"The world inside our heads is formed through stories"

lsquoEver seen a bulletsmashed windscreenrsquo is a recurrent question the narrator asks even before one begins to read Bilal Tanweerrsquos The Scatter Here is Too Great Much like this imagery Tanweer who has been published as one of Granta magazinersquos New Voices brings together a web of stories that come around as a novel Highlighting urban issues of a city its relation to violence and the role stories play in life mdash The Scatter Here is Too Great is much like Tanweer hardhitting candid and everydaylike Though it is not everyday you expect an author to use the lsquofrsquo word when it comes to discussing how American or British media deplorably paints South Asians as regressive keeping the instance of the film The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel in mind In the first story Blackboards the child and his father imagine camel rides by the sea PicAFP The write imagery ldquoI donrsquot think myself as a Pakistani novelistrdquo announces the 30yearold who studied Masters in Fine Arts at the Columbia University Yet Tanweer is acutely like the voice in his stories mdash a cartoonist a journalist a narrator with the edginess of a character on societal periphery The novel as Tanweer asserts his writing is embraces a multitude of characters from the pathetic Comrade Sukhansaz the boy who draws his vivid imagination on a blackboard Noor Begum a senile old woman who repeatedly asks to be sent to Mecca for Hajj at the airport and a teenaged girl who makes out with a boy who as later revealed thuggishly recovers loaned vehicles Bilal Tanweerrsquos debut novel The Scatter Here Is Too Great is as exciting as the writer himself who disdains being put down as just a lsquoPakistani writerrsquo It took him five years to complete Pic Courtesy Tom Langdon ldquoThe world inside our heads is formed through stories They form our attitudes towards religion the idea of nationalism communities mdash all are made up of and through storiesrdquo shares the writes who believes that stories are ldquoa very serious enterprise It is the legitimate way of creating knowledge about the worldrdquo Through this Tanweer the professor who teaches fiction writing at Lahore University of Management Sciences LUMS emerges ldquoFor stories the stakes are so high in South Asia they mean so much to us Our realities are so chaotic we look at stories for it to make senserdquo asserts the writer who was encouraged by Kamila Shamsie his first teacher of writing The Scatter Here Is Too Great Bilal Tanweer Random House India Rs 350 Available in leading bookstores An author39s experience ldquoIn the first story with Comrade Sukhansaaz lsquotum logon ki haddiyan tod dungarsquo was something that did happen to me Though it wasnrsquot a comrade but there were boys at the back making fun of his poetryrdquo shares the Fullbright fellow In lsquoLying Lowrsquo the old woman was someone who I really wanted to write about as I got to know about how old people kept on standing at the boarding gates asking the security to let them go to Mecca Medina or US or Canada as their children have moved aboardrdquo The fact that these astray figures were put on a bus which drops them on some road is also a form of violence Tanweer points out Is Karachi like Mumbai The Lahorebased writer assures that Karachi repeatedly considered a Pakistani equivalent to Mumbai is what he calls home Born and bred in Karachi Tanweer still engages with the city at least four months annually as opposed to being restricted to the university campus in Lahore The sea in the novel often surfaces as a site to be bullied by the police bond with onersquos father or make out with a girl on the sly The border between the nations ceases in moments like these Speaking of which we ask of his impression of Mumbai ldquoI transit through Delhi but itrsquos a shame I havenrsquot been to Bombay I love Ranjit Hoskotersquos work I met him recently in Goa Kiran Nagarkar Gyan Prakash mdash all of them as I myself think about cities and the influence they have on individualsrdquo Authorspeak gtgt Is it autobiographical Although I have not faced any actual violence but the story is of myself and of friends Stories are coping strategies with violence I am intrigued by how violence is held The bigger forms of violence gain attention yet the smaller go unnoticed gtgtu00a0Who is my narrator I am thinking of Junot Diaz and Aleksandar Hemon The narrator embodies a certain way of looking at the world The omniscient narrator doesnrsquot work for me Maybe it is the time we live in mdash the sensibilities we haveu00a0