Typhoon, by Qaisra Shahraz

Last night, I was at Chorlton Library to interview writer Qaisra Shahraz as part of Chorlton Book Festival. It was the first time we’d met in person, although we were fellow jurors a few years ago on the First Novel Award for the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain, and Qaisra has involved me in online events for the Muslim Arts and Culture Festival (Macfest). She told me in advance she would read from her second novel, Typhoon (2003), so in preparation I read that, as well as some of her short stories and a chunk of her first novel, The Holy Woman (2001), and dug through some old interviews and reviews.

Typhoon opens on a Tuesday in May 2002 in the village of Chiragpur, Pakistan, where the local qazi or judge is dying, but causes a stir by asking to see two particular women before he dies. We then jump back 20 years to understand why. In May 1982, a young woman called Gulshan is woken in the night by her husband is sneaking out of bed. Without him knowing, Gulshan follows him outside and sees him passionately embrace another woman — one she recognises as a recent arrival to the village from the city, and whose modern ways have already aroused some comment. Gulshan returns home, tells her mother Hajra what she’s seen, and Hajra goes out to see for herself. 

Soon, the local gossips have got wind of what’s going on, and it’s like a typhoon has whipped up. Hajra demands than the local qazi pass judgment… But what Gulshan and Hajra witnessed going on isn’t quite what they think…

Typhoon is a fast-moving, engaging story with lots of tension and emotion, and some great twists along the way. It involves a huge cast of different characters, and several plots going on at once. For example, there’s also the story of a rich young widow who refuses to remarry, and the strain on the qazi’s granddaughter of leaving her husband to come tend to the dying man. This means we often witness particular events from one character’s perspective, then have what we think happened challenged or shifted by someone else.

Some pivotal scenes are told very visually. For example, one key moment towards the end of the story — which I won’t spoil, but involves a woman at a well — is conveyed by describing the surface of the water being disturbed, and I had to read it again to ensure I’d understood what was happening. It’s a powerful moment, and a key one to the novel, but it’s rendered in a kind of cinematic prose.

Qaisra told me last night that this kind of thing was, in part, informed by her time working on the TV drama Dil Her to Hai (The Heart It Is), broadcast in Pakistan in 2003. Based in Manchester, she wrote the scripts in English and they were translated into Urdu by the production team, who also made some amendments and even added whole scenes to better showcase the leading actors. In Typhoon, she adopted some of the visual storytelling she’d developed in the series, but exerted more control over characters and story.

I think we can also detect some of the tensions experienced in working in TV in a particular line from the novel:

“The TV people forgot that there were people living out in the countryside whose problems and lifestyle needed to be reflected” (p. 69).

Qaisra kindly gave me a couple more of her books last night, so I’ll get to those in due course…