Amin X. Ahmad: Storytelling & Other Writerly Obsessions


An Interview by Dini Karasik

Amin X. Ahmad is a writer now based in Washington, D.C. but who was born and raised in India. He has published several short stories and essays in a variety of literary journals and his two books, both thrillers, are set in the United States and feature an Indian Sikh protagonist. The Caretaker and The Last Taxi Ride employ all the suspense and intrigue that one would expect of the mystery/thriller genre, but the novels also contain subtle social commentaries about race, class, and the immigrant identity. Ahmad is not satisfied with simply taking the reader for ride, he wants her to think along the way. That's because he is thoughtful, provocative, and preoccupied with the kinds of questions that prey upon all natural-born storytellers.

AX Small pic .jpg

ORIGINS

Let’s begin by talking about your origins and what they mean to you as a person and as a writer. 

AHMAD

My worlds have changed, many times. I grew up in India and we moved around a lot. I went to 13 schools before the 7th grade, and then ended up in boarding school in North India. My parents lived in the Middle East and I would return from boarding school to spend summers there.

ORIGINS

Where in the Middle East?

AHMAD

First, Oman and then Dubai. And then I came to the States when I was 17. I studied economics at Vassar and architecture at MIT. My refuge throughout all these moves was fiction. I was always reading. Back in India, I read old colonial British fiction, and when I came to America, I had to catch up on the entire American canon, stuff that my peers had read in high school here.

ORIGINS

And you grew up in Kolkata?

AHMAD

I grew up all over India. My father worked for a British bank and we were always moving from one big, old bungalow to another in a different city. These were bungalows that had been built in the 19th Century and were completely furnished. Paintings on the walls, drawers full of British-era cutlery with toast racks and marrow spoons. It was very strange. My books were the only thing that traveled with me. I was always stoned on reading. And it was how I got through a boys’ boarding school for six years, being completely un-athletic and short and fat with braces. I just checked out and lived in the world of fiction.

ORIGINS

Your imagination was your escape.

AHMAD

Yes. The one thing that has really stayed with me is that I grew up in a world without television. We didn’t have T.V., we had radio. T.V. came to India when I was probably nine or ten, but we didn’t have one till I was much older and so I grew up with stories. Especially stories told my by grandmother, aunts and uncles. We’d have a lot of blackouts, no electricity all night, and when it got dark, my grandmother would tell me a story. That is one of my earliest memories, sitting in the heat and darkness, with only a kerosene lamp, listening to a voice telling a long story.

On my mom’s side of the family, they are really incredible storytellers. And bullshit artists. They would return home at the end of each day with these incredible stories that of course were massive exaggerations. And so I just grew up always hearing stories. But I think it took me a long time to give myself permission to be a writer. I didn’t start writing professionally until my 40s. It really isn’t a viable alternative when you’re a newly arrived immigrant, as I was at age 17.

ORIGINS

Do dysfunction and chaos lend themselves to art?

AHMAD

That is the question. What is it that compels me to sit alone, for hours, engaging in lucid dreaming? I think for all artists, like writers, the meaning of life is not readily available or apparent. Meaning is achieved through practicing their art. Writers, especially, are really protective of their time. They don’t give a damn about money. They just want to have enough money so that they can buy time to do their work. 

For me, writing definitely is a way of creating meaning. I have such a ruptured background and come from a family that has a lot of secrets. So writing is a lifeline: it helps me integrate all the fragments of my life.

I don’t know if you need chaos or dysfunction, per se. You need to draw on your pain and your obsessions, but to do that you actually need to live a pretty orderly life. Sure, writers may not live conventionally, but I don’t think they court chaos. Look at Emily Dickinson—she lived in a secluded house in Amherst and didn’t venture out.  As a women her life was very restricted in the outside world, so she created a whole world inside her house, through her poetry. I think writers make the decision to create their own worlds. The real world is really not that satisfying to them. We have to transform it, color it, make it our own.

ORIGINS

Did you always know you wanted to be a writer?

