New Delhi: Aatish Taseer is a British-born writer and freelance journalist. The son of newspaper columnist Tavleen Singh and the assassinated former governor of Pakistan's Punjab province, Salman Taseer, he grew up in New Delhi.
Holding strong views on political heirs — be it in India or Pakistan — he says: "It's very bad and an attack on talent, hard work and merit." Aatish feels people are disappointed when the society rewards a person's family connections and class. "If that's the reason why people can hold high positions, it will ruin the environment," he says.
His debut book, memoir-travelogue, Stranger to History: A Son's Journey Through Islamic Lands, published at the age of 29, was an insight into his uneasy relationship with his late father.
Aatish's novel, The Temple Goers was the story of an individual trying to discover himself. Noon (Harper Collins), launched recently, is about a young man who grows up trying to create an identity that transcends the one divided across India and Pakistan.
The author speaks to Gulf News in an exclusive interview.
GULF NEWS: You wrote in Noon: "The gaps in my life were too many, the threads too few." Was this an inference to your personal life?
AATISH TASEER: No in that the narrator is speaking. But yes, somebody in England also said to me recently that the way my book is structured, it is as if it's the shape of the way people's lives have started to look — with a lot of fracture, disruption and upheaval.
My life has certainly some of that element in it. But it could be true of me as to many more people.
How much of Noon is fact and what percentage is fiction?
It's hard to say that, because there are always characters, models and situations, which become the origin and give you the idea for a story. But the resemblances to my life are mainly superficial. The resemblance — this half Pakistani and half Indian narrative — makes people think that it is for real. It's not. For the large part it is fictional. There's only a crust of non-fiction.
Does your personal pain seep into your writings?
Eminent Urdu writer Sadat Hasan Manto said: "I write fiction when there's a pain to my conscience." And I think a certain kind of pain, which I would describe more like empathy, a feeling of compassion and understanding goes behind the writing. I wouldn't describe it that it was my personal pain, but an experience with pain of some kind has perhaps allowed me to understand how people in other situations are feeling. And that obviously is a very important factor in any kind of writing.
Since your own personal story is dramatic and tragic, can such experiences strengthen the writing hand?
I think that kind of experience — if you are a sensitive person and understand your experiences and get affected by them — can develop a feeling of compassion in a writer and helps him to write.
While writing and shifting between fiction and non-fiction, how much do you have to work on it? Or does it come naturally?
With non-fiction, there's always material in the world that you can rely on. But with fiction it's about imagining powerfully enough in a closed world. And when you need to work on that you need to meditate in the world of imagination.
And it's a fragile world. I need lot of peace and tranquility in my life while writing fiction. It's kind of a strain and I need to be calm and wake up very early in the morning to write.
I'm able to write non-fiction more easily and it takes less out of me.
Do you carry the characters with you in real life while working on a book?
Yes absolutely. And when I'm finished with writing, that process still keeps working inside.
It's almost like an experience of being away from something, but thinking about it.
Many times I've gone to bed with my work unresolved and I'm trying to work it through. And then I'm woken up early morning with the answer and have felt the need to write immediately.
Were there any emotional moments while writing Noon?
In that last scene, the sequence in Pakistan, just as my book was finished and was to go for typeset, my father was killed.
It was a very difficult experience for me, because I felt that there was a lot in the book that was related to his death. The book begins with somebody else's father's death and throughout there was this ghost-like presence of a paternal figure.
And at the end of it all it felt very strange to have written this book before my father was killed.
Had you wanted him to read this book?
He had stopped reading my work after I wrote Stranger to History. He didn't agree with my views and so I wasn't counting on him to read Noon.
Is your mother comfortable with your books and your views?
She always seems to understand very well that there's a part of her life that's my life. And she has been able to make that separation to stand back and let me do what I have wanted to in life. She has never stood in the way.
What makes you angry?
What makes me angry is being let down by the place one comes from. And Indians have been let down for over 100 years.
For them to realise their talents and abilities they have to go elsewhere. India has consistently come short for them.
But as things are unfolding now, it seems the country has the possibility to finally becoming what its people wanted it to be.
The experience of being betrayed by your country in some ways is a very painful experience.
It's not a good feeling to have to take your gifts elsewhere.
Journey from journalist to author
- Aatish Taseer was born on November 27, 1980 in London to mother Tavleen Singh and father Salman Taseer.
- Early education at The British School, New Delhi until 1994.
- Studied at Kodaikanal International School, Tamil Nadu, until 1999.
- Graduated in French and Political Science from Amherst College, Massachusetts in 2003.
- Worked for Time magazine as a reporter in New York and London from 2003 to 2005.
- Travelled from Istanbul to Makkah to India for his first book Stranger to History: A Son's Journey Through Islamic Lands from 2005 to 2006.
- It was published in 2009.
- First novel Temple Goers short-listed for the Costa First Book (Novel) Award, was published in 2010.
- Noon was launched in 2011.
