The Writing on My Forehead: A Novel

by Nafisa Haji

  Having decided on our order—tomato soup, cheese toast, fish pakoras, chicken sandwiches, and tea—Big Nanima excused herself to use the washroom and I sat alone at the table to wait for everyone’s return. I looked around to survey the familiar scene. Lubna Khala’s treat at Gymkhana was something of a tradition on trips to Karachi. For her, it had always been a place to socialize away from home—a much-needed escape from her mother-in-law in years past. For us—Ameena and me—the large pool had been the attraction, a much-favored escape from the heat. As I’d gotten older, I had come to understand what it represented—an aristocratic refuge from the rabble, the status of membership there enhanced by the mystique of its past, when the only desis allowed in were there to wait on tables and serve. There were other clubs like it in Karachi, some of higher status than others, but all of them with this foundation in common. They were the residue of an empire that had not been replaced with much success, as Big Nanima regretfully lamented.

  This is what I was thinking of when my eyes were drawn to the center point in a group sitting and smoking inside the pavilion. There was a man there holding court, perched on the arm of a chair, hands in motion, brow furrowed, issuing forth from a face animated by a passion I was suddenly curious to find the reason for. He made his point and then fell silent, politely listening to the response he had provoked. He shook his head and smiled, turning his face to dismiss what his companion said. In the process, he caught me staring. His eyes held mine for too long a moment, forcing me to look away. Big Nanima returned. I stood to help her be seated and chanced another look. He was on his way over. Big Nanima saw the direction of my gaze and followed it. The man waved and Big Nanima waved back, saying, while he was en route, “Do you recognize him, Saira? He’s Majid Khan. I gave you his book to read last time you were here.”

  My interest, caught already, quickened. He was tall, with a full, thick head of hair, lightly dusted at the temples with gray. His smile was wide and brilliant, the creases at the corners of his eyes evidence of heartfelt pleasure at the sight of my great-aunt.

  “Adeeba Auntie! It’s a pleasure to see you,” said Majid Khan—journalist, novelist, and winner of the Commonwealth literature prize—taking Big Nanima’s hand in order to bestow a kiss upon it.

  “Majid, my dear! How is your mother?”

  “She’s well.”

  He nodded at me politely as Big Nanima explained, “Majid’s mother was my student. One of my first. And best.”

  “And you, Auntie, according to my mother, are the reason that I am a writer. It was her love of literature that gave rise to mine. You were the inspiration for her passion. My only misfortune was to have been born a boy, she says, making me ineligible to receive your teaching firsthand.”

  Big Nanima wagged her finger at him with a smile. “You are a writer! No doubt about it—twisting words to serve your purpose.”

  He grinned like a boy—an odd sight for a man whom I guessed to be not younger than forty.

  “For how long are you here, beta?”

  “A week only. I leave again on Monday, having learned—the hard way—that a long-term stay in Pakistan is not good for my health.”

  Big Nanima laughed appreciatively, a kind of laugh I had gotten used to, a head-shaking, joyless mirth that she issued forth when there was no alternative but to laugh. She turned to me to explain, “Last time Majid was here, he was stabbed. A direct result—we all know it is true—of his having done an exposé of the corruption of the Karachi police. They sent their ghundas after him.”

  Majid Khan shrugged. “It’s to be expected. Here—when you threaten someone’s livelihood, they will make sure you know of their displeasure. And if there’s one thing we excel at in Pakistan, it is the creation of ghundas and terrorists.”

  “You will not come back to stay?”

  “Not for the moment. The ground is unstable here—earthquakes, landslides, government coups—it all shifts beneath your feet too quickly for my taste.”

  “And where have you settled?”

  “Settled? Nowhere, I’m afraid. I wander aimlessly, perpetually searching for a story to be told.”

  “Don’t blame your restlessness on your profession, Majid,” Big Nanima scolded. “A writer will always find a story—you need look no further than the tip of your nose and there will be something that needs to be said.”

  “Ah, yes—like the Austens and the Brontës, who made provincialism an art. But I insist on making the world my garden, Auntie, and that is a lot of ground to cover.”

  Majid Khan’s eyes moved to embrace mine as Big Nanima said, “Beta, this is my sister’s granddaughter, my great-niece, Saira Qader. She’s visiting from America. And wants to be a writer. A journalist.”

  “A journalist? You’ll have to leave America, won’t you? There’s not much left in the way of journalism there now, is there?”

  I laughed.

  Big Nanima said, “She’s already been published. In a little magazine out of England.”

  “Have you?” His tone was a shade too polite to be categorized as bored.

  “It was a very good piece.” Big Nanima wouldn’t let it go.

  “If you say so, Auntie, then I have no doubt it was.”

  “I’m not sure Big Nanima’s opinion qualifies as unbiased,” I said, squirming a little at the thought of how many aunties must tell him daily about the talents of their writer nieces and nephews.

  “Who published it?” Majid Khan asked me.

