Before the storm

Writing the novel was a part of a process of figuring out what was running in the nerves of that town."

Zaidi, who recently won the prestigious Nine Dots Prize for her essay Bread, Cement, Cactus, is no stranger to the art of storytelling—her previous fiction includes Gulab and Love Stories # 1 to 14. But, with this novel, she uses the power of her unflinching prose, to show us a mirror to our society. "I think writers are almost always heavily invested in their own times," she says. "I only know that it [her novel] derives from the times I'm living in, and from places and things I've witnessed." It's also about history, she says, and how we derive our sense of ourselves from the stories we've been told about who 'we' are. "History can turn into a source of local pride, or it can turn into ammunition that feeds conflicts centuries after they should have ceased to matter."

Her narrative is brimming with voices—a collection of soliloquies—with every character telling us the story, sometimes of the same event, from their point of view. The idea, she says, was not to represent or justify any character's actions. "What I did want to do is capture, as accurately as possible, the sort of arguments I've heard from people, and what these arguments do to them—to their own soul, to their families, before they start to hurt others. I did choose the device of the internal monologue though, perhaps because I wanted to hear how these characters must talk to themselves. The thing about disturbing outcomes is that they usually come from a place of internal disturbance, and usually the sources of this disquiet turn out to be far removed from what is stated in public," says Zaidi. Her favourite is Fareeda, a young Muslim girl, orphaned as a child, who vows to look after her grandfather's estate, because she fears her brother doesn't want anything to do with it. "She is a wise, spirited child—the sort of girl you want to people the world with," she says.

The book began as a short story, but a writer friend looked at it and told Zaidi, "there was something bigger here. So I kept adding more perspectives. It's taken about three years," she says.

At the end, we only see the prelude, and maybe that's the relief this novel needs. Because, through Zaidi's characters, we see the forces that are coming, and none of them bring good news.

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