Wasafiri Wonders: Tabish Khair
Ever wondered what your favourite writer’s first drafts look like? Or which book they love that nobody’s heard of? Wasafiri Wonders is a series that asks these questions for you.
Describe your first drafts in one sentence.
A bit like having arrived after driving in the dark and trusting desperately that your headlights don’t flicker off.
Tell us about your writing rituals.
I don’t have any. You need space and time to have rituals. I write when I can, which is not often and not regular, because of my other responsibilities.
What themes do you gravitate towards and why?
Nothing consciously, at least not when I start writing. But looking back at my work, I can say that all of them deal, in different ways, with matters like difference, conflict, identity, violence, meaning. Why? I suspect that we, as a species, have a drive to make sense and to make beauty, optimally at the same time.
Tell us about your newest work.
A book on literature and fundamentalism, written for an intelligent non-academic readership. Still in progress. My last novel was Night of Happiness, a kind of literary thriller or ghost story about two men making sense, in very different ways, of a situation (in contemporary India) that does not make sense.
What is the best writing advice you’ve ever received?
No one ever advised me on writing. I did not grow up in writerly or arty circles. But my father, a small-town doctor who encouraged my writing but strongly dissuaded me from becoming a writer, suggested to me, once he got used to my decision: ‘Good writing seems to be like doing good in the world: you do what you can and what you should, and throw it in a well.’
What is your favourite book or pamphlet published in the past year and why?
I hate specifying an absolute favourite (as literature, like life, is not that clear-cut), but if I have to, I would say Johann Hari’s Lost Connections.
What is a classic you recently read for the first time?
The Mahabharata. But I had read chunks of it in the past too.
What is a book or pamphlet you love that no one else has heard of?
A. N. Das’s Changel: The Biography of a Village.
If your newest work were a music album, what would it be and how would it sound?
A blend of country and ghazal, I think. Something slow, and with audio clarity. Or a combination of classical rock (think Bruce Springsteen) and qawwali (think Sabri Brothers), which would be faster, harder but would also have audio clarity. Because I am tired of the valorisation of noise.
Which books or authors are relevant reads in our political climate — or one you’d recommend to current world leaders?
Emmanuel Levinas, Karl Marx, Joseph Conrad, Asadullah Khan Ghalib, Edward W. Said, Byung-Chul Han, Judith Butler, Martha Nussbaum, and a few others, but they would be far beyond the competency of world leaders today, so I suggest something simpler, shorter but as effective and useful: Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Tabish Khair’s Night of Happiness (Picador, 2018) is reviewed in Wasafiri 99.
Cover image: Illustrated by Simone Khanyi Hadebe