  I told him the name of the magazine, wishing Big Nanima hadn’t said anything.

  One of Majid Khan’s brows lifted. “But I know the editor of that sorry excuse for a magazine! A very good friend of mine. He insists on sending me a copy every month. What was your piece called?”

  “‘Magda.’ It was a photographic piece. The writing was just a side thing.”

  “‘Magda’?” He reached behind him to pull a chair up beside me and sat down. “I remember it. Very well, as it happens.”

  I felt myself flush—with pleasure, embarrassment, shock. “You read it?”

  Big Nanima clapped. “You see, Saira? You want to be a writer—and you have been noticed by one the world has noticed.”

  “He didn’t say he liked it, Big Nanima.”

  “Oh, but I did.” Majid Khan managed to sound sincere.

  Big Nanima clapped again.

  Majid Khan was regarding me much as a scientist might regard a peculiar form of bacteria on a slide. “I’m not normally so impressed by young writers. Altogether too self-consciously clever, too pat, too neat. Creative nonfiction is particularly repulsive—blurring the line between fact and fiction in a world already unable to distinguish one from the other. Your piece, however—it was nothing but a list of questions and doubts. No attempt to provide any answers. A lament, really. You were painfully aware of your limitations—and played to them in a way that was rather interesting.”

  Big Nanima hooted with delight. “Ha! Forgive me, Majid, but I have known you too long to take you seriously on a soapbox. Don’t be fooled by his stern manner, Saira. He has an image to maintain, after all. It was well disguised—the compliment he’s offered you. But there, nonetheless.”

  Majid’s nod was a concession to Big Nanima’s crowing. “Keep it up, Saira. Questions are all that matter. The answers don’t belong to you. Too few journalists understand this in the rush to formulate a story.”

  He chatted with Big Nanima for a few more moments. Then—before Lubna Khala and my parents rejoined us—he left.

  “That was—wow!” It was all I could say when he did. “I—I felt like a kindergartener holding up a crayon sketch of a house to Picasso.”

  “Nonsense! Picasso, indeed! You give him too much credit and yourself not enough.”

  THIRTEEN

  BEFORE I BEGIN,” Majid Khan said, addressing an eager audience of Berkeley students during an extracurricular lecture that had been arranged to accommodate the undergraduates among us, who did not have access to th
e man who was a guest lecturer at the Graduate School of Journalism, “I have some questions for you. A journalist always begins with questions, no? And because I believe there are some among you who aspire to be journalists,” he paused to acknowledge the laughter and engagement of those before him, “I hope and expect to be interrupted by your questions as we move along. How many of you have heard of Midnight’s Children?”

  I looked around and saw that only a fraction of the audience in the Dwinelle Hall auditorium raised their hands with mine. “Okay. How many of you have heard of The Satanic Verses?” More than half raised their hands. “And finally, how many have heard of Salman Rushdie?” This time, every hand went up.

  “That, my friends, is the difference between journalism and fiction. Power. The power that transforms a relatively obscure—no matter how highly acclaimed—literary figure into worldwide headlines. The contents of Salman Rushdie’s novels—his stories—will never, never have the impact that the story about Salman Rushdie had. There is a lot of posturing about this—about Rushdie’s right to expression from one side, about the blasphemous nature of his work from another—but what he expressed was read neither by the vast majority of those who claimed his work to be insupportably offensive nor by those whom they, in turn, offended. They—those rioting hordes, those mullahs and fatwa-issuing ayatollahs—relied on the news. The same goes in the so-called Western world—so-called, because this kind of delineation, it seems to me, is a dangerous affectation that has nothing to do with the fact that we live in one world, all of us, with equal responsibility to care for it and equal opportunity to exploit and defile it. In the so-called Western world, few cared about Rushdie’s novel per se. It was its effect that was the story, not its content. If that effect had not been reported on here, Salman Rushdie’s book would have remained tucked away, however highly appreciated, in the literary niche where brilliant writing remains buried. Am I right? Can we agree on this? That there is more power in journalism than in fiction?” Majid Khan paused for a long moment.

  My hand itched to be raised, my disbelieving eyes scanned the audience to find that no one else seemed to burn with the question that had formed in my mind. When I saw that I was alone, I raised my hand—slowly, tentatively. I had not come here expecting to expose myself to his scrutiny so soon.

  “Ah—a question! Thank goodness—I was afraid that no one would challenge the premise I just constructed. Yes?”

  “Umm—what you just said—isn’t that only true in the short term? I mean—who remembers the news when they read a novel? The news at the time it was published? Does anyone know about the war that was taking place in the background of Pride and Prejudice? Even novels that seem to be grounded in the context of history can be read without much reference to the news of the day—like Tolstoy, for example. His stories stand alone—and most people who read them today have no idea what was going on in the newspapers at the time. Excepting what the authors chose to incorporate in the narrative of their characters.”

  “Ah, yes, the long view. You must be a history major.”

  I nodded as the audience laughed.

