In his debut novel, 'Home Boy', which won the inaugural DSC prize for South Asia literature, H.M. Naqvi’s protagonist Chuck and his friends, Jimbo and AC — Pakistani men coming of age in a post 9/11 America — are described as ‘metrostanis’. The term would perhaps serve to describe their creator just as well. There’s a flamboyant style Naqvi has — at our meeting, he’s wearing ankle boots in deep burgundy leather (bought just after Home Boy was published, he tells us), a Rolex glints on his wrist and when he opens the leather messenger bag he carries everywhere, a bottle of Armani peeks out — that somehow sits perfectly with his measured, carefully considered way of speaking.
Apart from their ‘metrostani-ness’ however, you shouldn’t mistake Chuck for his creator. As a Pakistani man who has lived in New York, writing about a Pakistani man’s experiences in New York, it is often assumed that Homeboy is Naqvi’s autobiography — something he is quick to rebut.
“Readers tend to mistake 'Home Boy' for a memoir, but it’s not. It’s a work of fiction. I came of age in the sleepy capital city of Pakistan, Islamabad. On Friday nights, there was very little to do, except play billiards in a smoky pool hall in a supermarket. So the possibilities Islamabad offered —even for getting into trouble —were very few. Well, unless you got into a fight with someone at the pool hall when they tried to grab your cue stick. So my life was very different from Chuck’s life. I spent all of two years in New York, I am not a New Yorker. I’ve lived in Karachi for most of my life.”
Incidentally, Karachi is where Naqvi’s next book is set. He has described the book as a “big, bawdy epic that deals with the universe and its vastness”. Bring that up, and the author laughs. “Well… that’s how I like to think of it,” he admits. “We’ll see if it turns out that way but that is my aspiration — to write about subjects that are wider. Having written a novel that can be classified as immigrant fiction, I think that the anxieties of immigrants are not as exciting as the anxieties you and I have — about love, mortality, one’s relationship to God or lack thereof… These are subjects that excite me far more than this nostalgia for a samosa.”
If a mere two years’ acquaintance with New York could lead to such vibrant, original prose, one wonders how Naqvi’s writings on Karachi will read. Was it more or less challenging to write about the place he now calls ‘home’? “New York has been written about in prose and poetry for more than 100 years,” he says. “So one has to be conscious of the genre of the New York novel, one has to be conscious about how one will approach the novel given the genre and one has to be conscious about one’s status as an outsider. The issues in writing about New York are different from the issues that pertain to Karachi. Karachi has not been treated in prose and poetry for a hundred years. In recent times, there has been an evolving consciousness about the city and there has been some work emerging, but that is more sociological. As far as literature is concerned, to me, Karachi is sort of a blank canvas. There’s a certain freedom that comes with that — and a certain responsibility.”
And after New York and Karachi, is there any metro he’d love to write about? “Karachi’s population is about 18.5 million, officially. Unofficially, it could be above 20 million. So one can write about Karachi for the rest of one’s life — I don’t know if I will, but I can,” Naqvi says.
Then he adds, whimsically, “But I would love to be ensconced in Kisangani in the Democratic Republic of Congo — a city that Naipaul wrote about in A Bend in the River. Conrad also wrote about the Belgian Congo… So Kisangani fascinates me as does Port Moresby, in Papua New Guinea. So one never knows —maybe I’ll go there and write about it.”
Knowing Naqvi, it’ll make for compelling reading.
