Kashmiri novelist and former journalist Mirza Waheed did not attend the Jaipur Literature Festival in January, even though his third book, Tell Her Everything, came out this year. "I do not go to many festivals. I stay home with my two kids," says the London-based Waheed, during a trip to Delhi. Wearing a black shawl adorned with intricate brown flowers, almost like a neckerchief, and sounding a bit hoarse, possibly due to low-grade fever, Waheed says his son is nine years old and his daughter, four. He would much rather spend his time looking after them than embark on an ambitious book tour. "I am not going to get a second chance. My daughter is not going to be four again. I am old enough to realise that is the most important thing. The choice is very clear," says the 45-year-old author and father.
The thought of sending his children off to a boarding school in the future does not even cross his mind, unlike the central character of Dr K in his new novel. Tell Her Everything is about a most intensely felt father-daughter relationship written in the format of a rehearsed conversation where a self-made, successful father awaits the return of his daughter in London so he can recount and explain all his moral-ethical conundrums from a time he made questionable choices in his medical practice in an unnamed city. "In this story, Dr K loves his daughter dearly, so much that he denies himself his daughter's love," says Waheed.
Dr K is a perfectly ordinary and hardworking doctor who was born and raised in a lower-middle class family in small-town India. He wants to rise above his station and do well for himself. He goes off to England in the 1980s for better prospects but is unable to fit in. But he is resilient and ambitious and before long lands in an undisclosed city and starts to find his feet in a hospital there. Although his substantive job is normal and everyday in the hospital's emergency department, it's what he did occasionally on the side in the same institution—strictly from a professional point of view—that haunts him. "I've always carried it with me. It's here, there, everywhere... under my very skin. Every day that I live carries images, moments and words from that time," Dr K says early in the book and he wants to tell Sara, his daughter, everything, including why he sent her off to a boarding school far away in the US, when she was just seven, right after her mother's death.
Waheed's previous two books were both set in Kashmir. His debut, The Collaborator, shortlisted for The Guardian First Book Award and the Shakti Bhat Prize, and longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize, unravelled in a village called Nowgam near the Indian side of the Line of Control. Perhaps his most political novel, the book opens when Kashmiri militancy was at its peak and deals with the precarious journey of its 19-year-old protagonist. His second, The Book of Gold Leaves (2014), was a sumptuous love story set in a war-ravaged Kashmir.
The political undertones in Tell Her Everything are far more elusive and the setting and landscape are more transcontinental in nature. "I can't put my finger precisely on the moment or time when the idea of this novel took root. I had conversations with friends about how big hospitals work, the kind of things doctors sometimes end up doing in their line of work, when an ordinary man comes in contact with this kind of system, but that's about it," says Waheed. "Dr K is completely invented. I did not want to write an examination of the justice systems. I was more interested in the story of a man such as this. How would he behave with his little daughter, talk to his wife, conduct himself amongst friends and colleagues, feed his little baby daughter..."
Waheed, a Srinagar native, worked with the BBC for 10 years before he quit in 2011 to write his second book. Mohammed Hanif neatly fits into his category of "my favourite journalist novelist writing stories about the homeland". While both journalism and fiction-writing have served him well, "I am most happy, content and tormented when I am writing fiction," concedes Waheed. While writing Tell Her Everything, Waheed most enjoyed the process of being able to stay the man's head. "There is a bit of method acting involved," he adds. Not hard to imagine, considering his unswerving commitment to his children.
Tell Her Everything
By Mirza Waheed
Context (Westland Books)
Price Rs599, 234 pages