Man behind the Wish

Novelist Ali Sethi talks about why he took three years and three drafts to finish his debut novel The Wish Maker

Novelist Ali Sethi talks about why he took three years and three drafts to finish his debut novel The Wish Maker

Tall, lanky and melancholic, Ali Sethi is a spitting image of Zaki, the protagonist of his debut novel, The Wish Maker. The 25-year-old writer from Pakistan, son of respected journalist Najam Sethi and social activist Jugnu Mohsin, has been travelling with his book for nearly two months now.

At the cafe where we're scheduled for a 45-minute interaction, the aura changes. Sethi is restless, animated, his hands thump the table passionately as he makes a point and his Blackberry isn't spared either. Suddenly, he yawns. Coffee? "No, ignore me. I've recently quit smoking, so I've become extra fidgety. Ignore me," he repeats. Tough, considering he's the subject of this interview but I try.

Reactions to The Wish Maker about a Pakistani boy who returns from the States for a cousin's nikaah only to find that his memories of home are in danger of being lost have been varied, says its writer. "Some are surprised, some are pleasantly surprised. Some are startled that Bollywood is so popular in Pakistan. But the one steady reaction is that people are reading it as a sort of national narrative. Which is really unfair. No one book can fully represent the story of several million people or 62 years of one country. People want to know about the North-Western Frontier, martial law, democracy, some of which are topics that I do raise," he says.u00a0

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u00a0Ali Sethi strikes a pose on his first visit to Mumbai to release his debut novel The Wish Makeru00a0Pic/ Shadab Khan

It took three years and three drafts before Sethi could perfect The Wish Makeru2026 right? Wrong. "I didn't think the third draft was perfect, I wanted to do another. It's my first novelu2026 it's not easy to be satisfied," he says with a smile, adding candidly that it's why some parts of the book seem hurried, others more detailed. Boredom did set in and he got through it by telling himself that it was work. "With writing, it's easier to grow impatient... to feel defeated. It's the most solitary process of all arts. Because ultimately, you're doing it alone," says Sethi.
The forms of writing changed with the drafts too. The first was a hurried typed out version. "I was careless. I just had my plot in my mind when typing it out in New York (Sethi lived in the US for five years). As I was doing that I found that Pakistan was changing politically. The news got worse everyday. And here I was away from my country, writing this kind of story. I wasn't thinking seriously about my subject." What followed was the second draft in long-hand. "It's better for a slow writer. When you type, the blinking cursor can be quite nagging. When you look at the blank page, nothing beckons. You can lose yourself and your thoughts more easily," he says.

Obviously, the final product is quite different from what The Wish Maker set out to be. It's become longer ("I'm not sure that's a good thing!") and the names of some characters have been changed. "When I first named them, I didn't think about the ethnicities or time frames my characters existed in. It was a much shorter story then... my characters were sketches. Later, I had to rename them going by the era they belonged to, their roots."

Going back to the press meets in different countries, were there any repeated stereotypes about Pakistan he'd like to clarify once and for all? "There are several," exclaims Sethi. "In the States, an Arabic American will probably ask me why I'm not more Islamic. A white American perhaps wants me to be more modernised. I'm often asked whether Pakistan is more oriented towards the Taliban or the West? As if those are the only two options! We could well be more like India or China, but no one takes that into account." Sethi further talks of how naming the country The Islamic Republic of Pakistan has cost them dearly. "It has meant that we had to disown everything else. Pakistan is placed between Persia and India and is above Arabian Sea and below Afghanistan and central Asia. That's where its different entities come from. The Pakistani state has refused to acknowledge that diversity," he states.

Sethi's strong opinions are coloured no doubt by those of his parents. Jugnu Mohsin and Najam Sethi have had to encounter much resistance and more so in the recent past. "It's become much more serious now," says Ali and the concern in his voice is palpable. A few months ago, Najam Sethi was dragged out of bed at 2.30 am and thrust into prison for nearly a month before his wife could have him released. "In the past, you'd get arrested (dad's been jailed thrice, mum has been beaten up on the street), your phones would be tapped, they'd do things to reduce your status in society. But these days, you get death threats from terrorists. You can't escape it. It's a lot more dangerous now," he explains.

Sethi asserts that his parents weren't involved at any point with his book. "They only let me stay in the house when I moved back to Lahore, fed me and didn't bother me." In fact, Sethi senior and Mohsin read The Wish Maker only weeks ago. And their opinion of it? "My mother said the dialogue was interesting. My father hasn't said anything which is fine. I don't want to know," he says with a laugh.

All about Anarkali

Ali Sethi is yet to finish his college thesis based on Anarkali, the courtesan of Akbar's court who apparently passed away after an affair with Prince Salim. Sethi chose her because of his fascination for the virahini a woman who yearns for her beloved.

"Be it Sufism or Bhakti poetry, Radha, Mira, Shakuntala, Umrao Jaan, they all yearn for their men, who somehow never seem to yearn in return," he says. Sethi feels it's sexually subversive for a woman to express her love publicly: "A male poet using a female voice is more interesting. It always takes a panga with society."

Sethi has written three essays about the construction of Anarkali for his father Najam Sethi's weekly, Friday Times. He states, "There's a mausoleum in Lahore with an unnamed sarcophagus but it's supposed to be Anarkali's. You can trace the supposition to the 16th century. An English traveller walking around Lahore wrote that the Emperor had just died and his son Prince Salim was building a mausoleum for a former lover, 'Immak Keli'. Two hundred years, her name pops up again in the travelogue of a local Indian Muslim man. He claims she was Akbar's lover who committed suicide when he was away and that he had built it for her. The third major reference to the Salim-Anarkali story as we know it comes from Rabindranath Tagore's earliest short stories, Mughal Kitsch."

The thesis might remain incomplete but Samar Api of The Wish Maker has traces of the virahini: she yearns for Amitabh Bachchan throughout.