To judge from the way that people write about it, the Lahore Literary Festival (LLF) remains as great a theatre as Richard Wagner’s operas. It is not only the writers who are to blame: the public has an insatiable appetite for stories, gossip, food, and entertainment, generally catered for at the Alhamra on the Mall. Yet, the collective view of literature festivals across the country has become an increasingly lazy stereotype.

More than half a decade later, due to the pandemic nicknamed Corona, the noise and significance of the LLF appears to have faded. It is high time the festival was judged for what it is, rather than what it was or what it might have been. This applies, in particular, to the role of the festival director.

If the first ever digital/virtual edition of LLF had to have a theme, it would be Ethics of Memory. Whether it’s an obligation to remember the past when ‘the past is another country’ is open to conjecture.

In 2021, historians, fiction writers, poets, essayists, political analysts and artists came together to unearth the past, digging out vestiges of memory, recollections and reminiscences, fragments of antiquity, and traces of memory, in order to know the world better, in an attempt to proclaim, “Let Peace Prevail.”

In her recent book of essays, Negotiating with the Dead, Margaret Atwood analyses the unique power of the fictional terrain where voice is still heard beyond death. Such is the case of late Shams-ur-Rehman Farooqi. In a befitting tribute to his genius, Shamim Hanfi, Syeda Hameed and Nasir Abbas Nayyar bandied thoughts over Kai Chaand Thay Sar-e-Aasman, declaring it a masterpiece.

Many publishers and aspiring novelists must look at the sales figures for Forty Rules of Love and wonder what it is that Elif Shafak’s got. It cannot just be the subject matter. It is surely whatever makes the telling of the story seem unmanufactured and inimitable — in Henry James’s highest term of praise, “sincere.” It is what all Shafak’s books have in common, and what makes them identifiable: a certain narrative tone.

Tone is the hardest thing to catch, yet what often matters most to readers. It is what makes you think that a Jane Austen sentence could not have been written by someone else — as if, like stylistic DNA, the smallest element of a writer’s prose carried within it the essence of his or her singularity.

Finding a personal-sounding tone is much harder. Perhaps the reason 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World has been such a hit is the reassurance and satisfaction of being able to hear the voice of the gone and to piece together the future after the cataclysm. The opening chapters of the book are shattering and dazzling in their mix of horror and normality, and even though the energy begins to dissipate and the chapters begin to taste bland, it may possibly be an interesting, calculated blandness. Shafaq being concerned with the creation of a safe and supportive place in the face of a horror!

During the conversation between Elif Shafak and Maha Khan-Philips, the author admits that even though she is a novelist, a storyteller, she believes in an interdisciplinary approach where humanities and sciences intermingle and connect. “Living in a world like ours and coming from a turbulent land like Turkey, you cannot afford the luxury of saying, ‘I can only talk about fiction’. There are issues like minority rights, freedom of speech, women’s rights etc., that, I think, all of us should speak loudly about.”

Shafak conceived the idea of writing 10 Minutes 38 Seconds… when she came across scientific research carried out at various universities citing that once the human heart stops beating and you are declared dead, your brain remains alive and active for a few seconds up to 10 minutes. “For me it was a remarkable puzzle: the brain being the last to shut down, what do the ‘dead’ remember if it’s true that the part of brain in charge of long-term memory continues to survive. On the very first page, Leila is murdered and her body dumped into garbage. She recounts what happened to her minute after minute. That gave me the entire structure of the novel. It’s also the story of the land seen through the eyes of outcasts.”

She continues, “For me it’s important to give a voice to those who have been silenced, who live on the periphery. Wherever democracy is bruised, broken or non-existent, being ‘different’ can be truly difficult. Social bonding such as sisterhood, friendship and camaraderie is particularly important to people who are living on the edge with either no democracy or a fractured one.”

So, what exactly is the Cemetery of the Companionless? Shafak explains: “Dead bodies are dumped there without performing their funeral rites. They have no names, no personal information, no tombstones and no visitors. They are merely decimated to numbers. They did have companions but we don’t know about them. Among those who lie there are mostly sex workers, suicides, abandoned babies, LGBTQ members who are shunned by their families, and a growing number of refugees. It was hard to structure the novel in terms of the timeframe: What did Leila remember? How does she remember? Does she remember only the good things or the bad things too? Memory does not work in a linear way. I had a lot more to tell and had written a lot more but I had to delete all that because of the limited timescale I had. I had to compress Leila’s thoughts, and that was challenging.”