  His attention was focused on me now, a specific face in a crowd. I saw his eyes narrow, his forehead crease. “I know you. ‘Magda’? You wrote ‘Magda’?”

  I nodded again, resisting the urge to fan my face as the heat rose from chin to hairline.

  “The long view,” he said again, retracing his train of thought. “Who has time for that in journalism?” The audience laughed again, harder this time. “Your point is valid. But I won’t back down from my premise. I began by asserting that the difference between journalism and fiction is power. It’s true—what you said—that fiction lives a longer life. I will even argue that fiction is truer than journalism. But journalism is more powerful. And more dangerous. Because it is powerful, it is also attractive to power.

  “Fiction is truer than journalism, you ask? But journalism is based on facts. Facts. What could be truer than facts? Well, facts are often disparate and contradictory. Their complexity eludes our understanding. How to assimilate them—these unruly, misshapen entities? Journalists are reporters. Reporters are supposed to report. The temptation to do more than report is irresistible, however—all for a good cause, of course. To clarify, explain, contextualize—to help people understand what we ourselves do not. So, journalists are in the habit of putting facts together so that they make sense, fitting them into the frame of a story. To construct something out of chaos. But when you build a story, you choose which blocks to use, which not to use. You decide how they are to be arranged, what shape they will take. Journalists become architects. And who can say what an architect is? A glorified engineer? An artist? A little of both? An artist?—you ask in surprise and disgust. But an artist must create. A journalist merely reports, you insist. I disagree. Journalists also create. Journalists—those among them who become architects—are the designers of buildings and neighborhoods, which their audience will inhabit and occupy. Mainstream media is like this—actively involved in the design of endless tracts of cookie-cutter homes, two-car garages, white-picket fences, and well-tended lawns surrounded by pretty bouquets of carefully arranged flower beds. There is no room for weeds there—contradictions and complexities that threaten the order of the pattern. But weeds grow anyway, and journalists in America, with very few and brave exceptions, work hard to avoid them and ignore them—at best. At worst, they help to point them out as ugly, unwanted growths worthy only of being destroyed. That is what journalism is today. Know this. Be under no illusions.

  “The problem is that weeds have names, too. Any botanist will tell you what they are. There are facts to be learned about them—statistics, processes of survival, which are quite remarkable in their own right.

  “What kind of building will you design? What will the neighborhood which you construct look like? Which facts will you use? And which will you ignore? If a fact falls in the forest, and no one hears it, will it make a sound? Oh, yes. Because there is always someone else in the forest. Those facts that we dismiss because they do not fit into the pattern of the stories we write, they cannot be eliminated, no matter how hard we try, no matter how much we may love the neighborhoods, the houses, the buildings we have constructed. The other facts—those blocks which have been discarded—are still there, bricks in the hands of other people in the forest, who do see them and hear them, whose lives they inform. Take care. Those bricks can become weapons.

  “I am a journalist. Fully aware of my own limitations, aware that I will never be able to overcome them. I am as susceptible as anyone else to the business of construction. I am a product of my own specific culture, and in that culture I find justification for my point of view, already formed. Many of you may know what shaheed means. In the lexicon of most people—Muslims and non-Muslims alike—a shaheed is a martyr. Someone who dies for a cause—the cause of Islam. There it is—a word, ready to be used and which is used by those desperate enough, or crazy enough, or depraved enough, depending on your point of view, to need such a word. But the root word of shaheed is ‘witness.’ That is also the root meaning of the Greek word martyr. That is the kind of journalism I aspire to practice. Merely to bear witness. Not to make sense, not even to understand. Because when I try to do those things, I become an architect, the constructor of meaning and truth, a storyteller. When the need to ascribe meaning becomes overwhelming, I write a novel. That is the only time I allow myself to be concerned with telling a story. A work of fiction—the only context in which I am interested in the Truth. Capital T.

  “In journalism, truth is too easily rendered irrelevant, subject to the design and construction of facts. In fiction, facts are irrelevant, subject to the storyteller’s quest for truth. Truth is dangerous. The novel is the most subversive expression of truth there is. Because the greatest truths can be hidden in the fiction of a novel.

  “In Shia Islam, there is a principle of self-preservation, called taqiyya. When the truth becomes hazardous to
your health, you can lie. Go undercover. That is what fiction is—truth obscured, less susceptible to manipulation because it is hidden. My friend Salman is a brilliant writer. Hide-and-seek, he’s not so good at. Because he chooses to hide his explosive truths in very dangerous places—too close to open flames where they ignite and divert attention from the message of his stories.”

  Again, the audience laughed. He was a good speaker, but I’d heard that already from friends in the journalism department who were taking his class. I paid close attention to the whole of his speech. But I ventured no more questions through it or after, when others raised their hands. I knew—because he had recognized me—that I would have the opportunity to ask more in a less public forum. When the lecture was done, I lingered in my seat. I didn’t have to wait long. He approached as soon as the little crowd that had gathered around him—about the same size as the one I had first seen him in—dispersed.