Usman T. Malik: ‘I have tried to capture the doorway between the past and future; a portal between despair and hope’

Winner of the Crawford Award and author of novella The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn, Pakistani-American writer and doctor Usman T. Malik ’s Midnight Doorways: Stories (Hachette, 2022) is a mesmerising work of fiction. Consisting of seven stories, this collection draws from fables, histories, and present Pakistani reality but renders them in a shocking, horrific, and dark manner. Excerpts from the interview: What significance do you place in being a finalist for the 2022 Locus Award for Best Collection by the Locus Science Fiction Foundation? I’m grateful to Locus readers for voting for this little collection — an unexpected recognition as the book wasn’t even available for sale in the Western hemisphere. It seems that your work sits at the intersection of a few genres. How do you categorise your work? In 1973, Gabriel García Márquez told The Atlantic, “In Mexico, surrealism runs through the streets. Surrealism comes from the reality of Latin America.” I believe that’s even truer for South Asia and the Indian subcontinent, where miracles and magic are part of our reality. Religion and the rigors of superstition, folklore, and a fondness for fairy tales. Not encapsulating that in our fiction is in some way escapist itself, for you’re omitting how belief and acting on that belief shapes human lives here. Thus, I’m reluctant to delimit these stories to one genre but am comfortable in using the term ‘speculative’ for them. In my afterword for the Hachette India edition of Midnight Doorways, I ruminate a bit more on the question of genre, which readers are welcome to explore. I believe such a work cannot be composed if one doesn’t have an appetite for the kind of myth-historical storytelling that’s celebrated in South Asia: part truth and part fiction. What stories were you told and read while growing up? That’s a fair statement. I grew up reading mostly in Urdu: epics, fables, romances, and poetry. Abridged versions of Dastan-e-Amir Hamza, Talism Hoshruba, Bostaan-e-Khyal as well as western classics translated into Urdu published by Ferozsons (Pvt) Ltd; hundreds of children’s books by Mazhar Kaleem M.A., who became famous for his re-do of the superspy Imran series. But I also read a lot of books on Partition, Mughal, and pre-Mughal Indian history as well as the famous Urdu poets. All these have certainly seeped into the fabric of my worldbuilding and prose-building. English and American authors, of course, came later, but by then most of the fertilisation had likely already happened. While you employ a different writing style to tell the story of a junkie, stories like The Vaporization Enthalpy of a Peculiar Pakistani Family and In the Ruins of Mohenjo-Daro in this collection are so uniquely told. Both are experimental yet rooted in reality. What do you think is the connecting thread in all your stories? What unites them and makes this a “collection”? I’d suppose the connecting thread is my particular idiosyncrasies. I have a pretty variegated taste in reading, and I suspect that lends me a broad range in storytelling as well. Lately, however, I have come to believe that many of these stories are good old love stories told in the garb of ghost stories. What sort of control do you exercise, if at all, in weaving the fantastical and the realistic in your work? Or is your focus solely only on telling a good story and the rest takes care of itself? Tell us about your process. I don’t know if most writers could honestly claim to ‘control’ their stories. The creative process can be erratic, finicky, and tends to be different for everyone. While you can plan out a skeletal structure, writing the story is often surprising as much for the writer as for the reader when they read it. The story tends to thrash its head, run this way and that. I suppose that’s why second and third drafts and having good beta readers and editors can be helpful. I tend to have particular images in my head that I want to hit. My story tends to creep along, looking for those images, which it then assimilates into itself, like a swampy-risen creature. I believe the accuracy with which the medical metaphors and methods are described in the book are a result of you being a doctor as well. Do you practice full-time? If yes, do you have any specialisation? And how do you find time to engage with stories and words? I am a rheumatologist and do practice full-time — which is likely why I don’t have a novel out yet. While I wish I could pull off an Arthur Conan Doyle and write between patients, my brain just doesn’t work that