CHENNAI: What I had wanted to do — because I still didn’t believe I could write a novel — was write three small novellas. And then, that would be my book. One of those novellas was what finally became Radiant Fugitives,” began computer scientist-turned-author Nawaaz Ahmed. While it’s taken the author nearly a decade to see his dream come true, his pursuit has presented the world with a beautiful exploration of the nature of three generations of a Muslim-Indian family in Obama-era San Fransico, their life in the post-9/11 America, the tension that seems to envelop its women, the intersectionality of religion and sexuality, and much more. At the Indian launch of the book, organised by Starmark Kolkata, Nawaaz discussed the book and the journey he had to take to make it this way with fellow writer and friend Sharanya Manivannan.
A ‘novel’ attempt
While ten years may be a long time to persist with a creative process, Nawaaz was never short of motivation — and more importantly, faith. “Over the years that I kept working on the book, what gave me the faith in it was that I didn’t actually see anything else that was like it. There were so few Muslim writers. There were very few gay writers. There are very few books that tackle the intersection of faith and sexuality, and what I felt my life looked like. Not being able to see that, I wanted to write the book I wanted to read. Over the years, of course, we’ve had more Muslim writers and gay writers come into the picture and I’m so glad for all of them,” he elaborated, adding that the book has taken longer than expected.
This book follows the worldview of Ishraaq, a newborn, as he observes the lives of three women in his family — mother Seema, aunt Tahara and grandmother Nafeesa. “Each of these women is so distinct. Seema is a liberal who was disowned by her family when she came out as a lesbian. Tahara is deeply conservative and trying to raise her children in a country that is quite hostile to her people. And Nafeesa is at the end of her life and is facing a series of reckonings that we all go through,” shared Sharanya, about the narrative, before asking how Nawaaz managed to land on these characters to tell his story. Turns out, it came to him in a dream; well, almost.
“I woke up one morning with this vivid image of three women in an apartment that looked very similar to mine; I was living in San Fransico at that time. The scene was of two sisters who were sipping tea and there was some tension between them that I did not understand. What I did know was that one of them was nine months pregnant, the other one was very religious and their mother — who was in the adjacent room pretending to sleep — was dying. I immediately wrote the opening line and that scene the same day but it wasn’t until two years later that I began to think of this as a novel,” he recounted.
Between life and death
The rest of the novel — including the decision to make the newborn the narrator —was like a puzzle. While Ishraaq’s role in the plot may seem to be a curious choice, it was with the express desire to keep his own prejudices and biases away from the women he is trying to portray, shared Nawaaz. “It seemed to me that at the moment of his birth, he would be very accepting,” he added. Sharanya, in great agreement with the reasoning, chipped in that there is such rich empathy in the narrative for precisely this reason.
From here on, Nawaaz seems to take the poetic-prose route to deliver ruminations on certain philosophies of life — all within the context of how life, how different, offers common experiences to us all. And what’s philosophy without the questions on life and death. In this story, we begin with the juxtaposition of these moments — from the baby to be birthed to the woman waiting to die. “The thing about birth and death is that there is this whole journey in between. What the book became was not just about the moments of birth and death but what it implies for the journey. It comes back to ‘how do we live’ and ‘what is the purpose of life’. But, this journey was crucial for this book; also because of the newborn who is entering the world and wants to know what this is going to look like,” he theorised.
Nawaaz also revealed that it was important for him to acknowledge this in his own life, given that he was leaving behind a life in the world of computer science — one he had inhabited for over 20 years — for brand new territory. “It felt like computer science was not providing me what I felt I needed for my journey. I wanted to explore those issues in the book. And so the interplay of life and death became about what is this journey between these points. And the interplay of different texts (be it the Quran or John Keats works or even Obama’s speech) in the story came naturally from that,” he shared, as one who took solace from reading and the texts he came across.
As Sharanya pointed out, this is an incredibly ambitious book that navigates the tricky terrain of human choices and consequences but also religion, sexuality and politics. As a gay Muslim man who sometimes found the strictures in conflict with his reality, the process of putting life to paper had not been without challenges, it seems. “It took some courage to say I will go there. Now, I take courage from the fact that there are many other writers exploring these topics. I’m not the first and I hope that there would be many more of us who would be able to talk about these things in their own different ways,” he surmised.
The book is available on major e-commerce sites and in Starmark stores.