For most expectant mothers, pregnancy is a time to pause, make plans and look to the future. For the writer Huma Qureshi, however, conceiving her first child set her off on an unexpected emotional journey that ended with not only a beautiful baby boy, but also a debut collection of short stories out today.
The pregnancy also lent an urgency to her writing.
“I spent a lot of time thinking about what I would pass on to my son,” says Qureshi, who grew up in England to Pakistani parents and has written for The National.
“I don’t speak very good Urdu and I certainly felt I didn’t know as much as I should about my family history. How had I got to this point, what did my heritage mean? And I came to the conclusion that it’s not just the past that explains who you are, it’s the choices you make too. I’d like to think that comes across in the characters I wrote.”
It certainly does. In Spite of Oceans: Migrant Voices comprises 10 short stories populated with South Asian characters trying to make sense of Britain – be that a vivacious Indian mother whose sons are not interested in the "raunak" (the liveliness) of everyday life, or a teenage girl growing up kicking against the traditions of her parents.
Keen to avoid the clichés of the “culture-clash immigrant experience novel”, as Qureshi calls it, she put her journalism career to good use and actually began by interviewing normal people she came across.
“You know at the start of a film where it says ‘Based on a true story’?” she says with a smile. “It was like that. I kept encountering people whose lives I found fascinating and I couldn’t stop thinking about their backstories, how they came to be in the UK and how that had a knock-on effect on my generation born and brought up here.
“Such rich, emotional and personal stories – and it really appealed to be able to have, for a short period of time, a little window into the lives of quiet people. Everyone has a story to tell, I genuinely believe that.”
And the story in which that comes together most successfully is Learning to Drive, in which a timid Afra leaves Pakistan for late-1970s England to be with the husband she barely knows. It would be easy to cast this as another treatise on the morals of arranged marriage but it is, in fact, a story of resilience, strength and hope. Somehow, in just 17 pages, it captures the epic sweep of a life.
"It's the story that's had people in tears," says Qureshi. "But I'm glad that it's moved them, because the person I spoke to for Learning to Drive really did have that quiet determination to get through life. It's one of my favourites, but then, each one of these stories became precious to me because I really wanted to feel and capture what these people felt in real life."
Other stories explore the fizz of young love and the heartache of a father caring for his sick son. And if there is, perhaps, an over-reliance on the device of young women navigating their way through marriage – arranged or not – Qureshi is determined that the ideas should go deeper than that.
"Yes, the stories are mostly about the experiences of women and, of course, marriages and weddings are a big part of that in South Asian communities," she says. "But in The Curfew, the narrative is not just that Sara is Pakistani and can't be with a white boy called James. It's all the other things in her head – who she wants to be as she grows up, where her escapism lies, who she was with this other person. That's not exclusive to any one culture.
“What I’m interested in is the way these characters chose to respond to the challenges they faced, and how those decisions defined them, rather than their heritage.”
And that interest may now percolate into a debut, full-length novel. The circumstances around which Qureshi wrote In Spite of Oceans might have been unusual, but that period of introspection has spurred her on.
“I do want to write a novel,” she says. “I don’t know that I’ve proved to myself that I can write – that’s for others to judge anyway – but I do now feel like I can try to write something beautiful.”
• In Spite of Oceans: Migrant Voices (The History Press) is out today. www.humaqureshi.co.uk
artslife@thenational.ae
