This is a work of fiction. All the characters in it, human and otherwise, are imaginary, excepting only certain of the fairy folk, whom it might be unwise to offend by casting doubts on their existence. Or lack thereof.

Neil Gaiman (American Gods)  

The life cycle of a book is strange. A book is not born until the writer puts down the final full stop (or finishes off with the ultimate authorial flourish: The End). A book can be ready for the world to see in a few short weeks, or it can spend a lifetime in that incubator known as the writer’s desk. A book’s longevity depends on others: its pages may survive, but for the book itself to truly live on, it needs readers. The magic of the written word fades if there are no wide-eyed believers willing to sacrifice time and effort to read it.

The same holds true for the superhuman beings in Gaiman’s award-winning fantasy novel and the DWL Readers’ Club’s first read, American Gods. The story’s protagonist, ‘Shadow’, is a recently released convict who finds that the life waiting for him outside the prison walls is very different from what he had envisioned. An encounter with a mysterious stranger (named ‘Mr. Wednesday’) leads Shadow on a journey across the United States, which reveals some pretty unsettling truths about him and about the characters he meets along the way. The vulnerable nature of divinity is a central theme in the book. No matter how great their powers, deities can only live as long as there are mortals who believe in them.

It took quite a superhuman effort for us mortals to finish this rather large book (approximately 600 pages) in time (approximately two weeks) for the Readers’ Club’s first meet. The two-hour discussion on a balmy summer evening at the Roadside Café touched upon gods (American or otherwise), Gaiman’s influences, his new book (The Ocean at the End of the Lane), movie adaptations, Tolkien, Dean Koontz and world peace. Emotions were running high when we sat at the table and our voices rose several decibels within a very short time. Afia had the good sense to ask our neighbour, H.M. Naqvi (who seemed to be busy at work on his next novel, or so we would like to think), if the noise level was bothering him. Apparently he was leaving, and so we were free to scream our disgust or delight over the book as we pleased.

The verdict: American Gods had its brilliant moments but overall, it did not live up to the hype. Rahedeen found Gaiman’s ideas to be thought provoking and imaginative, and she enjoyed the witty dialogues, but she did not feel wholly engaged or immersed in the story. She thought that the author added too many elements to follow through on/ to remain consistent and so, in her opinion, the scenes fell flat. Omer felt this could have occurred for practical reasons. He said he could imagine Gaiman getting carried away with the elaborate story universe that he had created but eventually being restricted by editorial pressure or time constraints. He likened the author to J.R.R. Tolkien and Anne Rice, both of whom were known for having created massive worlds with extremely in-depth characters and settings, which could never have been done justice to within the confines of print. And because Gaiman is a natural-born short-story writer, Omer’s theory was that he may further have structured the book as three or four novellas woven together by Shadow’s plot, thus leading to multiple, seemingly standalone sub-plots.

Afia found the book engaging and the narrative well-paced, with a good buildup of tension towards one climactic event. But we all agreed that the pace fizzled out when the climax came around.

Death, redemption, resurrection, sacrifice, guilt, love, loyalty and, of course, faith were themes that featured prominently in the novel. The general concept was that  gods of the traditional faiths were fading away in America because there was a dearth of believers to perform the rituals required to keep them alive. Afia felt that this expanded her view of the god/believer relationship and was quite empowering from the individual believer’s point of view.

As the name indicates, American Gods was overflowing with gods of all shapes and sizes from a variety of cultures and countries. There were Native American gods, Egyptian gods and European gods whose origins were from mythology, folklore or old wives’ tales. A lot of these were unfamiliar to us and as Omer pointed out, he spent some time Googling the various gods and goddesses in the book just to understand the story better. (I did too and ended up jumping from one link to another because the origins of some of the gods made for quite an interesting read.)

The book had a very, to quote Afia, “American feel to it, given that Gaiman is not a US national”. The author seemed quite taken by what he saw during his travels around the US. The focus on the road, the cars, the motels, songs on the radio – all this was quintessentially American. But, ironically, the gods were mostly non-American. And America, as the book says, “was a good place for men, but a bad place for gods”.

