KLF: ‘I taped my eyes shut to get into my character’s skin’

Nadeem Aslam shares with Kamila Shamsie snippets of the creative process when he wrote ‘A Blind Man’s Garden’.

KARACHI:

So dedicated was Nadeem Aslam to his  book, ‘A Blind Man’s Garden’, that he even went as far as taping his eyes shut for a week so that he could literally be in the skin of the book’s protagonist, Rohan.

“I wanted to feel what sightlessness was like so that I could gain an insight into my character’s condition,” he said at the launch of the book on day two of the fourth Karachi Literature Festival. He also tried not to see anyone while he was writing the novel - months would go by without him even catching a glimpse of another person.

The discussion at the book launch, moderated by Kamila Shamsie, attracted a very large audience, eager to hear about the author’s journey. Aslam started off by reading excerpts from the opening chapter of the book, which is set in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the months following 9/11. It chronicles the journey of an old man, Rohan, whose school is converted into a breeding ground for extremists following his wife’s death.



“I had a discussion with a friend of mine about the situation in Pakistan with reference to terrorism and the general social condition. And I said if the Taliban and these problems disappeared in five years’ time, what if while they are here, they kill my brother?” he told the audience. “It becomes philosophical - how to live, how to cope. That was the attempt in the novel - how these wounded people are trying to cope with their humanity.”

For Aslam, as a writer, one thing holds true to heart. “A novelist does not tell you what to think, he tells you what to think about.”

Back to the beginning

Shamsie asked Aslam to talk about his relationship with Pakistan and his inspiring journey from being a boy grappling with English to a seasoned writer.

Aslam, who is not from an affluent background, moved to England when he was 14 years old. He revealed that when he joined school there, he performed poorly because of his tenuous grasp on the English language. “I couldn’t read or write well. There were some things I was interested in such as literature, history and sociology, but I did really badly as you had to write essays for these subjects,” he said. “I managed to do well in science as I didn’t need to have good English language skills for it.”



Aslam eventually dropped out of college, saying that a “safety net” was not going to be an option for him if he wanted to pursue writing. It took him 11 months to finish his first novel as he worked odd jobs, telling himself and others that “an artist is never poor.”

However, he spent almost 11 years on his second novel. “I wanted to educate myself,” he said, when asked about his process of learning English and why he took so long on his second book. “I read everything by Thomas Hardy and more. I copied, by hand, novels I considered to be great to see for myself where each comma falls, where every full stop is.”

It was through Aslam’s books that he began to travel to Pakistan after two decades. He wanted to heal the “fractured” connection he had felt with his country.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 17^th, 2013.