Avocado Shake with Zafar Anjum

Zafar Anjum

Interview by Femke Tewari

Writer and journalist Zafar Anjum (www.zafaranjum.com) has two published books under his belt and is working on his third. He has been anthologised before and his fiction and journalism have appeared internationally in periodicals and on websites. Zafar is the founder-editor of Kitaab.org, a website dedicated to Asian writing in English. I probably don’t have to mention that we’re proud to have his story included in the Love and Lust anthology.

FT    Can you tell us a little about your background?

ZA            I am a dreamer. From the moment I was awakened, I wanted to become a writer and a filmmaker. Today, I’m a journalist by profession. I was born and educated in India. I worked in the Indian television and publishing industry for a few years before I came to Singapore nearly six years ago. I am currently working with an Australian media company here. I live with my wife and daughter in a HDB flat, soaking in Singapore, hooked to this beautiful island’s libraries and bookstores.

FT            When/how did you start to write?

ZA            My first writings were not literary, they were political, basically essays. I don’t remember ever writing a short story when I was in school. In those days, I was enthralled by films and my mind was mainly occupied with Bollywood characters. In college, I began to read English fiction. I got introduced to great writers like Hardy and Dickens and on the pages of their novels, I felt I had found my world. I felt like an Englishman roaming the streets of Uttar Pradesh. Secretly, I yearned to be in England, to be in the geography and weather described by the English novelists, away from the heat and dust of India. The experience was so surreal, it filled me with the desire to put pen to paper, to create my own world in the fashion of the writers that I was sharing my mental life with. I started a novel and then abandoned it.

After college, drunk with inexperience in my early twenties, I published my first novel, Of Seminal Fluids—a roman a clef chiefly targeted at my family and friends. Some thought it was a medical treatise. Others thought it was a ‘below the belt’ sort of creative fiction. But the novel was more about the angst of bondage and about a young man’s unfulfilled ambitions than anything else. As an effort, it was more of a prank than a serious publication and insouciant that I was, I didn’t give a damn about who thought what about the book (even though secretly I wished everyone liked it). The idea behind the novel was to primarily convince myself that I could actually write a novel—the ambition did not go beyond that. I am glad the novel found a larger audience and even a few favourable reviews. One friend complimented me that I had left Khushwant Singh—then my idol—behind in terms of writing lurid minutiae of sex in my novel. Another friend, a librarian in a management institute, shared with me that my novel was one of the most sought after books in the library. I was happy with the reports but was also alarmed by this kind of popularity.

At one level, I had achieved my dream—the dream to have written a novel, any novel. But actually it was the start of my writing journey. I had just scratched the surface. At that time, I didn’t know how to write short stories. I thought I could never write one, that I was incapable of writing one, that I was creatively sterile when it came to writing short fiction. But then, magically, I wrote a short story one day. Having discovered my fecundity, I was delirious with joy. And then I wrote the next story and the next and it never stopped.

FT            Where do you find inspiration?

ZA            For content, I am inspired by what I see around myself—the world I live in. As a writer, my creative tentacles are always up. I spend my time watching people. I keep guessing what kind of stimulus lurks behind every move that a person makes and what makes a person behave in a certain way. I absorb details of my surroundings, record the pleasures and hurts of my experiences. But for form, I am invariably inspired by other writers. Sometimes, I read something and it triggers something somewhere in my brain and I sit down and write a story. In that context, honestly, I am just an inspired reader.

FT            Who are your favorite writers?

ZA            Too many to list them here. But let me try. Among novelists, Rasool Hamzatov, J.M. Coetzee, V.S. Naipaul, Hanif Kureishi, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Jorge Luis Borges. Among short story writers, Chekov, Raymond Carver, John Cheever, and Manto.

FT            What is your favorite book?

ZA            It keeps changing, depending on my mood and the circumstances I find myself in. In my university days, it was Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage. Then for a long time, it was Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia and Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K. and Disgrace have also been my favourite books. My current favourites are Naipaul’s Guerrillas and Patrick French’s authorised biography of Naipaul, The World Is What It Is. The latter is my bedside reading.

FT            Can you give us a little teaser about your story in the anthology?

ZA            My story in the anthology, A Fraction of A Whore, deals with the psychological and emotional state of a failed Indian foreign worker (“foreign talent”) in Singapore. A “foreign talent” is usually seen as a success story in his home country as well as abroad. In the media, we often read or hear about such success stories. But what if a “foreign talent” fails? What happens to him, how he deals with the failure, and what redeems him as an individual—that’s what I try to explore in this story.