Words say it all

There are two kinds of writers: those who make you think and those who make you wonder. Musharraf Ali Farooqi is a little bit of both.

As a writer, he is atypical — effortlessly shifting between languages and genres. As a person, he’s charming and chivalrous, making it a point to personally get our lattes from the counter as we sat down for this interview in a well-known cafe in Karachi, the city of ever-dimming lights.

Farooqi proved to be an easy-going interview subject. Cooperative. Smooth. Not overwhelming in his display of brilliance. Right at the outset this Pakistani-Canadian writer, translator and journalist dismisses the phenomenon of the ‘writer’s block’. “It’s really just an ‘idiot’s block,’” says a smiling Farooqi.

The journey to arrive at his calling of being a writer took him through many a turning point and milestone. After three years of drawing schematics and such, he dropped out of a prestigious engineering university in Karachi, hardly a year away from finally holding that rolled up engineering degree.

What made him take up engineering in the first place, given his natural inclinations? And how did he muster the courage to drop it and follow his heart, at a time when literature and humanities were not accorded even the slight acceptability and honour they are given today? “In our times, if you were an engineer, a doctor or a teacher, it was taken for granted that you had a bright future. Arts colleges were only meant for people who had immense financial security.”

Forget about the ‘writer’s block,’ says Musharraf Ali Farooqi. It’s the ‘idiot’s block’ you need to worry about!. PHOTO: HUSSAIN DEWANI

In any case, even though it took three years of studying engineering for him to finally drop out, he says that he had realised that this field did not suit his temperament after the first one and a half years. It was never meant for him. Once that realisation hit him, he knew that he must quit the dry and technical world of mechanics.

“My mother thought that now her son was a ‘gone case’ and had no future whatsoever, let alone a bright one,” Farooqi says, smiling at the memory.

Though his recent works are all in English, Urdu literature is a passion for him. A year after joining university, he started reading Urdu literature avidly and was notably inspired by the contemporary Urdu poet Afzal Ahmed Syed, whose poetry was the first thing  Farooqi translated into English.

Urdu humourists such as Muhammad Khalid Akhtar, the author of the novel Chakiwara Mein Wisal, and Shafiq-ur-Rehman inspired him to try his hand at satire. His very first work in Urdu was a parody which he showed to Muhammad Khalid Akhtar for approval. From humour he moved on to Urdu language classics such as Tazkira-e-Ghausia and the Indo-Islamic epic Dastan-e-Amir Hamza, which he also later translated.

Farooqi’s very first book, Salar Jang’s Passion, was published in Canada, around 12 years ago. It revolves around a wealthy elderly widower who is pursuing a ‘rapacious’ actress named Madame Firdousi. And all the while, a termite infestation is literally eating the town from the inside out.



His recent work Between Clay and Dust is a novel which revolves around the rather messy and murky lives of a pehelwaan (wrestler) and a tawaaif (courtesan). The story is set in the pre-partition era and throws a significant amount of light on the shared values and the common culture that exists, or once existed, between the Hindus and the Muslims.

What’s really interesting is that Farooqi never actually stepped into, or even laid eyes upon, an actual akhaara while writing this book. Yet he somehow penned down an entire book on desi wrestlers. When I ask him about this, he retorts smoothly by saying, “After writing the book, I got a chance to set my eyes on an actual akhaara. However, writing is simply a function of how vivid and vast your imagination is and this is exactly how I effectively utilised it to paint the entire picture.” He excitedly points out that many of his readers find it incredibly hard to believe that this was a pure work of his imagination, as the depiction of the akhaara and its subsequent setting was so precise in nature. One can only wonder what kept him away from the akhaara in the pre-writing process, as well as while he wrote it.

Between Clay and Dust has been long-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize 2012 and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2013, but awards are not his ultimate goal. “For me, awards are synonymous to lotteries,” he says dismissively.

One of the most attention-worthy things about this writer is that he loves to shift back and forth between different genres. At one point, you will read his intellectual works such as Dastan-e-Amir Hamza, whereas at another moment in time he is working on children’s books.

Children’s literature is a joy for Farooqi. “Books for children are fun to write and I love writing for children. The reason is that these young readers are very sincere in giving feedback,” he says.

Elaborating on this, he said that children’s response is evident on the facial expressions that they exhibit when a paragraph out of a just-published book is read out to them. If they like it, one can instantly see the shimmer in their eyes. On the flip side, if the book fails to capture their interest, one can see them yawning or looking away. This is what inspires Farooqi to write books for these youngsters and transform them into “intelligent readers.”

One of Farooqi ‘s recent works is the illustrated novel, Rabbit Rap: A Fable for the 21st Century. A satirical story meant for young adult readers about a group of disaster-prone, self-destructive rabbits who invite endless troubles because of their reckless ways, its various themes include politics, environment, corporate greed, and feminism. The book is available in India, and will be available locally in late December.

His wife, Michelle Farooqi has illustrated this book and two other titles by Farooqi — Tik-Tik, The Master of Time which is Pakistan’s first in the English language novel for children, and the story collection The Amazing Moustaches of Moochhander the Iron Man and Other Stories. Michelle Farooqi is herself a visual artist and an illustrator who recently showed her artwork at ArtChowk gallery’s Portraiture group exhibit, which included her oil paintings and charcoal drawings.



Elaborating on their joint creative projects, Farooqi says that once the text is in hand, the two of them discuss the ‘look’ of the characters. Once there is agreement on that, Michelle selects the passages to be illustrated and begins her work.

When it comes to the local market for graphic novels, he feels that the market has tons of potential to grow but only and only if it aims to achieve a reduction in the price level for such novels while simultaneously enhancing the quality of the publishing.

What valuable pieces of advice would this established writer give to the aspiring writers out there? The answer is succinct: “The aspiring writers should not look for praise. They need to write for themselves only and not for anyone else. They need to write for what they believe in.” Farooqi also feels that to check on the quality of one’s writing, one should look up to the ultimate gurus of literature as role models. Benchmarking work with the work of the contemporary writers is a mistake that should not be made, he feels. A sense of balance is what Farooqi endorses. He feels that the twenty-first century generation must have the courage to publish their work as well as to learn “not to rush through things.”

In his opinion, writers need to develop and continuously enhance their ability to distinguish and draw a crystal clear line between the ordinary work and the extra-ordinary one. Between writing that is shallow and writing that is deep. Exactly how that’s to be achieved is, of course, left unsaid.

Published in The Express Tribune, Sunday Magazine, December 9^th, 2012.

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