Maps for Lost Lovers | Post-book doodling 

Acrylic, Watercolours, Pen and Ink and sketchpens on Moleskine Large Sketchbook 

I like the luxurious and equally disturbing world ‘art’ as such produces. I read, write and try to create art whenever the mood kicks in and it is pretty relieving. Sometimes, something I sketch makes me write, something I write makes me want to pick up a pencil and something I read makes me want to illustrate. It’s a huge web of entanglement really, a good one though. 

This random doodling is from one such book I recently finished reading. ‘Maps for Lost Lovers’ by Nadeem Aslam is an interesting story dealing with all things human and earthly which was at some points, out of the world...merely thinking about it. It’s not a perfect piece, this little illustration. It’s far from my best and yet, I’m still going to share it with you all because it was one of the most beautiful things I’ve read in a while which made me want to doodle away, if not anything else. 

If you’re a bookworm, this book might be a good go-to. If you’re not one... well, pick up a book. It’s never too late. :) 

Love, 

I was drawn to the title of Aslam's book "Maps for Lost Lovers" long before I read it. Dense, written with a fierce attention to beauty. Aslam goes into the shadowy subconscious of his characters unearthing startling contradictions that suddenly arise to them about religion, love, and what we've been told we ought to do. In this interview he speaks about his "immense homeland of heartbreaking beauty" and how he wrote Leila in the Wilderness for 60 days straight, missing Christmas and New Year and not seeing anyone. Granta 112 accepted it without any editorial cuts. 

In your story, many ideas come together. There is an almost medieval brutality, there is magic, there is contemporary Pakistan- the references to Guantanamo Bay and Jihad. One is unable to separate the magical fable from the Aishwarya Rai scrap book and the nuclear bombs, the conflict in this “immense homeland of heartbreaking beauty”. Inevitably, many worlds exist and mix in Pakistan. Most stories seem to have only one or at best two layers of reality. However in your story, multiple worlds mix with such ease. Please talk about this. 

   Reality is like that – it is made up of many layers, and our mind is quite capable of perceiving them simultaneously. We try to keep this aspect of existence out of art, out of stories, because we wish to see order in art, not chaos; we wish to sense rhythm and pattern, as opposed to confusion.

    In a way it would be easy to let go and talk about everything, write down whatever comes to mind. I talk about Aishwarya Rai and nuclear bombs and Guantanamo Bay in the same breath. But the details are very carefully arranged. My hope is that the reader will feel pattern within the story, an orderly progression.   

     And, really, the story has just one main strand. Leila is the star around which everyone and everything orbits. Politics, geopolitics, jihad etc appear quickly in the narrative and then disappear. If you wish to concentrate on them, you can; but I am sure that the reader’s chief concern will be ‘What will happen to this girl?’

   The other strands are important – and I hope the reader will be rewarded by concentrating on them too. For example: one of the two brothers in the story – Wamaq – is named after a Socialist poet. I mention it in passing. But through him I wanted to comment on how revolutions go wrong. Wamaq has no understanding of what Socialism is but he defends his father who had given him a Socialist name: so his attachment to politics is merely a sentimental one. Later, he doesn’t tell anyone that ‘the mosque of angels’ is a sham, that in fact he helped build it in secret two or so years ago. It doesn’t concern him. Only when he realizes that someone he personally cares for – Leila – is in trouble with the people who own the mosque does he decide to act. He and his brother then make the mistake of acting on their own – they don’t involve other people. That is inherently apolitical. They attempt a revolution – but they haven’t prepared the groundwork. The support that should be in place before they act is not there. Therefore they pay very dearly for their attempted 'coup'.

Now: all this is on a hidden level in the story – the reader can (and probably will) miss it, and still follow what is happening in the story.     

2) Co-existing with this immense beauty is also a very bleak/brutal picture of rituals, of religion, superstition. What is your personal take on the topic? Are you a spiritual person? Are you religious?

  I am an atheist. I trained as a scientist, and science calls for a dispassionate exercising of one’s intellect. (I would have become a marine biologist but began writing my first novel instead.) So I believe in cells, not souls. As far as I am concerned there is no Afterlife. Someone in my last novel The Wasted Vigil says, ‘When you are dead you decay and become part of the earth. It is no disrespect to the dead to say that their bodies have been consumed by creatures in the soil. It makes us cherish this life and this world more. That is much better than the false talk about eternity and the hereafter. Death is not greater than life.’

     But I do love thinking about religion and how it attempts to put something other than money and sex at the centre of human discourse – it puts love there. As Borges said: I give thanks…for love, which lets us see others as God sees them.   

 3) How did you start writing this piece? You worked on it for fifteen years. Tell me about the process.

  I began writing it almost 15 years ago. The novella is about one family’s prejudice against female births. We all know this happens – in India as well as Pakistan. But no one had written about it in a direct manner. I am not sure why that is. Perhaps there are some topics that are so obvious that no one seems to notice them. I kept postponing the concentrated work on the novella, saying to myself, ‘Tomorrow someone will write about this…The day after tomorrow someone will write about it, there’s no need for you to do it…’ But it didn’t happen. On the very first day of my visit to Pakistan a few years ago, I picked up the newspaper and saw an article about a woman who claimed soon after giving birth that the doctors and nurses had exchanged her male baby for a female one. When the exasperated doctors threatened to carry out a DNA test, she relented and said that, yes, the girl baby was hers. Her husband had threatened to throw her out if she gave birth to a girl again. (The incident appears in the novella.) On the second day of that visit, I was introduced to a man – an educated man – who asked me whether I was married and had children. When I told him that I had no children and that I thought of my books as my children, he said, in utter seriousness, ‘Yes. Your successful novels will be your sons, and your unsuccessful ones your daughters.’ That was when I began to think seriously about writing the novella. I reminded myself that I personally know women who have had foetuses aborted because the ultrasound scan showed them to be female. It is my understanding that Pakistan is among those countries where the ratio of men and women is inconsistent with the rest of the world. In the rest of the world there are more women than men. In Pakistan, more men than women. Millions of women are not there. Once I had made up my mind to write about it, it took 2 months: December 2009 and January 2010. Using notes and ideas accumulated over the course of a decade and a half, I wrote every day for 12 or 13 hours – I did not celebrate Christmas, I do not remember the new year. I wrote for 60 days without leaving my house or seeing anyone. My only communication was with this story. Sleep, wake, write. Sleep wake, write. Sleep, wake, write. Repeat that 60 times, and the novella was done. Granta accepted it immediately, without any editorial cuts or rearrangements.

You say you never have a reader in mind while writing? Has this always been the case or did you consciously work on erasing the imaginary audience in order to be able to delve into yourself, to the truth of your life and experience? Do you have a reader in mind for Granta 112.

  It has always been the case. I remember being a student and buying Bruno Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles for 50 pence in a secondhand bookshop after reading the first paragraph. No one told me it was a great book, that he was a great writer. I knew it instinctively. It connected with me and that was enough – I didn’t need to know what the others thought of it. It is the same with films, with paintings, with music, and also with friendship and with love. When the real thing comes along you don’t need anyone to tell you: something inside you tells you. That is how I wish the readers to come to my work.