An Abundance of Wild Roses (Canongate Books, 2024) is a story about a multitude of existences, human and animal, seen and unseen. The stark geography and weather of the region, mountainous and cold, exert their own forces. From the start there is a sense that we are entering a narrative that has been going on since those mountains were formed. The story starts with the discovery of a body of a man crushed under a fallen trunk. He is brought to Moosa Madad, the Numberdaar of Saudukh Das, a village in the region of Pakistan’s Black Mountains. We see him in his various temperaments toward this injured man of unknown identity, his wives, his daughter, and Lasnik, a boy without a father. Birds and a wolf-dog are participants in the lives of these people, all the while the spirits residing on the mountains narrate their own observations.
Feryal Ali-Gauhar is the writer of several novels. Her first novel, The Scent of Wet Earth in August, was a bestseller in India and her second novel, No Space for Further Burials, won the Patras Bokhari award. An Abundance of Wild Roses is her third book. Feryal was a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador for the Population Fund. She is also an actor, film-maker, columnist, and animal rights activist. Currently she serves as Advisor at the Water and Power Development Authority of Pakistan for cultural heritage management of Diamer Bhasha Dam.
This conversation took place over an online call, attended by Feryal’s cat Tiger.
Farah Ali: What, to you, is the idea of “writing”?
Feryal Ali-Gauhar: I put into Abundance all the thoughts and observations that I’d been carrying since I was a child. So the path to it hasn’t been so much about writing as it has been about understanding, thinking, and feeling. I don’t feel that I’m on a big journey as a writer, or that I’m on a quest to find myself, because I’m here. When I write, it is just one way among many in which I express myself. I didn’t take writing seriously when I had started it as a child. I still don’t.
FA: When did you begin to write? What made you start?
FAG: I think I was writing in my mummy’s womb! My mother was always my inspiration. She wrote and spoke beautifully, she was very poetic. I was six when I was first published. Even then it was a story about animals. Then, when I was at the American School, one of my teachers encouraged me and I wrote a short story about my experiences as a child in Cape Town, South Africa, where my mother was born and where her family still lives. And that story won an award. I was thirteen or fourteen then. So even though I would pick up awards from submissions here and there.
When I was twenty three I’d started writing on political economy issues, as a columnist for Dawn Newspaper. It’s what I had studied, and it was the lens through which I looked out at the world. As with my fiction, my mother was my inspiration for those columns. Growing up, I’d always seen her committed to what I believe were the right causes. She was the youngest ever member of the African National Congress (ANC). She carried messages between her class teacher and the leader of the ANC, Nelson Mandela. Nobody would have suspected a good little Gujarati girl from a Muslim home of being involved in this. The messages would be tucked into her lunch box beneath the roti. She did it because she had the heart for it. Later, she married my father and went to live in a completely different culture and started writing. Her first works were short stories about what she saw and experienced. They were sublime and gentle yet powerful. The earliest one that I remember was about these birds that picked little holes in burlap sacks. And later we, as kids, would also steal the grain and barter it for sweets etc at the singular shop in the village where my father farmed. Fast forward fifty years, and I was finally able to expand upon the relationship between sentient creatures and us in Abundance.
My father has also been instrumental because of his generosity and his relationship with the peasantry. He was the first landowner to change the tithe system – he decided that it was going to be half, not a tenth. He believed in just governance. Then he fell ill and went into a deep depression, and shortly after that the Indian forces occupied our land, and the 1965 war happened. So among my early memories is finding bloated bodies of people in the village wells, people I had known. Seeing death at that age, and then losing my father just five years after that and not understanding where he could have gone after his mortal self had stopped being visible, led me to create a different world in my head I which people went into the sky. I didn’t have concepts of heaven and hell, I grew up in a home where religion wasn’t taught, we were free to learn anything we wished to. So my sense of the afterlife was my own. This is how I ended up creating Nihibur in Abundance.
Another influence came much later from the I spent working in Gilgit-Baltistan. The whole region, which stems from the Caucuses, used to practice what is known, generically, as the religions of the mountains. I started reading origin stories of those beliefs. It was uncanny – and also not – to find that others, too, had imagined what I had when I was younger. Their stories included spirit beings, such as pari, which for them are militant creatures. And there are the Yatz, which are benign ogres. There tales have descriptions of encounters between them and people, of the Yatz inviting them to their weddings which take place underground. And this was exactly what my world was when I was a child. I do believe that other realms exist. There are many things we haven’t yet understood.
FA: It must have felt joyous to discover people who think and believe as you did, when you learned the origin stories from the mountain regions.
FAG: To find my tribe elsewhere was great. I am more at home with people with whom I can have conversations, and I’ve found them mostly outside of the default idea of home.
FA: Yes, sometimes we feel extremely connected to a place without there being any logical reason for it.
FAG: Logic is for mathematicians. It could be that you set your feet upon the soil of that place and felt the air of that place. All that alters you. In Eastern classical music there is the concept of scales existing between scales. In a flute or a sitar, for instance, between one sur and the next there is an entire scale. So if you go for “Sa” to “Re”, you could, when pulling the “Re”, turn that into a “Sa”, then the note after that would be “Re”, and so on. The entire sangam exists within one note. These paths within paths are in the spiritual practices of the East as well. It’s this nuance that explains that affinity we feel to a place we weren’t born in.
