ISLAMBAD: Not soon after her much-criticised interview, in which she claimed that eating in restaurants and lingering in bookstores are ‘forbidden luxuries’ in Pakistan, appeared in the London Evening Standard, Fatima Bhutto spoke at the London School of Economics (LSE) to a full house about her new book, titled The Shadow of the Crescent Moon.
Waziristan, a region the host of the event described as a twilight zone between Pakistan and Afghanistan, and one that is in the news for all the wrong reasons, is the setting of her latest novel.
Commenting that being on a book tour is what she imagines being a prisoner of war feels like (being shunted from room to room and interrogated with the same questions) Fatima said that she wanted to write about northern Pakistan but did not choose Peshawar, Bajaur or Banu as these were settings that had too many prejudices, such as the Taliban and drones, attached with them.
Thus, she picked the small town of Mir Ali, albeit a highly fictionalised one, as the setting, for she felt it did not already have a singular meaning attached to it.
Fatima also believes that characters unfold on their own when one is writing fiction. “It’s a strange process You think you are building people, but they make themselves and they change across the writing of the book.”
The people in her book are struggling with things she herself is curious about, and in each of them there was something she sympathised with, whether it was their fears, longings or their suffocation. “In all of them, even the ones I didn’t agree with or felt offended by, I didn’t feel I could judge them.”
She was particularly intrigued by a character called Meena, who actively starts looking for funerals to go to: “Every morning, she finds out what soyem is happening where, and she turns up and starts asking questions. Meena used to disturb me very much when I was writing.
“She used to rattle me and as her story started to unfold, I started to see more of her, rather than creating more of her.
“You let the characters be, which is curious. You don’t actually have the control you have with non-fiction where you build structures which are very definite. With fiction, you observe and follow along,” she said, adding that she got unreasonably attached to these characters that ‘don’t exist for anyone but you (the author).
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