In place of multiple perspectives, the attitude and the dismissal of the mawkish, the novel Chini Kothi becomes a hybrid of realism and wishful thinking. From its stuttering, quietly urgent beginning to its grandly hyperbolic final sentences, Siddiq Alam’s latest offering is designed to wrongfoot you, circumvent your immediate reactions and finesse them into ambiguity and disarray.

Such a deep vein of presumptuousness, married with the wheedling pre-emptive strike, is just one of the irritating things about Chini Kothi. But that misses the point. What Alam is really telling us is that there is something underneath — underneath this scrambled tale of troublesome family relationships, of professional and romantic and social failures; of an abiding melancholy that flowers in an unexplained panic event — and that we too can excavate it, like memories brought to life by diligent and trusting free association.

“Chini Kothi is based in a mythical town that has an association with my hometown which is rocky and barren. When my novel, Chanook ki Kashti, was published, I was going through a period of personal turmoil: my wife had passed away, and I was isolated. Like any metropolis, I explored most of Calcutta on foot because in each alley and street there was a new face and a new story, and each day a new world would open up on me. But no one actually belongs there: people who’ve come to inhabit it, even the Hooghly, come from somewhere else: there is a priest, a Bengali, a Bihari, an Oriya — all these ethnic groups populate my books. Then there is a young man called Chowringhee because he was found on the footpath. His parents are unknown. We don’t see much of the kothi in the novel; instead, what we encounter, time and time again, is the coffin that sneaks in and out of the rooms, and keeps re-emerging as a leitmotif.

Alam’s real achievement is to push the boundaries of the novel further, by making something of such sheer, daunting and inspiring largeness. Cheeni Kothi echoes the remnants of the Imperialist powers and their expansionist ideals. When the English left Calcutta — the city they had founded — they left behind their influence with the consequence that the city could never remain what it used to be. There are many moral and metaphysical questions raised in the novel through the rape trial in the courtroom. “You will see ‘foreshadowing’ in my novel that gives a certain character to it. There is also a strong element of self-destruction in it,” quips the author.

While mulling over the idea of a utopian dream, Alam says that the reader brings with him his own perspective, and that really matters.

In recent times, is the world’s best literature dystopian in tone, asks Nasir Abbas Nayyar. “Do you attribute it to the colonial experience or to the basic human experience or is it a mix of both? We are all displaced people and yearn to return to the real world when there is no such place on earth. Utopia and Dystopia are both our own constructs; the essence of our lives is the daily struggle we go through. ‘I’ll live on’, proclaims the novel in its last sentence.”

Shafak conceived the idea of writing 10 Minutes 38 Seconds… when she came across scientific research citing that once the human heart stops beating and you are declared dead, your brain remains alive and active for up to 10 minutes. “For me it was a remarkable puzzle: the brain being the last to shut down, what do the ‘dead’ remember if it’s true that the part of brain in charge of long-term memory continues to survive.

It is evident that Abu Dhabi based Saba Karim Khan, author of the novel Skyfall (published by Bloomsbury), is trying to say something important about the nature of personal guilt, about its self-aggrandising and narcissistic relationship with the lesser matter of actual responsibility, about how “the truth of the story, again, has everything to do with the desperation of the tellers and their own symbolic inclinations,” and about how self-narrativisation makes liars of us all. Her determination to take whatever is real and urgent about her feelings or perceptions or insights and to turn it into a performance, and a deliberately contrived and clichéd performance at that, is almost, at times, heroic. Or, at least, generally ambitious.

While talking to journalist Wajiha Hyder, the author summarises that the novel is a coming-of-age story of a young girl, Rania, who begins with loathing her homeland to reclaiming it. “She comes from the chock-slums of Heera Mandi, Lahore, and journeys all the way to New York, the land far removed from her own. While writing her story, I found it hard to disentangle myself from the issues I grew up with scattered all around me. I was confronted with self-censorship and the fear of a militant backlash and the loag kya kahenge factor. Even though, I did not aim to be the representative of ‘such women,’ I did not want to be reductive either talking about their sexuality and desires.”

