The people in Mahreen Sohail’s short story collection Small Scale Sinners and Raaza Jamshed’s novel What Kept You? do not conform, even as they live amidst the push-and-pull of a world running to conventional scripts. Jahan, in Jamshed’s debut, persists in defining what liberation means for her, with the political injustices of the past as urgent for her as the present threats of fires to her home and her animals. And the women and girls in Sohail’s short stories choose to detach from what is “good” and explore their own definitions of that word as it pertains to character – sometimes sidestepping any need to even consider it – through acts of betrayal, sacrifice, or morbid curiosity.
The two authors discussed their books over emails, where they talked about language and what defines a person, and the obsessions behind a creative work.
MAHREEN SOHAIL: Your novel, What Kept You?, deals with themes of grief, identity, loss and – this stood out the most to me – climate change. Did you know early on that these were the things you were writing about or did these themes become clearer to you as the book neared completion? Has your writing always circled these themes?
RAAZA JAMSHED: I didn’t set out to write a novel. I love the short story form, I love its constraint, its poetry, the almost architectural precision it demands. But after writing Cocinnity: Some Awkward Digressions in 2019, every new writing project I began got pulled into the same vortex of a voice. It was a female voice, very insistent, and it felt more capacious than what a short story could contain.
I think a debut novel inevitably reveals how a writer’s brain is wired – what obsesses them, what they can’t put behind them, how they organize the world and make sense of it. Grief, loss, identity, all these weren’t themes I consciously chose. They were conditions the voice was already living with. Climate change, too, wasn’t something I sat down to address. But it is deeply important to me as a human being. And the more-than-human world has always been central to how I see things. Until something beyond the human enters the frame, the picture remains incomplete for me.
So in that sense, yes, my writing has always circled these concerns. I’m drawn to thresholds: between self and other, human and animal, belonging and estrangement, the seen and the unseen. The themes became clearer as the novel took shape, but they were there from the beginning, embedded in the way the voice took root and moved through the world.
MS: At its core, What Kept You? reads as a love story between a granddaughter and grandmother. Would you agree with this? I’d love to hear you talk more about using this unique relationship as a framing for your novel.
RJ: Yes, I would agree, though perhaps I’d say it’s a love story in the deepest, most complicated sense of that word. I was raised by my mother and her mother, so my grandmother’s presence was not peripheral to my life, it was almost atmospheric. She carried within her an entire world that I’ve come to associate with Pakistan, its history, and its origin story which is both bloody and miraculous. Through some kind of osmosis, I absorbed it all. Writing the novel, I found a way to circle back to a part of myself that migration had unsettled.
I’ve also always been drawn to fairy tales, especially Little Red Riding Hood. It feels to me like an alternative to the masculine hero’s quest. Instead of conquest, there is encounter. The girl enters the woods – a space of danger, yes, but also transformation. She must reckon with the wolf before she reaches the grandmother’s house. Across feminist and postmodern retellings, those three figures remain: the girl, the wolf, the grandmother. The novel leans into that triangular tension. The wolf is not only an external threat; it is history, violence, migration, inherited fear, even the parts of oneself that feel monstrous.
While there are many mother-daughter narratives in literature, in South Asian traditions the grandmother-granddaughter bond carries a particular kind of power. It’s not only love but sensibility, story, survival knowledge. I was interested in how that relationship could function as a call back – a plea to return to a former self, or perhaps to a self that was never fully allowed to emerge. In the novel, storytelling becomes the bridge across time, and the granddaughter eventually becomes the storyteller. That reversal felt essential to me. It’s through that act, through remembrance, that she finds a way to remake herself. So yes, it’s a love story. But it’s also a story about metamorphosis – about how we cross the woods, confront the wolf, and, in reaching the grandmother, reach something ancestral and unresolved within ourselves.
MS: Jahan and Ali’s relationship seems to pull between love and a palpably suffocating silence. Tell me more about writing this relationship – I’m interested in how it stands next to the grandmother/granddaughter relationship.
RJ: I was very conscious of wanting to write a mixed-race couple in which both partners were people of color. I’ve so often seen, in Anglophone literature, the South Asian woman positioned opposite a white partner, and the tension mapped onto a simple racial and linguistic binary. I was interested in something more complicated: two brown people from different geographies, different histories of empire, with different relationships to language and belonging. With Jahan and Ali, the friction isn’t about visibility in the obvious sense but about misalignment. They don’t share a first language. They don’t share the same childhood myths. Even their silences carry different meanings. For me, language was the most honest way to render that collision of worlds. Not through overt declarations of difference, but through texture – pauses, misunderstandings, the rhythm of sentences. Love is present between them, but it is strained by that which just cannot be said and understood.