AHMAD

Originally, I was expected to be a banker, like my father. I studied economics and hated it. I worked at Citibank for one summer in Dubai and was so bored that I ended up photocopying my face. The I was an architect, and the design process allowed me to be creative in a certain way, but the writing itch never went away. 

I really think of myself as a storyteller, not necessarily as a writer. When the writing gets tough, I say to myself, Just tell the story.

ORIGINS

I think that really comes across in your writing, especially when you write about home. Reading your work is a very visual experience. Even though I’ve never been to India, to the world you describe, for example, I can see it in great detail. My senses are engaged. 

In one of your essays, “205 LC Road,” you write about your grandmother and her home. As I read, I can see her house, the yard, the mango trees, but what I imagine is not likely to be the same as what you are describing. You’ve written what you see in your mind, but as the reader is experiencing it, it’s not really your vision, it’s something else entirely.

AHMAD

Absolutely.

ORIGINS

What do you think about this? Does it occur to you as you’re writing that your reader may never truly see what you see or experience what you experience?

AHMAD

This is something I’ve been thinking about recently because I teach novel writing. We talk so much about writing but we never talk about what actually happens during the act of reading. I happen to come across a book by Peter Mendelsund called What We See When We Read. He designs covers for high-end publishers, and he is amazingly adept at distilling the essence of a book into a visual image.

The book really helped me to understand that, as a writer, you have to pull out a few details from a whole mess. There are so many different ways I can describe my grandmother, who died, and now just lives in my memory. Here are some details: her crisp, white, starched widow’s sari and her soft, droopy skin that always smelled of Pears soap, a kind of fragrant glycerin soap we had in India. If I just give you those details, you are going to fill in the rest: tall, short, fat, it doesn’t really matter, you’re going to fill in your grandmother. And what we arrive at—the writer and the reader—is a collaborative act.

I think as a writer I’ve become more and more conscious of having a reader. Not in the sense of creating subject matter that would interest a contemporary reader. I’m still going to write the stuff that I’m interested in, but I always feel like story comes I’d like to tell a story that will in some way engage and entertain the reader. This is not something you hear about much in the literary world where there is such an emphasis on character, voice, and interiority. Story or plot is seen as a cop-out, something that hacks use; while actually, all successful writers use some variation of plot. 

ORIGINS

You used the word “rupture” before to describe your upbringing. What did you mean by that?

AHMAD

I grew up with the sense that something was wrong with my family. My father’s family lived in a very modern apartment building that my grandfather had built in the 1950s and we had no old furniture except for one green tiled table. And my father didn’t have much of an extended family, which is unusual for India. There’s also a lot of mental illness in the family and I didn’t quite understand why that was. In particular, I have a very charismatic younger Uncle who is mentally ill: I look like him, so I was told that I might go mad, too.

As I got older and older, I kind of realized that my father’s family, who had remained in Kolkata, were the remainder of a much larger family that had fled in 1947, when India was partitioned. The rest of the family went off to East Pakistan. My grandfather, who was one of nine siblings, stayed behind; the other eight all left. 

Our large, extended family used to live in this ancestral home in the South of Kolkata, in a Hindu neighborhood. And during Partition there was ethnic cleansing; Muslims were dragged into the streets and killed. My family had to leave there, and move to safer part of the city that was predominantly Muslim. 

I found out all this late in my 30s.  I also learned that we still owned our ancestral house, which had been rented out and become a slum. My father was the trustee of this property, but he had never told me that. In fact, I’m in line to be the trustee after him. So I had grown up with this phantom house sitting there, hiding in plain sight. People just talked around it. No one ever referred to Partition or 1947 or the trauma that our family suffered.  As a child, when there’s a secret, you learn very quickly that you shouldn’t ask questions. No one talks about the secret, but it emanates pain and suffering.

ORIGINS

This is the house that you write about in your essay “Catfish?”

AHMAD

Yes, the house where my mentally ill uncle goes to collect the rents.

ORIGINS

Different from your grandmother’s house.