                                                                                    ***

The next meeting of the DWL Readers’ Club will be held on Tuesday, 16^th July at 6.30 pm at the Roadside Café. For this session, we have agreed to read something by modern American fiction’s late blue-eyed boy, David Foster Wallace. Readers can pick up anything penned by DFW, and when we re-converge on the 16^th, we will have a broad discussion on the author and his writing style. For readers who are not located in Karachi, we will be live tweeting the discussion and we encourage you to participate via Twitter.

Neil Gaiman Photograph: Google Images

Photograph 2: Farheen Zehra 

Guest post by Qurratulain Zaman

“Pakistan ek aisi jagah hai jahaan gale katne wale usture bante haiN,” an inmate in the hospital tells Bashan Singh when he asks, “What is Pakistan?”

Toba Tek Singh is one of the most celebrated works of Saadat Hasan Manto. Set in post-partition Lahore’s Central Mental Hospital, it is the story of an asylum inmate called Bashan Singh, whom everyone calls ‘Toba Tek Singh’ after the town he hails from.

Photo credit: Abeer Shaukat

Manto’s story was recently adapted for the London stage in a production called Tales of 1947 – a play in Urdu, Punjabi and English performed by students of the School of Oriental Arts and Sciences (SOAS). Directed by Marta Schmidt, a Polish student in her final year of BA Politics and South Asia, the production combined music, dance and shadow play. The play premiered in March this year and due to its tremendous success it was performed again recently to a jam-packed audience.

The narrative begins a few days after the partition of the subcontinent. Indian and Pakistani authorities have decided to divide among themselves, like many other things, the lunatics living in the Lahore asylum on the basis of their religion.

Photo credit: Elif Sipahioglu

Toba Tek Singh and his fellow inmates are not happy with the decision. Wanting to stay together in Lahore, they cry and fight with each other and call their Gods names for dividing them. A Sikh lunatic asks another Sikh, “Sardarji, why are we being deported to India? We don’t even know their language.”

Bashan Singh of Toba Tek Singh escapes the asylum with a sense of confusion and displacement. He asks everyone he meets, “Where is Toba Tek Singh? In Pakistan or in India?” He encounters different people on his way and witnesses the turmoil faced by them during the partition. One of these people is Bahadur Singh, who shares his memory of honour killings of women from his village. The narrative here is very touching. Bahadur recounts how the women of his village aged between 10 and 40 were killed by their own brothers or fathers to save their honour. The families feared that the Muslims would rape them or force them to convert.

Photo credit: Elif Sipahioglu

This particular scene as enacted on stage was powerful and very emotional. As background music, Schmidt decided to use the song ‘Saada Chirya Da Chamba’, a famous Punjabi folk song popularized by the late Surinder Kaur and Prakash Kaur, which is traditionally sung during the formal departure of a bride from her parents’ home. In the play it was employed to depict the departure of the women of Punjab to another world. The version sung for stage in Raag Churaksi by twin sisters Hernoor and Sukhman Grewal was very moving and highlighted the wider displacement and suffering of women during the partition of 1947.

Similarly, ‘Aj Akhan Waris Shah Nu’ a poem written by Amrita Pritam (1919-2005) was recreated by Amrit Kaur Lohia for a rape scene in the play. Amrit Kaur, the singer and music director of the play, is definitely a gifted young musician. Her pure, deep voice seemed to take the listener back in time.

Photo credit: Abeer Shaukat

Further into the play, Bashan meets Javed who has lost his lover Husna during the partition. Javed longs for her and cries day and night. Marta Schmidt re-enacted this scene on stage with a breathtaking semi-classical dance on ‘Husna’, a song by Piyush Mishra sung in Coke Studio India.

All the actors in the play were amateurs but their performance was exceptional. It was obvious that the subject really touched them. Like the characters of the story, they too were of different backgrounds: Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs. Zain Haider, a British-Pakistani who played a Hindu, expressed the troupe’s wish to travel with the play to India and Pakistan. “We would like to go to the colleges and schools in Pakistan with Tales of 1947,” he said.

At a time when Manto’s work is being rediscovered in Pakistan, this innovative interpretation by an excellent British student troupe could definitely serve as an inspiration.