Disaffection seeps into the writing, veering far too often into the hackneyed and sentimental, the self-excusing and the obvious. There are some terrible moments in the book, “powerful yet strangely cathartic. All art is a protest in some form or the other. Skyfall means the last attempt against people who outnumber you. I read my novel as an exploration of women’s lives which can be loud but also quietly fierce. Art and literature allow me to talk about protest and resistance but not in a way that may make it look like peddling on the gender. To writers their characters are like their children. Rania had to go through the immigration ‘apocalypse’ for the American dream to be shattered.”

Desi Delicacies: Food Writing from Muslim South Asia, edited by Claire Chambers is a series of essays and articles that celebrates gastronomy and the local cuisine with contributions by chefs, housewives, and gastronomes glorifying traditions of cooking with a certain attention to etiquette and the evolving food culture. “It all began when I came to Pakistan for a year to teach English in KPK,” informs Chambers. “South Asian literature had always been of special interest to me which led to a passion for South Asian food owing to the Pakhtun hospitality.”

While Sanam Maher dishes out her thoughts on the ubiquitous burger and how the nomenclature entered the pantheon of political jargon, Rana Safvi of Lucknow discerns between korma and kaliya. “Even though I grew up in a liberal house, we were very conservative when it came to traditions. Family recipes were sacrosanct. As a young girl, I used to hear that if you wish to make a dish or a restaurant popular, give it the name of a Mughal emperor, for example, Jehangiri Korma or Shahjehani Pulao.”

Safvi further reminisces that the culture of the dastarkhwan — the saying of prayers before and after the meals — was central to our traditions.

“Of all types of kormas, chicken korma was the most special and occasional. Today, meat often means chicken whereas in those days, it used to be quite special and expensive. I often refer to Abdul Haleem Sharar’s Guzashta Lucknow in which he mentions that chicken would be served on the nawabi dastarkhwan garnished with saffron.

“One of my aunts gave me the recipe for raan mussalam when I was doing a promotional for ITC. These are the kind of memories that raced through my mind while writing for this book. Most of the recipes were passed down to me by my aunt. The normal fare known as kaliya would be stewed meat and vegetables with turmeric whereas korma would be braised chicken garnished with hara dhaniya reserved for special occasions and feasts. My naani used to advise, ‘Masala aisey bhoono jaisey dushman ka kaleja’.”

Food is a universal language that can communicate beyond borders. It’s rather interesting to note how the pandemic has ended up reviving interest in food giving way to experimentation. In these trying times, cooking has been a therapeutic activity for people.

In another session, the book launch of Zahid Hussain’s No-Win War: The Paradox of US-Pakistan Relations in Afghanistan’s Shadow, Kathy Gannon asks the author that for the past 20 years, US has looked at Pakistan through the prism of Afghanistan. What Hussain’s book does is that it looks at the US in Afghanistan through the prism of Pakistan.

Hussain replies unapologetically, “After 9/11, so many things were happening, such as the US-Pakistan alliance, but there was no point of convergence as had been the case way back in the ’80s between the two countries. On many an occasion, Pakistan had asked the US to include moderate Taliban in the negotiation bond. Even though 9/11 brought US and Pakistan together, there was a huge wall of distrust between them because of the ‘90s when after the ouster of the Soviet troops from Afghanistan, Pakistan was left high and dry. It was a strained relationship because of Pakistan’s protection of the Taliban leaders. Pakistan, however, had no choice than to ally with the US.

“When the US entered Afghanistan, it hardly had any understanding of the country or its dynamics and its politics. It thought the war in Afghanistan had been won, so it diverted its attention to Iraq. That is when the second phase of the Afghan War began in 2005. There were 170,000 US troops deployed in Afghanistan but they had no plan. Pakistan had serious security concerns: the Northern Alliance was close to India; the reason why Pakistan began to support the Taliban.