AHMAD

Yes, my grandmother’s home was the new place my family moved to. So I never knew about the old house, but I ended up being an architect who specialized in restoring old houses. My first marriage was to a Hindu girl who lived one block away from our ancestral home. It’s hard to believe that this was all a coincidence. This was all a huge realization, you know? I’ve tried to write about it, in a family memoir called The Lost House, but I don’t seem to have the distance to write it yet. I have written several short pieces, but I’ve never been able to find the structure to create an entire book.

ORIGINS

Talk to me about what India means to you. It is a presence in both of the thrillers and in your essays and stories.

AHMAD

I left India when I was 17, so in a sense I don’t really know contemporary India. An older India is imprinted in my mind. There are still people walking around Kolkata who are no longer alive, for example. 

India was a strange place to grow up in because it was frozen in a kind of dream time. After 1947, after India achieved independence from the British, we said, “We don’t want any reliance on foreign imports,” and we just shut down the economy, put up barriers. India was hermetically sealed off from the outside world. So, my childhood and my parents’ childhoods were very similar.

We had two kinds of cars and they are still on the road: a 1954 Morris Minor that was renamed the Ambassador, and an old Fiat. Those were the only kinds of cars and there were no consumer goods, no T.V., and the colonial presence—because I was twenty years after the British left—was still very much alive. We had these very exclusive clubs with mounted deer and antelope heads on the walls; the city was full of colonial names and statutes on plinths. So I got a whiff of an entire world that is now gone. India is not like that anymore. A lot of the old bungalows have been demolished and it’s a very different place. I think maybe a better place, a more confident place, with more economic opportunity. But I’m stuck with my memories: India is like a ghost that haunts me.

ORIGINS

Is it the past that speaks to you most?

AHMAD

I have made a conscious effort not to confine myself to writing about the India of the past. That would be an exercise in nostalgia and I would soon run out of material. I’m more interested in exploring the “dual-time” that immigrants inhabit, in which I’m here in America with India hovering like a ghost in the back of my mind.

The Egyptian-American writer André Aciman wrote a wonderful essay in The New Yorker, "Arbitrage," in which he talks about being in America on a warm day and remembering being back in Egypt, and then visiting Egypt and being nostalgic for that day in America when he was remembering Egypt. This happens to me: I’ll be in India, in the bosom of my family, and I’ll be homesick for being in America and thinking about India. Times and places get really mixed up; the immigrant inhabits a temporally complex world.

The real struggle for me has been to find subject matter that I can write about. I never intended to write suspense. I wrote two literary novels that remain in the drawer because I just didn’t have the skill to pull them off. I was working, at the time, as an architect, I had a little kid, etc., and then I stopped writing for a while. I later took a suspense writing course and realized that just writing a suspense story, set here in the States, opened up a whole different world of possibility. I didn’t have to be restricted to India. That was liberating.

ORIGINS

Why did you choose to name your protagonist Ranjit Singh, a famous name in history, the first Sikh emperor in India?

AHMAD

Oh, that was just for fun. First of all, it’s a pretty common name, but for me, my Ranjit Singh is like royalty. He’s an ex-army captain of an elite force in the Indian Army. And through some really bad circumstances, not of his own making, he’s forced to come to America where he is nothing. He’s kind of in exile, in a way. I was playing with those dichotomies a little bit. 

ORIGINS

You are not Sikh. Why write from an Indian perspective that is different from your own?

AHMAD

Well, there are some practical reasons and not-so-practical reasons. One is that the Sikhs have historically been a very martial people. Sikhism was a reform movement of Hinduism and they have always had to fight for their beliefs. There are a lot of Sikhs in the Indian army and when I was researching the Siachen Glacier conflict, which appears in my first novel, I kept seeing photographs of Sikh officers up there.

Another thing I wanted to explore in my book was what it feels like to be a foreigner in America post-9/11. A Sikh is so distinctly foreign, and so visible; the turban becomes like a flashpoint for all kinds of things. 

