Characters result from seeds of one’s life: Fatima Farheen Mirza

Visiting India for the first time five years ago, author Fatima Farheen Mirza visited the masjid (mosque) where her parents had their nikkah (wedding), in the city of Hyderabad. “A man sitting in the courtyard was threading flowers that would decorate one of the shrines. I asked if I could have one flower because I wanted a souvenir of the place. He refused. I remember telling him, ‘But my mother got married here’. And he looked at me, asked me to wait for a minute, and then threaded an elaborate string of flowers that I could wear in my hair. I’ll never forget it.”

Fatima’s description of the moment is as if it has filtered out of the consciousness of one of the characters of her debut, A Place for Us. As a family gathers for the nikkah of their eldest child Hadia, their youngest, Amar, can’t be found for the family photograph. This is a family, but the discord is unbelievable. Hailed by Sarah Jessica Parker of Sex and the City as a book about a “quintessentially American family”, the book was chosen by the actor for her debut with her imprint for Hogarth Press. Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Paul Harding, too, has exalted it as “a work of extraordinary and enthralling beauty”.

And when not touching your deepest impulses about life and relationships, A Place for Us is a work about the significance of choices: A patriarchal father passes on a watch meant for a son, to his daughter. A deeply conservative mother gathers the courage to roll up her shalwar to meet her little son in the river. A young couple in love chooses to continue to meet in private, risking everything at stake.

One assumes Fatima, who was born and raised in California, spoke and wrote English for the majority of her life, and developing characters from the same milieu. How did the book come about? The author shares, “Writing has always been a part of my life. Recently, I was surprised to find a story from when I was seven or eight, because it was written in both Urdu and English — an impulse that returned when I was working on the novel. But throughout high school, I wrote about characters with names like Corrie, and now I wonder if my imagination had internalised the belief that stories belonged only to the kind of characters I’d grown up consuming. I remember pausing when I first wrote the name Hadia... but

FATIMA FARHEEN MIRZA’S A PLACE FOR US HAS BEEN CHOSEN BY SEX AND THE CITY STAR SARAH JESSICA PARKER FOR HER PUBLISHING DEBUT

once I started writing about this family, I was committed.”

Conceptualising Hadia —the ideal daughter, freethinking but also devoted — must have come somewhere from inside Fatima? The author, who was once pursuing medicine, and has similar beliefs about religion and autonomy, says, “Once seeds from one’s own life are planted into the novel, they are altered by the personality of the characters. I might relate to the pressure Hadia feels to pursue a medical career path to make her parents proud, or Amar looking to lines of poetry as a way to make sense of his own life, but the way these pursuits manifest in their lives is theirs alone.”

White characters make short appearances as the immigrant minority dominates the focus in A Place for Us, and their customs and sensibility — Sunday school, the significance of prayer, community gatherings — come to the forefront. Can one interpret this novel, then, as an attempt to envision a new America? “I wanted to place their lives, their concerns, at the centre of the narrative. If what results is a version of America that seems new, then that speaks [about] the lack of adequate representation in literature — because these lives have been here, and they have stories to tell,” says a modest Fatima.