Q. Zaman is a Pakistani journalist. She divides her time between Bonn and London. She tweets @natrani.

by Farheen Zehra

Reading is a solitary activity, whether you’re doing it on a crowded beach, in an airplane, on a train, in a queue or curled up on your sofa at home. It’s only once you’ve pored over the book that you get the itch to share your excitement, disappointment or frustrations about the story. And for book aficionados, there is a certain high in having an intelligent conversation about a piece of literature.

Enter the DWL Readers’ Club. This is no ordinary book club – consider it a sort of reading movement. We’re coming across too many people who want to be great writers and barely any who want to be better readers. We’ve noticed that more and more people (including us) are falling back on the “I don’t have time to read” excuse. We’re fed up of hearing hours of detailed analysis of TV shows but scattered conversation on books. Don’t believe us? Next time you go to a regular social gathering, ask someone what they are reading these days, then ask them what they’re watching these days.

Our manifesto is simple – read more, read widely, read better, and learn from it. We want to become more critical readers and we want to use this to become better writers. If you’re an aspiring writer, then this will be especially useful for you because many of us practice the craft too. Many new writers search high and low for creative writing courses, not realizing that books are one of the best sources of both inspiration and technique. If you’re in Karachi, come over to the Readers’ Club meet and dissect plots, characters, writing styles, voice, pace, themes and more.

The Readers’ Club officially started as an offline DWL activity on 6^th June 2013. A few of us met at The Second Floor (T2F) and talked about Nabokov, sci-fi novels and movie adaptations over tea and brownies. After throwing a few names around the table we finally decided to read ‘American Gods’, an award-winning novel by Neil Gaiman. Most of us had not read Gaiman before, so we welcomed this chance to push ourselves out of our reading comfort zones.

Besides making reading ‘fashionable’ again, we are using this platform to raise funds for Desi Writers Lounge. We will charge a small fee of Rs.200 per session which will go towards DWL’s various online and offline activities.

Our next meet is on 21^st June, at the Roadside Café behind Boat Basin, at 7:00 pm. Come over and join us over a cup of tea for an hour or two of literary catharsis.

Guest post by Hareem Atif Khan

‘Out beyond ideas

Of wrongdoing and right doing,

There is a field.

I’ll meet you there.’

‘And the Mountains Echoed’ begins with a Rumi quote. Khaled Hosseini keeps this promise and does indeed usher the reader into a field where there is no right and no wrong, where ‘cruelty and benevolence are but shades of the same color.’ Many readers want to know: “How is this third novel different from his previous two?” Well, one big difference is that unlike the ‘Kite Runner’ and ‘A Thousand Splendid Suns’ there is no untarnished hero, no irredeemable villain. There is only life, and circumstance, and the reader is set up to ponder over rather than judge each character.

Part of Hosseini’s brilliance lies in the firmness with which he pulls together the strings of the Mashreq and Maghreb until, in flat defiance of Kipling’s prophecy, that twain finally meets. He uses English as the deft medium but the novel defies the classical western tradition of the ‘story arc’. That is, there is no simple “exposition, conflict and resolution”. Instead, from his very first chapter, Hosseini proceeds in the timbre of the ancient storytellers of the east, spinning many different tales, sometimes leaving the listener at the clutching throes of one before tumbling headlong into a totally different other. Of course the tales are connected. A character from one tale sometimes appears in another (as in the Ramayana or the Arabian Nights). And they all emerge from a common womb.

That womb is Afghanistan. Protagonists may spill in from Greece or spill out into France and America, but a merciless Kandahari wind blows through their lives wherever they are. Though it is about Afghanistan, this is not a book about war. In the voice of one of his characters, Hosseini explains: “I need not rehash for you the those dark days. I tire at the mere thought of writing it, and, besides, the suffering of this country has already been sufficiently chronicled…” The war may thunder on in the background but the real stories are of separation and pain, of sibling rivalry and forbidden love, of duty, identity and complicated parent-child relationships that span a lifetime.

The reader will meet leg-revealing, cigarette-smoking Nila, who rebelliously scratches down erotic poems with her pen and also Parwana, who bears none of the lightness that her name implies. The reader will meet humanitarians who rush in to heal Afghans from the war and watch how they manage, in the process, to heal themselves. Above all, the reader will question, whether a little girl whisked off to Paris or a little boy pampered in an ivory tower were better off than children who faced the poverty and war. As we can expect from life, and from the great literature that mimics it, there is never an easy answer.