Choosing a Sikh protagonist was perhaps prescient. When I sold my first two books, my editor said, “Is this a series?” and I said, “Yeah, sure,” and I came up with an outline for a third book, which involved a bomb going off in a Sikh gurdwara, planted by white militants. I wrote that outline and sent it to my editor. Then in 2012, when a white supremacist shot several Sikhs in a gurdwara in Wisconsin I thought, Oh my God, I wrote this. I think writers sometimes sense what’s in the air. Given my family background, I’m particularly attuned to fear.

ORIGINS

Is there something subversive about the Ranjit Singh books? About writing from the perspective of an Indian protagonist in a genre that has featured predominantly white characters?

AHMAD

Mainstream white characters don’t really interest me. I can’t write them. What interests me are immigrant worlds. So, my first book is set in Martha’s Vineyard with all these immigrant workers. The second one is about immigrant cab drivers in New York City, and the third book was going to be set on the U.S.-Mexico border in California where there are migrant workers and a Sikh-Mexican community. So that’s really what interests me: exploring worlds that haven’t been written about before.

Also, the thriller really came of age during the Cold War, with a white protagonist facing off with some evil Soviet antagonist, and you can’t really do that anymore. We don’t have enemies in the same way. More and more, in thrillers, the enemy is our own government. Without clear-cut bad guys, thrillers have begun to focus on place. So in that sense, my books fit into the changing genre.

ORIGINS

Have you been keeping up with recent social media discussions about the lack of diversity in some of our literary institutions?

AHMAD

No, I haven’t but I’ve been going to mystery and thriller conferences for years and I’m often one of the only people of color there. I went to one where there were two Black writers, both of whom I knew. And that’s it! The last conference I went to was in a conference room at a hotel. And I saw 20 or 30 Indians and I was so happy, I was like “Wow!” And then they started wandering off in another direction and gesturing to me. Then I saw a big sign that read, Microsoft Office Training [laughs], and I realized they were part of another conference. I will be really shocked when I get on a literary panel where there’s more than one person of color. The thinking is “Hey, we’ve got one, we don’t need two.” 

At the same conference, I was on a panel where another author said that she doesn’t make her chapters ethnic in any way but rather makes them as generic as possible so that "everyone can relate to them." She strips her characters of any ethnic markers. I was both stunned and horrified.

ORIGINS

That presumes that we can’t relate to people who are different from us, no?

AHMAD

Right, absolutely. I think that the mystery and thriller world is complicated. There’s a very loyal readership base, but it’s very homogenous and white because the genre came out of the Cold War and is rooted in mainstream inventions. 

ORIGINS

How do your books do in India?

AHMAD

The first one was published in India, but not the second one. I’m not sure why. I think I’d like to try to sell the second book in India. The original title was Bollywood Taxi, and I think it would strike a note there. 

But India, in a sense, doesn’t need me. They’re sort of sick of American writers writing nostalgic stuff about India and Indian immigrant life—even though Indians are very proud of Jhumpa Lahiri and writers like that—they don’t really need us. They have they’re own thrillers and mysteries and homegrown stuff and an enormous readership and market. It’s really taking off. My readership is in America. I’m, by default, Indian-American. I’ve been living here for 30 years. I’m interested in exploring that experience. If someone said to me, write a mystery series set in India, I wouldn’t do it. It wouldn’t feel authentic to me.

ORIGINS

So what does that say about your identity, now, today?

AHMAD

My identity…I think I’m just trying to get away from identity.

ORIGINS

How so?

AHMAD

It can be very constricting. There was a time when writers like Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow were called “Jewish writers.” When their books came out, critics said “The Jews are writing their stories and asserting themselves in the America literary cannon.” In The Adventures of Augie March, one of the first lines is: “I’m American, Chicago-born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself…” Bellow is staking a claim there. But nobody thinks of Phillip Roth as a Jewish writer anymore. He’s just an American writer. That transition has been made, whereas Indian writers are still firmly in the ghetto, with approved topics that will sell. You want to write another tired novel about arranged marriages? There’s a market for it. You want to write some gauzy, 19th century colonial stuff about India? There’s a market for it.

So, I want to move beyond just “Indian-American” and be a contemporary novelist. Like Junot Diaz. He’s not a Dominican-American writer, he’s just an American writer.