way. I have to put some evenings aside if I have a story deadline; otherwise, I would never write. Though this work seems to be a love letter to Pakistan and its glorious past, it is a very direct criticism of its failures, too. What do you have to say about that? Writers capture the world they live in, right? Its astringent beauty and decadent desolation. The historian-politician Aitzaz Ahsan wrote a great book called The Indus Saga, wherein he discusses the people of the ‘Indus’ versus the people of ‘India’, arguing that the alluvial plains and mountains of the great Indus River bred peoples and cultures with a specific geographic signature. What is now Pakistan was once the first line of defence Hindustan/India had against invaders from Central Asia and beyond. What a fascinating story and mythology that makes for! Yet, we’re impoverished by our own history; by the identity mess the British have left us; by the feudal-military complex, where a handful of families and would-be dictators have dominated the economic and political landscape of the country for decades. The reality of contemporary Pakistan irritates me, like hair in a lover’s eye. Love demands the lover behold the Beloved in all her glorious and inglorious beauty, wanting the fullest jalwa of her. If that is intolerable, so be it; the lover needs to take that and assimilate it into his heart as well. I am an optimist, however, and I do see hope in the youth of the country. The millennials and ‘baby Zoomers’ are seeing a different Pakistan than my generation did; where change is inevitable, and democracy has power. They may be polarised on what they support and hope for, but I have great hope their dreams will prevail. I suppose I have tried to capture that in my writing: a doorway between the past and the future, a portal between despair and hope. And if I haven’t done it deliberately sometimes, it’s because I haven’t needed to. It’s quintessentially who I am — a duality with several layers. Through your stories, you also seem to be addressing the fact that being a believer has divided our world in unimaginable ways. Do you feel that religion is the debris of all conflicts that face us today? Or are they the result of opportunistic political moves? What should one do to remain tolerant in an increasingly hate-filled world? My answer may seem simplistic, even naive, but I believe and will continue to believe it: The genesis of all religions, anthropologically speaking, is hope and fear. Fear of the ever-encroaching dark tightened all around us and hope we can surmount it and break through to something larger beyond. Therefore, a religion (or faction) fuelled by hope, dream, and love will strive for light, betterment, peace, and strength. One fuelled by fear will succumb to it. Since my twenties, I have felt the mystic underpinnings of the great religions are what makes them all salvageable. “Masjid Dha dey, Mandar Dha dey, Dha dey jo kuch dhenda, Par kisay da dil na dhawen…” saved us all a long time from internecine annihilation. It can continue to save us today, should we choose it. Whose works do you find inspirational? Any books that you’d like to recommend to readers of science fantasy fiction? How about great writers and books for all readers? I recommend the brilliant writers Kelly Link and Ted Chiang for their utter mastery over what they do. I adore the late great son of Lucknow Naiyer Masud, perhaps the greatest post-Partition writer of the Urdu short story. His Collected Stories from Penguin India should adorn every bookshelf. Anil Menon, Vandana Singh, Indrapramit Das, Jayaprakash Satyamurthy, Vajra Chandrasekera, and Malcolm Devlin — all write wonderful, powerful speculative fiction. I adore the maximalism and weirdness of Cormac McCarthy, the eros of Philip Roth, and the erratic Cronos of Brian Evenson and Kurt Vonnegut. I’m currently reading the short stories of Shams-Ur-Rehman Farooqi, but my Urdu has become rudimentary from years of disuse, and I find myself wanting to switch to English translations — an act I’m determined to forego. Lately, I have been obsessed with A Thousand and One Nights and Yasmine Seale’s incredible feminist translation that came out just a few months ago. What are you working on next? Trying to finish a couple short stories so I can return to a weird novel I’ve been working on for two years now. It’s a haunted house novel set in Lahore with echoes of partition and wisps of the pandemic. Saurabh Sharma (He/They) is a Delhi-based queer writer and freelance journalist. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News , India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook ,  Twitter  and  Instagram .