Mehr Afshan Farooqi, daughter of Shams ur Rehman Farooqi, admits that she had no intention of writing a book on Ghalib when so much had already been written on him: His bibliography alone is 400 pages long! I recalled that when I was a child, my father made me memorise one of Ghalib’s ‘rejected’ ghazals. It occurred to me that I should start working on poetry rejected by Ghalib himself, having no idea, at that point, that Ghalib had rejected more than half of his Urdu kalam in his lifetime. What we know as the Diwan-e-Ghalib is just a selection; it’s not the complete diwan.

Once she engaged herself with the project (that took her 10 years!), she had so much material collected that she realised it could result in two volumes rather than one. At the very outset, she singled out the rejected poems and instead concentrated on finding answers to questions she had in mind. A Wilderness at my Doorstep is a result of that.

Farooqi relates that Ghalib’s journey to Calcutta was a milestone in his career, and had a crucial impact on his creative life, so much so that it changed the course of his creativity.

“Ghalib went to Calcutta for his pension, and ended up staying a year and a half there. The first major breakthrough was the realisation that Calcutta was more cosmopolitan in comparison with Delhi’s courtly culture. He got acquainted with the world of print. His friend, Maulvi Sirajuddin Ahmad, who used to take out a weekly newspaper, Aina-e-Sikander, requested him to bring his ghazals to the paper and when Ghalib recited his Farsi kalam in a mushaira, he came under fire. That is when he recorded his indignation in a long masnawi, called Ashtinama, later renamed as Baad-e-Mukhalif.

“When asked to share his poems, Ghalib compiled his entire Farsi kalam and some Urdu ghazals, and called it Gul-e-Ra’na. In its preface he made some important observations such as ‘this book is a garden with two gates — one opening into Farsi, the other into Urdu.’ For the next 20 years upon his return to Delhi, he continued to write mostly in Farsi. When his first diwan came out in 1841, Ghalib had taken out 1,000 verses out of 2,000, and when the Farsi diwan came out, he had excluded more than 6,000 couplets.

“I never considered the move from journalism to historical fiction transitional because being the son of a poet-journalist father, to me it was part of the same mindset,” confesses Amin Maalouf while in conversation with Ahmed Rashid.

“I never felt I was moving from one world to another when I switched to literature from journalism. From the time I opened my eyes, my passion has been to watch the world, trying to understand what is happening around me. Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history.”

Mulling over the future of Lebanon — the land in turmoil Maalouf comes from — he surmises: “Something was broken, back in 1975, in Lebanon that could never be repaired. I was an eyewitness of the first tragic event of war, and I understood that something had changed forever in a few months. I decided to come to Paris.

“One of the first things I noticed when I moved here was the gap between the two worlds to which I belong — Arab Islamic World and the Western European World. There is a gap of vision, and there is not a single event which is viewed through the same lens in both worlds. Truth cannot be attained unless we have diverse points of view. It was not a coincidence that my first book was The Crusades through the Arab Eyes.”

Talking about the towering historical figure of Jamaluddin Afghani, Maalouf remarks: “Afghani was a pivotal figure. He was the father of nationalism, religious movements and modernist ideals. He had a strange yet fascinating character. Although he was not an Afghan at all [he was from Iran], he took up the name ‘Afghani’. When I try to imagine the lives of very important people, his name often comes to mind. I could have written a complete book on him but had no incentive after having written about him in Samarkand.

“One of the tragedies of the Afghani’s life was that he had to live the last few years of his life with cancer of the jaw. He was trying to imagine the future of a great part of the world. The human aspect of his life cannot be separated from his role as a political figure — they were intertwined.”

About his fascination with Iran and Persia, Maalouf says, “I was on the plane to Tehran in 1979 with Ayotullah Khomeni on board, among 200 journalists, watching history unroll before our eyes. At that point, I felt absolutely interested in knowing the history of Iran. The first figure from Iran that tempted me to write about was Omar Khayyam; the other was Mani. He was a mysterious figure. The religion that he founded could not have the success of other religions, and the only nation that followed it was the Uygurs of 6^th century who for some time adopted Manichaeism as their official religion. After that, it disappeared in the East and reappeared in the West in France, Italy and Eastern Europe in a new manifestation.

“He was not just the founder of a religion but also a very famous painter who also used to draw alphabets.”

The writer is an art critic based in Islamabad