ORIGINS

Most say he’s a Latino writer, I think, and there’s also something to claiming your identity in such a way that makes the mainstream sit up and pay attention, don’t you think?

AHMAD

But he’s gone beyond that. My son grew up here, he’s 15 years old, and he loves reading Junot Diaz. He doesn’t think about him as a Latino writer. He thinks of him as a writer.

ORIGINS

Are we too focused on a writer’s origins? Why should we care about identity?

AHMAD

Writers of color can’t just write about their specific material…they become representatives of their culture. When that happens, your individuality is being denied, you are being forced into a role you don’t really want. I don’t want to be an explainer of Indian culture to white America. I just want to tell stories.

ORIGINS

You’ve mentioned before that you find it irksome when you meet someone at a cocktail party and you mention that you’re from India and the person will say, “Oh, I love Indian food.”

AHMAD

That’s the main thing I get.

ORIGINS

Is that someone’s attempt to relate or telegraph that they’re interested in you?

AHMAD

I think America is behind when it comes to diversity. So, for example, I’m not touting England as a racial paradise—they have very real problems—but I was just watching the detective show Broadchurch and the judge character is of Indian origin. It’s not remarked upon. One of the prosecuting attorneys is Black and various other characters are Black. The society is multiracial. There’s an interracial romance in this British detective show, but it’s not the point of the show. It just is.

A real multiracial story is told when people connect in universal ways, not across difference. 

My son is a teenager, he goes to school in Boston, which is a very racially divided city, but he has all kinds of friends. They don’t relate to each other primarily through the lens of race. You’re a skater or you’re into punk music or you like graphic novels, whatever the common interest is. 

Speaking of graphic novels, it’s interesting that there are a lot of non-superhero graphic novels that are so far ahead of fiction in terms of race and multiculturalism. There’s one called The Massive, which is about a world where global warming has happened and there’s sea level rise and a Greenpeace-type ship travels the globe. The main character is a white guy who was born in Bangladesh and there are people of all different hues and nationalities. If this happened in literary fiction, people would be like, “Oh, that’s different.” Graphic novelists are way ahead of the curve.

ORIGINS

Their audiences are younger.

AHMAD

Yes, younger people who have different views on race than older generations.

ORIGINS

We’re in the midst of changing demographics in this country, which we mostly talk about in terms of politics, but such a shift affects everything, including art, don’t you think?

AHMAD

I think people of color have always been fighting for place at the table and we’re still fighting. But it is heartening to see people who are post-race. For example, the comedian Aziz Ansari—a short, skinny, nerdy, Indian guy—his comedy is not about race, it’s just comedy. It’s not about “Oh, my parents, the clumsy immigrants,” or accents, or “My aunt and uncle visited and now my house smells of curry,” and all that kind of nonsense. 

ORIGINS

I think what you’re saying is that it’s about normalizing the perspectives of writers of color and other marginalized writers. It’s not about measuring ourselves against a mainstream, white dominant culture. Recently, a reputable literary magazine put out a call specifically for writers of color. I read that and asked myself, “Is creating a separate space for writers of color the answer? Why aren’t we demanding that writers of color be published as a matter of course? Why do we talk about writers of color in the context of whiteness?

AHMAD

The problem is that you can pick up any literary magazine and you won’t find that diversity. Are you going to see three short stories by Indians in the same issue? No, there’s going to be one Indian per issue. 

ORIGINS

 

You will see several Indian writers in the fall issue of Origins…that’s what came through the slush pile.

AHMAD

Origins is probably the first journal that I’ve seen doing that. But you have a certain politics to your magazine that attracts certain kinds of writing. It’s called Origins. That’s a great word. 

ORIGINS

Maybe part of the solution to the lack of diversity in publishing is making sure writers of color and other marginalized voices know where to submit? Maybe targeted calls for submissions are a really good thing?