FA: So much of what you say is related to geography. In Abundance, the landscape is an integral part of the entire narrative. It enters and leaves scenes the way the human characters do, and just as we don’t question the appearance of Moosa Madad, for instance, we don’t question the Doorway of Chartoi or the Stone Circle. What comes first for you, geographies or human nature? How much do you think about the effect of one on another – do you think the people in this narrative were a result of their landscape?
FAG: Without consciously intending it to be so, it was something I needed to do. I have a deep love for the land. Animals have their struggles, especially since we’ve taken their spaces. During the 2005 earthquake I was with the Cuban relief team. Afterwards, the Cuban ambassador invited me to speak about Pakistan. So I sketched the political map for him, explaining Pakistan’s political position relative to Russia, China, and India. I talked about what happened in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989, what its purpose was, and how the Vietnam War was a factor to that decade. Because I tend to jump between topics, at one point the ambassador requested that I slow down. I summed it up then, “Three words: geography is destiny.” You are where you are. In the book, the avalanche is the anger of nature. The irony was that here was this war that had been going on since 1984, with no end in sight, which was taking up resources, and in which at least ten to twelve thousand soldiers had been killed, not from bullets but because of weather. On one hand, we were creating these warrior-type men, and on the other we were warring with nature, which we could never win. We are just a tiny part of the universe. If we see how vast Sirius is and how small Earth is in comparison, we will be filled with fear.
FA: Humankind gives a lot of supremacy to its own capabilities. We say “conquering” when we speak about climbing a mountain or exploring the depths of an ocean. That choice of word puts us at odds with nature.
FAG: It’s fear that drives us to conquer. I remember learning about the concept of Manifest Destiny, in American history. Altering things to fulfill that idea of success. This fight with nature is about taming it. If we look at the evolution of human society we see our reliance on nature. People sowed seeds to grow crops and that led to the development of settlements. And then with surplus production came the notion of wealth, and wealth is connected with private property, with the trading of commodities. Woman is a commodity. With the Industrial Revolution the direct link between humans and land, water and air broke. The British in India constructed the two biggest structures there, one was the canal system for irrigation, the other was the railway. The harvests were sent away by trains into other cities outside of the subcontinent, then resold back in the subcontinent at five times the price. So the one who had picked the cotton became irrelevant and the one who created the outfit became supreme. And nature also became commodified. And all systems continue to perpetuate this commodification, of nature, of woman.
FA: In your book the characters have to contend with development – a new road, new jobs – and how that brings a teacher to the village. I love this line in the book, “…greed, taking more than you need will make you sick, and is an irresponsible thing to do”. I read that as being irresponsible to not just yourself but to the other beings around you, and to the land you’re on. There is a nudging for the reader there, to push their thoughts into diections they might not have considered before. What is the balance between development and taking more than what one needs? And do you think your own beliefs seep into your writing, and you subconsciously want to take the reader there?
FAG: I believe we are merely particles. I don’t think we are anything special at all. I feel intensely embarrassed if I call myself a writer, as if I am putting myself on an elevated level. I also like to play soccer, so I could very well introduce myself as a soccer player. This is to say that whatever I do is not with the intent to become something. If my work hadn’t gotten published it wouldn’t have saddened me. When I write it’s for myself and my beliefs do become part of it. A book is such a powerful thing; it can cause an entire movement. But I don’t intend to teach anyone a lesson or tell them what to do. What could happen is that a reader could feel supported in their beliefs by reading something I’ve written.
FA: We see Moosa Madad being harsh with his daughter and then we see him in a tender moment when he buries a dead bird, carrying it in his own shawl. He is kind to Lasnik. Again and again, broken bodies are brought to Moosa Madad for solutions. Then there’s the English madam, full of white-person benevolence. She is kind but thinks of the locals as “simple people”. Some of the characters in this story are visible in all their complexities.
FAG: Although I wouldn’t validate a person harming someone, their action makes me wonder about the kind of society that creates a person like that, a society that rewards holding and abusing power over defenseless creatures. I treat my characters in that same way; I am curious about the ways they have come to be who they are. These people, so caught in their beliefs, would feel pain if forced to think about their actions and their justification for those actions. I don’t think a person is born bad; it’s the systems perpetuating certain ideas that are to blame.
FA: In that same vein, you don’t always show the reader all the action. There’s a scene when we find out that Moosa Madad has been to the store room where his daughter is, but we dont see that visit. You’ve kept it off-page from us. Can you talk a little about that, about inviting the reader to make space for a character in their mind, after their intial reaction to that person’s actions?
FAG: This space humanizes the character and us at the same time. At one point in the story Moosa Madad, in an angry tone, asks his wife Fatima, “Has she eaten?” He’s actually asking about his daughter, but when Fatima mistakenly thinks he’s asking about Maryam he doesn’t correct her; he feels compelled to maintain that show of angry strength. He has griefs that he has been carrying with that same show of strength. He also has instinctive, fatherly feelings toward Lasnik.
The animals that I take care of in my home can be feral. But they’re coming from abuse sometimes, from no love. I have to forgive when they hurt me. I know they will be the death of me one day, you will find me sprawled out amongst all these broken animals. It is important to note here that, where people are concerned, justice goes alongside with forgiveness, even if the latter might never happen.
Farah Ali is the writer of the novel The River, The Town (Dzanc) and the short-story collection People Want to Live (McSweeney’s). Her work has been anthologized in the Pushcart Prize and the Best Small Fictions, and has appeared in Shenandoah, Kenyon Review, Ecotone, Virginia Quarterly Review and elsewhere. She is the Reviews Editor at Wasafiri.