Yes, it is possible to find flaws in ‘And the Mountains Echoed’ starting with the clumsiness of the book-title itself. Readers who are used to plots that provide instant gratification or satisfying resolutions will have a bone to pick with Husseini’s refusal to create neat little endings to the wounds he gashes open. The multiple sub-plots can feel distracting, especially to readers who prefer to finish their novels in one sitting. And of-course readers who dislike crying will be downright mortified. By the time she reached the last sentence, this reviewer had raw eyes.

How many stars for this book? As many as shine down on the deserts of Afghanistan.

(Hareem Atif Khan is a teacher and a curriculum expert who lives in Islamabad. She blogs at moonshine-scribbler.blogspot.com/. Follow her at @overtaketrucks.)

Written by Mariam Saleem Farooqi

The Islamabad Literature Festival sort of snuck up on the good people of the capital. After a brief announcement in a few newspapers, ILF withered away with no website or social media presence to speak of, leading to the suspicion it had been abandoned. And then, lo and behold, a week before the event the KLF website unveiled a little Islamabad tab showing a program of events, and so ILF came shuddering back to life.

One immediate bone of contention with the festival was the timing. Why the middle of the week and not a weekend? As expected, Day One of the ILF saw many half-empty halls and a general absence of the throng one expects at festivals of any sort because people could not get out of school/work on a busy Tuesday afternoon.

Walking inside the venue, I couldn’t help envying Lahore. They got their litfest in Al-Hamra, while we have to settle for a small hotel best known as the torture cell where CIE examinations and aptitude tests are suffered through. Nonetheless, the presence of books everywhere lifted the mood considerably. Festival spearhead Oxford University Press had a massive stall up and running, as did Liberty Books, Sang-e-Meel Publications and a number of other national and local publishers.

At 2:50 p.m. I slipped inside auditorium hall to find that the talk scheduled for 2:45 p.m. was actually already underway. Colour me surprised. Since when did we start doing things on time?! With that decidedly positive turn of events, I settled in to listen to Aasim Sajjad, Hamida Khuhro, Ashraf Jehangir Qazi and Humayun Gauhar battle it out on the sensitive issue of ‘Dynastic Politics in Pakistan’.

Colour me further surprised when the ramblings of audience members with an inability to understand the term ‘keep it brief’, were smoothly cut short and the session concluded on time, leaving plenty of time for a quick browse through the book stalls before heading to the next talk. ‘YouTube: Supporting the Electronic Media’ boasted a diverse panel – Taimur Rahman (academic, writer and musician), Raza Rumi (journalist and political analyst), Osman Khalid Butt (writer, director, blogger, actor and entertainer) and Ali Aftab Saeed (musician and journalist). They discussed the impact the YouTube ban has had on their respective fields, as well as the possible implications of the alleged order by the government for ‘selective unblocking’. Overzealous moderating was the only weak link in an otherwise interesting discussion.

There was much chatter about Shehzad Roy’s session but unfortunately he was a no-show. Other sessions generated a lot of interest too, with Aamer Hussein’s talk being the most popular. Topics such as child labour, English novels in the new millennium and Sufi classical poetry were addressed by a host of prominent panelists.

So Day One had been pleasant but not earth shattering. It definitely failed to make the kind of impact previously made by KLF and LLF, not even being able to trend on Twitter. Of course, that might have had something to do with the fact that those inclined to tweet about it could not seem to agree on whether #IsbLF or #ILF was the way to go. #ConfusionsAbound

Day Two began with low expectations and a mad rush to make it to the morning Kamila Shamsie session on time, because whoah, it had ALSO started on time. More points for ILF right there. Shamsie was in conversation with Shehryar Fazli. “A novel is an intimate thing,” said Shamsie when asked about how much current events influence an author’s choice of topics. “It has the pressures of time, so it doesn’t make sense to worry too much about expectations. Stick to a topic you are ok with being totally obsessed with for years, one you can let your imagination be consumed by,” she said. Afterwards, the lovely lady gamely allowed a hoard of undisciplined fans to mob her as she signed book after book.

