“I never use real people in my books. I don’t think it is fair to them to be made fictional characters.” — Qaisra Shahraz

Qaisra Shahraz is a British-Pakistani novelist and screenwriter. She was born in Pakistan and moved to the UK when she was nine. She has lived in Manchester ever since. Her novels, The Holy Woman and Typhoon have been translated into several languages. The Holy Woman won the Golden Jubilee Award and was the ‘Best Book of the Month’ at Waterstones. She was attending the Islamabad Literature Festival where Dawn caught up with her to talk about her novels and the strong female characters in them, and about how she balances patriarchy with feminism in her writings.

In your books, there is a theme of feminism running side by side with patriarchy in Pakistan. You have these strong women conforming to the rules set down by men, while having their say at the same time. How did you balance the two concepts?

I was interested in patriarchy because I was interested in women’s issues and the two go hand-in-hand for me. It is patriarchy that prevents women from reaching their true potential and creates hurdles for them.

I was interested in how, in a developing country like Pakistan, it shapes a woman’s life and I wanted to explore that with a modern, educated women who has it all, but at the end of the day, she is still being shaped in terms of decision-making in her life by her parents. And through the story of Zarri Bano I illustrate that.

And as she said in the book [The Holy Woman]: “We are beads in a tapestry that our forefathers weaved”, and that illustrates the helplessness of it all.

But because I am a feminist, I did not want to leave Zarri Bano as the victim, and the women in the book as passive. These women were strong. They were victims but they fought back. And there are a lot of women like that in the book, with some of them as modern and accomplished as Zarri and others who are more humble, but still live life on their terms.

You created a character whom you would not have expected to be made a holy woman. How did you come up with that idea?

Making Zarri Bano a holy woman was a challenge for me because she was not ordinary. It was a challenge because she was not a typical Sindhi woman and I thought, how can a woman like that be made a holy woman and then I came with the idea that she was only made a holy woman because her father was jealous of the man she was to marry.

Zarri Bano had to be modern and glamourous, she had to be a good heroine and that is why of all the characters in my four books, Zarri Bano has stuck in readers imaginations. Many readers from various parts of the world have said, when Zarri Bano wept, we wept.

What is it about ordinary lives that inspires you?

I have always loved life in the villages, the ordinary life, even though I have never lived in a village myself, I have always been an urban girl. I have a natural empathy for it. I couldn’t probably live there for life, but I love it. Ordinary people inspire me.

What are some of your favourite scenes from The Holy Woman?

There is a scene of Zarri Bano looking at herself in the bathroom mirror the morning after she is wed to the Quran, thinking what use is this body. And one where she is praying to Allah and saying take out the guilty soul of this woman who is still in love with this man when she is a holy woman.

Another powerful scene is when she falls into pieces in her mother’s arms. I loved writing that scene and I wept as I wrote it. It was so real to me. It is about the power of a sexual relationship. Of a woman who struggles with being attracted to a man.

Do you use real life incidents or people in your writing?

I have used some real life incidents in my books, insofar that I have taken inspiration from them. But I never use real people in my books. I don’t think it is fair to them to be made fictional characters.

But, you can get ideas from anywhere. I was inspired to write The Holy Woman after watching a documentary on Sindh. Typhoon was inspired by a news report of a woman who was raped and the idea for The Slave Catcher came from a documentary I saw on a visit to Boston which was further developed when I visited concentration camps were Jews were kept in Germany. I think you are inspired by real life events which invoke strong feelings in you, something you are already passionate about.

I penned a character called Sameer in a story about migration and the inspiration for that character was my father. I used to think, what will my father do if my mother died, is he going to stay in the UK or go back to Pakistan? And when she died a few years later, my father reacted in the exact same way that Sameer had in my story.

What advice would you give aspiring writers?

I would say just push on. Sometimes you will have writers block and at others you will not know where the story is going. But just make use of the time you have by doing something productive.

When I first started writing, the world was not so open and it was harder to be published or noticed. My work was rejected by three publishers before one agreed to print it.

So, there are more opportunities now. But at the same time, there are more challenges as well. There is too much competition and a need to be perfect. You have to engage the publisher and the reader from the first chapter. People don’t have time anymore to wait for the good part to come.

What is your creative process? Do you plan your stories out before writing them, or do they just take form as you write?

When you are writing a screenplay, you have to plan ahead, and it can be very exhausting. Each scene is a complete story with a start, beginning and end. One play can have 300 scenes and every scene has to be meticulously planned.

Writing a novel is a more leisurely process. You can form a story as you go along. With The Holy Woman, I knew from the beginning how the story was going to end. But with the book I am writing now, I don’t know where the story is going to go.

Your first novel turned out to be a huge success. Is it hard to keep up to expectations with your new work?

It is. It took me such a long time to write Revolt because I wanted it to be perfect. I was done with the book and when I read it, I thought this is not how I want it to be. This is not good enough. So I spent another two years re-writing it to make it just the way I wanted it to be.