO (Person of IndianOrigin) card, my name was on it, and they said, Dhyan se jaana, sambhal kejana, jaldi wapas aa jao. When I went to the other side, they welcomed mewith open arms…"You were in India for so long!" It was prettyaffecting, because there was a lot of warmth and even when my father was distantand cold, this was compensated for twice as much by everyone, who said, "Thisis your country, make sure you feel its your country…"  They weremore than happy to take me in. They would have liked me to turn my back on Indiaand then be theirs. To keep the two was something that was strange and difficultfor them.  

The racist remarks about Indians, Hindus, that you quote?  

They didn’t say that to offend me. They thought I would subscribe to them.They weren’t speaking maliciously, that was just the kind of casual  -just the - way they spoke.  

Your first visits to Pakistan were made after 9/11. Do you think that thatsense you communicate of a bitter, closed society, was a post 9/11 thing?  

The rejection of India was not a post- 9/11, it is a deep thing, it is therein Iqbal.. it is a deep intellectual basis for  Pakistan. But certainly,they were doing much better in the past, were richer, had better roads..Certainly, for my father it was a big shock to see India suddenly, sometimesfalsely, being positioned as this rising superpower. In the last 10 or 15 years,the depressing news about Pakistan was very upsetting to Pakistanis. And theyall had fresh experiences of being treated very differently in the west, ofinsulting things said about Pakistan.  

India’s economic rise bothered them?  

More than economic rise, it has been the cultural rise that blows them away.They have a view of India in their house everyday with Bollywood. They used tohave lots of small complexes, our women are prettier, and suddenly you havethese Maharashtrian beauties coming out of  the woodwork. India’s softpower is shocking to them.  

There was a hope in the 80s, that with a new generation, one not burdenedby the baggage of Partition, there could be a better relationship. But your bookhas a lot of young people expressing angst about India.  

With every generation it is worse. The people I felt closest to were fromthat older generation who had an idea of a mixed society, they had an idea ofhybridity which is essential in India. Indians carry it in their minds withouteven knowing. With that younger generation ... they have had their pure society,so they are not used to that  hybridity. They have been fed a lot ofnonsense. I found that as the two countries ... as we .. got younger,  itwas more clear they had gone their own ways.  

When one travels in a country, one has many experiences. When you write,you choose. Do you think the experiences with Pakistanis in your book wererepresentative of the general trend?  

What I like do is to lay my own perspective down as much as I can for thereader so that he can see the working behind the thoughts and the experiencesthere. Because I believe a book like this cannot be impartial, shouldn’t beimpartial, it is not a textbook. As long as the reader knows the person he istravelling with and can feel that the experiences are honest. That’s the mostimportant thing. They represent my way of looking at Pakistan. And I havea faith that they tell a story that is true of Pakistan in ways bigger than me. 

It was a brave decision to lay bare your family relationships,particularly your very difficult relationship with your father. How did youreason this in your mind?  

I reason it in this way, that the personal circumstances contained a biggerstory. If they had been strictly personal, if they had just been just one’sown wranglings, I don’t think I would have. And it was so strange, the kind ofdivisions that have come up between my father and me, I almost immediately knewthat they seemed to hint at other, bigger truths. And the personal way is theonly way I write, it’s my only way into a situation. So after I felt that thepersonal life was of importance, of significance, that there was somethingbigger contained in it, I wasn’t very shy about speaking frankly about it, andit was also a way to deal with it myself.  

What has the experience of writing this done for you?  Now thatit’s over and done with, what does that do for you?  

(long pause) I think that second silence (the one after the letter) thesecond falling apart, it felt like a desperate situation. It was a very positivestep when I went for the first time to Pakistan, and many positive things hadhappened. And to suddenly see it run aground, so this was a way to make my peacewith that personal history as well. Obviously, I had a kind of intellectualthing to work through vis-à-vis Pakistan, this hybridity, where it would leadme. But on a personal level, writing about it did help me to put some of itbehind me...

And it’s not a topic you would want to go back to, the family, therelationships, the personal history, in your writing? The book helps you moveon?  

A first book often has this quality of a person coming to terms withthemselves, and then you hope you start to look around you as well, that itdoesn’t become an endless self-obsession. It’s an unusual story, but oncetold you wouldn’t want to keep telling it.  

I also hope for it to be a book for Pakistan. I know that is a very naïvething to say, but neither with my father, nor with Pakistan, was it written tosettle any scores. Books like that don’t last. And I hope that despite whatlooks like a bleak look at Pakistan, it is possible to see a genuine concern andaffection for the place. That it will mean something there too, maybe not nowbut that it will eventually have some importance there.  

Have you got any Pakistani reactions, did you circulate the manuscriptamong friends there?  

I haven’t yet… I think it was out of a respect for my father. Ourrelationship is more or less... there has been no contact for the last year orso over this issue, I thought it wouldn’t be nice to have people talking aboutthe book before he’d seen it, and I was going to send it to him as soon as itwas ready. I didn’t want to send it to him in advance because I thought hewould flare up unnecessarily.  

So you don’t have a sense of how people might react to it?

I can’t imagine it will be well received…You know, I don’t have that inme, I have no check that would make it seem better or worse. It would behorrible if I came with a lack of compassion, but I don’t feel that the booklacks that. There is a lot of compassion for people through it. I couldn’thave softened it all, it would have been a stylistic problem (he laughs)…Ialso feel that if something about a place stands out, then you are not beingbalanced if you fill in all these other things to counter that.  

What was your father’s response when you told him you were writing abook?  