AHMAD

The first essay I wrote, I didn’t know how to get it published. I met with a friend of mine who’s an editor and she was looking for stuff for her literary magazine and I told her I had this essay about my family’s house. And I went back and looked at it and asked myself, What’s she gonna like? So I put mangoes in the second line, because that’s what I thought she would like.

ORIGINS

It turns out that those mangoes are important to the story.

AHMAD

Yes, but I consciously wrote them in to make the essay more desirable to a non-Indian editor. I think there are certain ways in which writers, consciously and unconsciously, try to make their work more marketable. I’ve done some experiments. I wrote an entire story about an Indian guy and his American girlfriend on a visit to Barcelona, and they end up breaking up. After I finished it, I thought, this is not "literary" enough. What would make it more literary? References to a Western iconic literary figure, so I wove in stuff about Emily Dickinson—who I’m obsessed with anyway. And that story got published.

ORIGINS

What makes a piece literary to begin with?

AHMAD

A literary piece is, I think, not supposed to be about plot. The literary novel is supposed to spring from character and language. Of course, all good literary fiction has plot, but with genre fiction, the plot is an old one that has been re-told. For example, in a mystery, somebody is killed, and a detective has to solve the murder. This simple plot has been invented so many times, and in interesting and surprising ways. Whereas, with literary fiction, the plot is not supposed to be standard, it is supposed to be a more subtle construction. 

In my first book, which is a mystery/thriller, there’s a mysterious object, something is hidden in it, and you have to find out what’s it is. That’s a very well-worn device. The literary novel I’m working on now does not have these plot devices. My current story is turning into a journey, a harrowing one, that leads the characters through many stages, toward a goal. It’s still a plot, a quest in some archetypal way, but the plot is more subtle.

ORIGINS

That may be so, but could you say your use of language, your focus on political and social themes, and Ranjit’s interior conflict in the first two books make them literary thrillers?

AHMAD

There is really a tension between genre fiction (mysteries, thrillers, romance, sci-fi, etc) and literary fiction. If genre fiction is good, the reviewers say, “It transcends genre.” I think the label "literary thriller" is an attempt to cash in on two separate markets! Thrillers are an incredibly popular genre, and publishers want to tap into it. 

Genre fiction comes with constraints: you have to work within the conventions of the genre. For example, in my mystery novels, the inciting incidents happen far into the book, on page 60. This is because I like books with a slow build, that develop gradually. But it drove my editor crazy, because the genre convention is that you have to start off with a bang.

I do think literary fiction allows you to be more digressive, it offers a respite from the rigidities of genre writing.

ORIGINS

Do you want to talk about what you’re working on now?

AHMAD

Most Indian-American fiction is about immigrants in America, who are feeling alienated and trying to find their way through America, who are in interracial relationships and dealing with the kinds of confusions and miscommunications that come out of that. For me, that’s a vein that's almost tapped out, and it’s a constricting narrative.

In my current novel, The River’s Son, I have this Indian kid named Brando who’s been adopted in America and has grown up here, without knowing anything about Indian culture, language, and society. He gets deported and sent back to India, and has to find his place there. 

In a sense, I’ve tried to flip the immigrant narrative. Instead of setting it in America, this Indian-American kid has to find home in an India he knows nothing about.

ORIGINS

This goes back to the theme of rupture.

AHMAD

Yes. Ruptures are always productive terrain, whenever you mix things up. It is opening up all sorts of fictional avenues for me. On his journey in India, Brando ends up in Benares, the holy city set on the banks of the river Ganges. Hindus believe that if you die in Benares, you are liberated from the endless cycle of birth and death. It’s a liminal city, a place of dying and also of intense life. So the city attracts all sorts of seekers: Indians who come there to die, Westerners searching for spirituality or the thrill of death, Indians who come to bathe in the holy river. People there are all pilgrims in different ways. So my poor 19 year-old Indian-American kid is dropped right in the middle of this, and has to make his way through it. Stripped off his American identity, he has to find out who he is. 

ORIGINS

Ah, more themes and questions about origins.

AHMAD

Yes, the usual obsessions…


Read more about A.X. Ahmad on his website here.

 

 

Posted on October 14, 2015 .