More than a decade ago, I used tell my wife a bedtime story. She liked some parts and some bits would put her to sleep. Where did this story come from, what became of it?
The Book of Gold Leaves
Let me go back to my childhood.
I grew up in the ancient city of Srinagar, the capital of the disputed region of Kashmir. It is a wonderful, magical place. As a young boy, I roamed its lanes and by-lanes, its Mughal gardens and orchards - all those beautiful spaces that give Kashmir such clichéd sobriquets as 'paradise on earth', 'pastoral idyll'… I was lucky to live in all these places.
But I also lived in the old part of the town, which has existed for centuries. This congested heart of the city, by the river Jhelum, is very different from the rest of Kashmir, which is forever associated with these images - the famous Dal Lake, houseboats introduced by the British, the colourful shikara boats, meadows of flowers, handicrafts…But the town is amazing for other reasons. It has ancient houses, markets that go back hundreds of years, from the time there was trade and cultural exchange between Srinagar and other cities in Central Asia, the old but now forgotten trading centres on the Silk Route.
My mother's family came from the old town, where they had this somewhat crumbling but magnificent house. It had a colossal staircase, which didn't look it was built for humans. One day, I asked my maternal uncle why the stairs were so huge. He said, 'actually, they were not meant for humans alone; they were meant for horses to climb all the way up to the top floor'. I spend a lot of my childhood in this house.
All these places and images, and vignettes from memory, inform your sensibility as a writer. You can trace the arc of your imagination, if you're a novelist or pretend to be one, to that time, to those scenes and stories. My relatives would tell me stories about what the city used to be like.
My paternal grandfather was a papier-mache' artist of some renown. As a child, I used to see him paint. These were moments of awe and mystery. How can this man paint a vase in half an hour! When I was sixteen, Kashmir, by now in the grip of a brutal conflict, was under a long curfew that lasted months, so the family, out of money and short on food, decided to go back to its old craft to make some money. Under the tutelage of my uncle, Mirza Fida Hussain, I, too, painted, and somehow finished a hundred papier-mache Easter eggs for which I was actually paid a thousand rupees.
Many years later in London, as I sat down to write the story I would tell my wife when we first met, all these memories found their way into the book. I'd had the premise-a Shia boy in love with a Sunni girl at a time of brutal geopolitical conflict-in my head for years, and now everything came together magically. The love story of a semi-literate papier-mache artist turned militant and a highly educated girl, as their world crumbles around them, merged with my personal history of the city. And the city's specific cultural and political history provided the perfect backdrop.
In many ways, then, The Book of Gold Leaves is my long love letter to Srinagar and its quietly heroic girls and boys.
My wife likes the book, too
Mirza Waheed is one of six authors on the shortlist for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2016. Established in 2010, the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature awards a prize of US $50,000 for the best work in fiction to one author from any ethnicity or nationality provided they write about South Asia and its people. This year, the winner of the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature will be announced at the Galle Literary Festival in Sri Lanka, on 16th January 2016.
For more information please visit - www.dscprize.com