A quick coin toss decided the next session would be the ‘Afghanistan & Pakistan: Conflict and Extremism’ panel discussion by Riaz Khokar, Zahid Hussain, Mohammad Amir Rana and Ashraf Jehangir Qazi. Learned and astute though these gentlemen undoubtedly are, something in the air right then was making it impossible to captivate much of their audience. Many in the back were sporting a dull, glazed look in their eyes – which made it all the more unpleasant when jerked out of their stupor as your friendly neighborhood earthquake came calling. Unperturbed, the panel powered through the brief power outage and odd panicked scream, and continued waxing eloquent on the fragile state of Pak-Afghan relations. The session on ‘Afsanay ki Nayee Awazain’ by Nilofar Iqbal, Asim Butt and Mubashir Zaidi happening simultaneously seemed to be more engaging as the audience could be heard laughing from even behind closed doors, and were reluctant to let it end.

Mohammad Hanif, journalist and author of ‘A Case of Exploding Mangoes’ and ‘Our Lady of Alice Bhatti’, in conversation with the enigmatic Naveed Shahzad was the highlight of the morning. Hanif sat slumped in his chair and, in his relaxed, sardonic manner, let Naveed Shahzad question and poke fun at him. “A writer’s responsibility is to the page. Mocking a dictator is not a social responsibility, it’s fun. Journalists are the ones who actually have this responsibility,” he said. His reading of excerpts from his books was powerful and injected new depth into his writing. Hanif also talked about his recent collection of stories of missing people from Balochistan. “It’s the State that’s responsible. They know they can’t get away with that kind of stuff in other provinces. But when it comes to Balochistan, nobody cares for too long. So they can get away with it.” He said he hoped the publication might shame fellow journalists into taking some action.

The afternoon sessions on Day Two were all packed to capacity. Shehzad Roy was once again absent – caught up in projects in Dubai apparently – much to everyone’s disappointment. Nevertheless, the session on ‘Common System of Education’ proved quite interesting. Speaking on the panel was Baela Jamil, Hamida Khuhro, Nargis Sultana, and A.H. Nayyar, with Ameena Saiyid as the moderator. Each speaker spoke crisply about the complications of establishing a viable common system of education in Pakistan, and managed to keep the audience engaged despite being seated in an outdoor venue at midday in hot April weather.

Strolling from one session to the next was becoming increasingly cumbersome as the number of people kept increasing. Now would have been time for festival organizers to take heed and later disasters could have been avoided. More on that later. Any hopes of snagging a good seat for Zia Mohyeddin’s reading fizzled away as roughly one-third of Islamabad’s total population was already crammed into the medium sized hall. All ages, shapes and sizes of people possible were present. Sitting crammed into six inches of floor space, with an elbow in my side and a little kid poking into my back, all became worth it the minute Zia Mohyeddin climbed up on stage. Dressed in a gray suit that was just the right amount of baggy, and a maroon tie, the dapper gentleman quite literally had the audience at hello. He read aloud from a selection of stories in English. It did not matter what the words were, or what they were trying to say. All that mattered was the way they leapt to life under the influence of Zia Mohyeddin’s gentle yet powerful voice. For just the quarter of an hour that he spoke, the world was truly a better place. Ending to thunderous applause, he patiently allowed fans, well-wishers and reporters to swarm around him.

After all the sessions of the day were over, a brief closing ceremony was to be followed by a showing of ‘The Dictator’s Wife’, a monologue written by Mohammad Hanif and performed by Nimra Bucha. Fifteen minutes before the scheduled time, the hall outside the auditorium was already teeming with people. Considering the intense punctuality demonstrated for two days, there was no reason to expect any different from the last event of the festival. Famous last words. Seven fifteen came and went, with no sign of life from within the closed doors. Suddenly one set of doors was thrown open and the crowd surged forward, only to be met with hysterical crew members who shooed them back out, claiming ‘not time yet!’ Disgruntled and miffed, the crowd was not amused. As the sweaty, stifling wait stretched on, even I stopped judging the folks pounding on doors to be let in and began to wonder if I should just join in. Finally, after over an hour, the doors were thrown open and a mass of humanity burst forth.

