Courtesy of Richard Lea Hare Nadeem Aslam.Nadeem Aslam is the author of several novels, including “Season of the Rainbirds,†published in 1993, “Maps for Lost Lovers†from 2004 and “The Wasted Vigil†from 2008. His latest novel, published this month, is called “The Blind Man’s Garden.†Mr. Aslam was born in Pakistan and now lives in England, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. India Ink interviewed him at the Jaipur Literature Festival. Â
What are the occupational hazards of being a writer
The first thing I have to stress is that an artist is never poor. But as a writer you have to deal with practical matters like keeping theroom warm in which to write and that all of course costs money - you have to pay the electricity bill. I can’t speak for anyone else but I don’t come from an affluent background; I’m a working-class man. When I decided to become a writer there wasn’t anyone who could say to me “I will support you for a year.†I had no parents; I’m not from a rich family. For me it was how to buy time in which I could sit down and write - how to buy five hours, how to buy a week.
For that I worked on construction sites, I worked as a bin man going from house to house collecting the garbage for the council.
But these are secondary things. The important thing is the struggle that goes on in the study; once you have bought the time what do you do with it.
One of the things I was grateful for was that when my first novel was accepted, I was a young man of 23, my editors were very kind to me and said to me go and work on your second book don’t start think! ing of yourself as an artist. I think that is a hazard which a person can fall into - thinking that now I am published, I am an artist, I don’t have to do the work. The work is the important thing,  you have to keep going.
What is your everyday writing ritual
When you are working on a novel there comes a time when you need to go into the deeper layers of the story. You realize after about a year’s work that I have arrived at that space where I need to be with these characters, and just them and not anyone else. Then I isolate myself.
During the four and a half years it took to write “The Blind Man’s Garden†there were about 16 months where I didn’t see a single human being. I was just with my characters, trying to learn from them. I think the biggest critics I as a novelist have are my characters - they will tell me if I have done them justice.
Why does the Jaipur Literature Festival mattr to you
On the second page of my book you will find this sentence, “The logic is that there are no innocent people in a guilty nation.†So if Pakistan’s government is doing something bad, therefore it is possible because of the way the world is constructed, that certain people will think that everyone who comes from Pakistan is killable. This interaction between Indian and Pakistani authors means that we see that we are as helpless in the face of our government’s actions as the Indians are. It’s important for us to be able to talk at places like Jaipur.
How do you deal with your critics
I think you have to learn in that a piece of criticism or a book review doesn’t appear in a vacuum - it is part of a magazine, it is written by a person. When you look at a good review or a bad review you have to think about who this person is. Have I read previous reviews by this writer and what do I thi! nk about ! this person’s ideas If he’s reviewing my ideas I’m reviewing his ideas. And of course magazines, newspapers and journals have political affiliations - so you think this is a right wing journal, so of course they will say this.
But if you find a writer whose intelligence you trust and if they have found something good in the book and you feel like they got what you were trying to do, then it is a source of pleasure. And if they say I didn’t understand that, there is no need to be upset about it, you can learn from it.
Why should we read your latest book
The writer doesn’t tell the reader what to think, he tells the reader what to think about. We’ve lived through an extraordinary decade starting with 9/11 and ending with the Arab Spring and we are trying to understand what is going on. Neither you, nor me, nor the reader - unless they are very highly placed within the various governments of this world - actually know the corect reasons why, say, the Iraq war happened. Our government has given us reasons but do we trust them
And if you read “The Blind Man’s Garden†you will see that terrible things happen to the characters but 90 percent of the time they don’t know why these things are happening. The people who are causing those things to occur are lying to them. They are completely blind as it were. In a way it’s my way of saying that look, these things are happening, and these people don’t know, but I have a feeling that these might be the reasons. You wish to understand what happened in the last decade - these are the reasons.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.
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