Renegade Romantic

- Satyavrat KK

My novels are my way of saying to the cruel, unjust people in the world, ‘You think you got away with it?!’” A Nadeem Aslam novel can be many things. You could read it for the poetry or the hypnotic imagery; the immediacy of its events or the relevance of its anxieties; its rich historicity or its cultural authenticity. However, if there’s one consistent thread that runs through his five novels, it is this Pakistani author’s need to tell the stories of ordinary people and the courage they call upon everyday. “I have no interest in the rich. They can sort out their own problems,” he says.

Aslam’s family was forced to flee the tyrannical president Ziaul-Haq’s Pakistan when he was a teenager and move to Britain, where he still lives. He started writing at an early age and when he decided to become a working writer (his words) he sought out VS Naipaul’s publisher from an address printed in a copy of A Bend In The River (Knopf, 1979). It worked. His debut novel Season Of The Rainbirds (Vintage, 1993) won the Betty Trask Award, but it was his second book, Maps For Lost Lovers (Vintage, 2004), that established his reputation as a lyrical chronicler of the immigrant experience. The book, which gives us a glimpse into the lives of working-class Pakistanis in Britain, took 11 years to write.

When he’s in the middle of a novel, Aslam spends all night writing, so I wasn’t sure what to expect when I called him at 9am for our chat about his latest book, The Golden Legend (Penguin Random House)