He said -- it’s in the book -- if you are writing another filthy diatribeagainst Pakistan, I don’t want to have any part of it. He felt that his familyhad been patriots, he didn’t want anything he saw as... He granted that myprejudice wasn’t intended, he didn’t think I was trying to wilfullymisconstrue the picture. But he felt that I was prejudiced and hedidn’t want to be part of anything that would potentially run down Islam, rundown Pakistan. And you know, the whole private story, by the time we come aroundto the book, this story has come out in newspapers, it is not a big secret.Everyone in Pakistan knows that I am his son. But he has tried to rein thatback. In an interview he will say he has six children which is just a sillything to say, everyone knows. Because he has dealt with this so little in hisworld, even the personal story is embarrassing to him.  

This business of your father becoming the governor of Punjab?  

That is a very surprising and for him, I am sure, an unfortunate development.But I couldn’t have seen that coming. This is not some kind of tell-all book,but I couldn’t have put my life on hold, because in that crazy world ofPakistani politics, he is at that very moment… Governors come and go inPakistan, but he has been there six months... The timing is slightly insane (helaughs uncertainly) I wouldn’t have wished for it to be timed like that.. Hewas just a businessman, a nameless Pakistani, and that was good enough for whatI had to say. He didn’t need to be the governor of Punjab.  

You wrote this book for Pakistan you say. But if Pakistanis are the wayyou say they are, a portrait like this would make them get even more worked up?Is that your sense?  

The situation they are in with Islam is so kind of a cul-de-sac, it isso empty, that they’re going to have to realise they cant keep re-churning upthis nihilism, they have to look at something serious about what went wrong.Things have come as close to rock bottom as possible. I don’t think I am theonly person making a noise like this. Even in fiction, the DaniyalMueenuddin stories.... He looks pretty seriously at Pakistan.  

It’s not so sharply political.  

And non-fiction anyway would feel grittier. It is true that I have no lovefor the idea of Pakistan. I reject the idea of Pakistan, on an intellectuallevel I think it is absurd what they wanted to do. It is an ugly idea, it is anidea of saying, we don’t want to live with you. It has brought up terribleresults, it is behind the kind of rootlessness Pakistan knows today.. In bothPunjab and Sind, their societies have been so disrupted, even worse than India.It was with that in mind that I wrote this as well. It was to see those placesdismembered still, 60 years later. One of things I would have liked to writeabout, which I didn’t write about, is the film industry. I spent a lot of timewith people from it. It was so sad in a poetic way, Lahore as this centre withsuch a close connection to Bombay. There was always this idea that if a film wasto work, it would work first in Lahore. Lahore had gathered the poets, it was amoment cinema-wise that you just can’t imagine because there so much differenttalent. That decline... that’s another sad story.  

You’ve showed a society that has lost its syncreticism in Pakistan. Buton the Indian side too, you see a great loss of that... The Indian reality isalso gritty. You describe the degeneration of a town like Hyderabad in Pakistan,but you see so much of that in India too. 

I have no illusions about that. This book couldn’t have been about India,my second book (a novel, The Temple-Goers) is, and I don’t think I amblind to any of those realities. And you’re right...you know, there is aphrase mushtarka tehzeeb, yeh tehzeeb jahan sab log shareek hain. Whereall people are present. That was a beautiful cultural idea, that has brokendown. Muslims are alienated and in a difficult situation in relation to thefuture of this country. So there is a lot to be concerned about.  

But this book was about Pakistan…Did you ever feel Pakistani?  

I feel Punjabi in an undivided sort of way. I feel a very close and familialconnection to people who live in Pakistan. As you know, I had so much troublefinding out what being Pakistani is all about, so I don’t think I could feelPakistani in the way of citizen. But I do feel those are my people as well, thatI am among countrymen.

British royalty feels like they live in a different planet. How did youfeel being part of that world? (He had a relationship with a minor Britishroyal, Gabriella Windsor.) Being on the cover of Hello Magazine?

It’s misrepresented, that whole thing. I was in Britain for a very shorttime. Ella and I were living abroad a lot. It was welcoming enough, not to livein, or carry on with. I had good time. Hello wasn’t for me, Hellowas doing it....

You got paid for it?  

She got paid. I was in a situation where I was obliged to do it for her sake. 

Will you send your Dad a copy of the book?  

I will. But just because he has behaved so appallingly I didn’t want tosend it to him early.. My last meeting with him (just after Benazir’s death) Ilike to think of as one of those strange human things ..It wasn’t that wemoved forward, but I was very upset to see him feeling that pain (at herdeath).. A big tough man. I have no doubt in my mind that he loves his country,that there is nothing he wants more than for Pakistan to stand on its own feet.When you see someone like that in one of Pakistan’s darkest hours, you can’thelp but be moved. ..I have heard from so many quarters how upset  he isabout the book, brothers, sisters, uncles, I thought I could hardly call him upand tell him, it’s ready!  

What about all these uncles, brothers, sisters, they’re OK about thebook?  

The family works like a mafia. Everyone comes behind. There are a fewbrothers and sisters who are renegade brothers and sisters who keep up theconnection. But most of them toe the line, which is a sad thing.  

If you were to lose this relationship because of this book, you are quiteprepared for that?  

I kind of already have. Whether I wrote the book or not, I am definitelypretty much persona non grata…I have a brother who makes a big effort,a sister who makes an effort, but the family is centred around the youngerchildren and the third wife.. and all (those) doors are shut. And yet, my fatheris a bright intelligent man, well read, I hope he understands some day thatthere was some part of this story I had to come to terms with.