After several frenzied minutes with people here, people there, people every where – during which the harassed organizers tried to convince audience members it would be a good idea to watch  on screens outside the auditorium – the play finally began, with Nimra Bucha snaking her way through a throng of people sitting near the stage to get to her place onstage. But wait, it gets better. Many in the audience seemed to think that a one-woman play meant they should help her out with answers and suggestions to her dialogue. Worse were the folks in the back who kept shouting about not being able to hear her even as she tried to deliver her lines. In the midst of this cacophony, an elderly gentleman decided to stroll up onstage and plop himself down on the bed that served as part of the set. To give credit to Bucha, she continued unperturbed despite this series of interruptions, even managing to coax the loud, boorish gentleman to pipe down eventually. Hanif’s writing and Bucha’s performance made quite the dynamic combination, and had it not been for the unfortunate events leading up to it, the play would have been quite a thrill to watch.

All in all, the first ever Islamabad Literature Festival was a better experience than I had expected it to be. With OUP’s Children’s Literature Festival also scheduled to be held in the city at the end of the month, it seems that Islamabad is finally going to get a chance to play in the big leagues. About time, too. The city needs more than just political showdowns and long marches to keep it occupied. Well done, ILF. Come back bigger and better next year!

(The views expressed in this blogpost are the writer’s own. Desi Writers Lounge does not take responsibility for any opinions or factual inaccuracies in this post.)

Siyaah, an independent horror film produced by Imran Raza Kazmi and directed by Azfar Jafri, recently hit cinemas nationwide. Farheen Zehra got together for a quick Q&A with resident DWLer Osman Khalid Butt, who wrote the screenplay for the film.

FZ: So, a horror story screenplay. How did this happen?

OKB: I’d previously written several scripts [both short and long format] for theatre and had been adapting scripts for stage since my directorial debut Some Like it Hot back in 2007. I’d always wanted to write for film but our industry was ruled by the whims of a gandaasa and an electrocuted bosom, and my Punjabi was reserved to the odd off-color joke copied from desi dubbings of Hollywood movies [see: The Amazing Spiderman]. Recently, with the growth of the indie film industry, opportunities began arising, specifically with short films. In 2008, I started writing a series of shorts, beginning with a story called ‘Kalika’, which I’m hoping you’ll see on Facebook/Vimeo soon, Insha’Allah. However, I always found one reason or the other not to put my stuff ‘out there’, share it with other aspiring filmmakers/colleagues or just pick up a camera myself and shoot. I’m grateful Imran Kazmi [the producer of Siyaah] gave me a much-needed kick when he brought the concept of the film and scene breakdown in the winter of ’10.

Siyaah was conceived by Zahra Zaman Khan and actually went through three to four screenwriters before it came to me. I’ve had an unhealthy obsession with horror ever since Omar Ali Khan,  entrepreneur and director of Zibahkhana, lent my brother this B-movie called ‘Tourist Trap’ and the still-effective ‘Candyman’ back when it was still inappropriate for me to be watching horror. So when Imran asked me to expand on the concept of Siyaah and to rewrite its screenplay, I happily agreed, self-doubt for once gleefully thrown out the window. It wasn’t an easy process, mind you: bouts of creativity [or so we thought] were followed by weeks where I couldn’t write a single dialogue. I began writing the script beginning February, after getting done with prior commitments, and finished mid-July. Imran was with me every step of the way.

FZ: Which genre of horror appeals to you the most? Is it reflected in this script?

OKB: The tension before the reveal, if you will. Where the music – usually discordant violin – reaches a crescendo and then abruptly stops and you think, but not really, that the danger just might be over. The King of the genre [forgive the bad pun] spoke of terror and its types. Being a huge fan ever since I read ‘It‘, there were moments in the script where I tried to terrorize viewers with what I wrote: specifically with the fear and guilt carried by the principal character, Zara [played by Hareem Farooq], with those instances where Natasha gave that all-knowing smile and you knew she was plotting something terrifying – that edge-of-your-seat suspense. But there were also moments of horror, like in Natasha’s reveal: her brutality… her sheer evil. And of course, there were scenes that employed obvious gimmickry as well: the nods and references to several iconic horror films, pointed dialogue, the occasional slit throat and snakes and bogeymen.

FZ: What aspect of script writing did you find most challenging? What was the process like?

OKB: Procrastination. Had it not been for Imran practically dragging me out of bed, shoving a Red Bull down my throat as he opened up Microsoft Word for me, this script would never have seen the light of day. Also: hitting the proverbial writer’s Great Wall of China.

FZ: Unlike prose, is script writing a more collective effort? At what point did you share your draft with the director?

OKB: Yes, it is and in the case of Siyaah, perhaps even more so. In an industry that’s struggling to find its bearings, and particularly with an indie film, your screenplay does become a collaboration of many minds. For Siyaah, director Azfar Jafri had to improvise with a number of things I’d written. Certain dialogues and situations were changed, including the original ending (which I was aware of and participated in). Then there was the scene where the Pir opens the door to an alternate universe in his attempt to get away from Natasha. That was all Azfar. Improvisation is necessary because there are several constraints that accompany a filming process here: budget, schedules, timelines, technical support (and also the fact that your screenwriter has written a practically impossible-to-shoot scene where a body falls from the first floor and crash-lands into a windshield, with the principal character inside the car).

By the time I took on scriptwriting duties for Siyaah, there was an entire plot outline to follow. There were certain elements the producer wanted which I tried to give the old wine/new bottle makeover. Fortunately I was given free rein to construct the sequences, work on character development and present your usual horror-movie tropes in a contextualized, slick, different manner. While writing, I eventually embraced the fact that the movie was essentially a homage to the great horror films, before the gore and torture-porn masquerade started. That’s why you’ll see some subtle, some not-too-subtle pop-culture references thrown in there, including one involving pea soup [The Exorcist]. But mostly, though, it was me sitting in front of my computer, throwing ideas Imran’s way at 3 am whilst staring at a blinking cursor – and then working on constructing said scene when it felt right spoken out loud and envisioned.

For me, it was very important to have audiences connect with Zara’s character for that much-needed human element: to feel her disconnect and her silent suffering – and her unique relationship with her husband: easygoing on the surface, but quiet tensions simmering nonetheless. Hareem did a great job at peeling through Zara’s different layers and bringing them out. Zara is not just a ‘scream-queen’; she is a fleshed-out character. I’m glad the reviews have reflected that.

FZ: Is it safe to label you as a horror film writer or will you venture into other genres?

OKB: Oh, the latter, most definitely. Here at DWL, for example, my poetry and prose has been mostly about the macabre. Come to think of it, two of the four plays I directed under my banner were of the thriller/horror genre [The Good Doctor and Let Me In, the latter based on Stephen King’s novella ‘The Mist’] while the remaining two were musicals [Some Like It Hot and Superstar Avatar]. In the two feature films I’ve acted in, one had me regressing into a zombie and featured my own brand of projectile vomit [Zibahkhana, literally translated as Slaughterhouse]. So it’s safe to say that yes, I am most definitely interested in venturing out.

Osman’s Humsafar parody made him a household name

Comedy is a particular interest. One of the reasons I started video-blogging/performing comedy sketches on YouTube was to test the waters, so to speak; see what brand of humor worked best with viewers. From satire to dry wit to slapstick and the occasional cross-dressing, writing material for my v-logs has been an insane and yet illuminating process.

What I really want to write, and hopefully direct, is a kitschy Bollywood-esque dramedy. Horror might be considered a niche genre, but that’s not the only reason. I’ve said this so many times now it’s going to be written on my gravestone in all-caps, but I’ve grown up on a staple diet of Bollywood. I love the formula: the meet-cute, the music, the choreographed dance sequences, the complications arising smack before interval, the acoustic, stripped-down versions of the title songs for dramatic effect and the eventual happy ending. Feel-good cinema is where my head’s at these days. Actually that’s a lie. It’s been where my head’s at since I was eight.

Desi Writers Lounge is proud to announce its first monetary prize for writers.

The Dastaan Award, worth 50,000 Pakistani Rupees, will be given to one of the three winners of DWL’s annual short story competition. The title of the award pays homage to the South Asian tradition of the dastaan, which is synonymous with inspirational, world-class storytelling. The prize is open to writers from all over the world.

DWL will celebrate its seventh anniversary in 2013. Founded as a community to nurture writing talent from South Asia, it has painstakingly built up a fraternity of budding writers and created an online magazine to showcase new talent. The Dastaan Award is the first in an envisaged array of incentives for new writers that will be offered by DWL.

For more information on the Dastaan Award, please visit the award page on the Papercuts website.