Placed beside the grandmother-granddaughter relationship, the contrast is stark. With the grandmother, there is a subterranean fluency: a shared mythic language, even when there is friction. The granddaughter inherits stories, cadences, gestures which render their bond somewhat porous; it allows continuity and metamorphosis – even in death, the two communicate. The marriage, by contrast, is structured around containment. It is tender at times, but also suffocating, because Jahan will not articulate herself within it. The very thing that connects her to her grandmother – language – is what exposes the limits of her marriage.
So the two relationships come to operate as mirrors. One gestures toward origin and return. The other exposes the texture of chosen intimacy in diaspora in how love can exist alongside estrangement, and how silence can weigh heavier on a marriage than direct conflict. Writing them side by side allowed me to explore two different kinds of belonging: one ancestral and mythic, the other contemporary and negotiated – both important and formative, but in very different ways.
MS: Were you nervous about writing a book in the second person? What books did you read to prepare?
RJ: From around 2019 onward, the only way I seemed able to write was in the second person. The novel is technically in the first person, but the second person address presses so closely against it that it almost drowns it out. That choice didn’t feel deliberate and I began writing without a blueprint but over time I realized there were two impulses guiding it. The first has to do with the time in which the book was written. I began working on the novel during the COVID years, when so many of our rituals around illness and death could no longer be performed. People were dying without loved ones at their bedsides. I think the second person address became a way for me to restore some of those rituals: the act of sitting beside someone, taking care of them, speaking to them as they move toward death. The “you” in the novel became a way of holding that vigil.
The second impulse had to do with language and audience. I wanted the book to resist a kind of performance for a Western English-speaking readership. English is a hegemonic language, but something quite subversive happens when people who inhabit other linguistic worlds speak through it. They bend it in ridiculously inventive ways. In the novel, Urdu and Arabic and English sit beside each other because sometimes English simply cannot carry the weight of certain meanings. Whole worlds attach themselves to particular words.
So there is, I hope, a bit of winking in the text, a sense of inside humor, but also a deliberate unsettling of the insider/outsider dynamic. The Western English reader is placed slightly off balance, positioned as someone looking into a world that exists fully on its own terms. The direct address helped create that intimacy while also preserving that distance.
It was only much later, in the final stages of editing, that I began actively seeking out other books that used a similar mode of address. Reading On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, and Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend, was hugely reassuring to me because it showed me how powerful and intimate that form of address could be.
MS: How did you know the book was finished?
RJ: I didn’t. If it had been up to me, I would probably have spent another ten years with it. My editor and publisher, Ivor Indyk, also happens to be my mentor and a dear friend. In many ways, he knows how my mind works almost better than I do. When he said the book was finished, I trusted him. I handed it over and let it go out into the world.
So much of publishing, I’ve realized, is about humility, about recognizing your own limits as a writer and sometimes deferring to the judgment of people who can see the work more clearly than you can from inside it. I’m very grateful to have had people in my life who knew when to say: this is enough, the book is ready, let it go.
In your collection, Small Scale Sinners, there seems to be a new lexicon at work, an apparatus for girls who transgress in ways that feel universal in impulse but culturally specific in their execution. Girls who kill, girls who desire openly, girls who misbehave without apology. How conscious were you of constructing a distinctly Pakistani world for these girls as they push against the expectations of being good, of being shareef? You never say the word shareef in the book, but it feels like an animating force, or an invisible code the girls are constantly pushing against.
MS: I worked on these stories through most of my twenties, during a time when I was in the process of becoming an adult, leaving home, getting a real job. I’m not sure I consciously created this world but because it was my world it seeped into the stories. I had just moved back to Pakistan when I started work on the collection, and so was able to see the country with fresh eyes, and that had an effect on the stories too. I also think many of the women’s concerns – how to be good, how to have agency, how to live a life that is entirely your own – are concerns that women around the world have.
RJ: We both use Urdu obscenities in our books – and one word in particular, randi, or whore, carries an enormous cultural charge. If being good, being shareef, is the ultimate standard imposed on women, then becoming randi feels like its ultimate counterpart. By invoking that word in your text, what kind of political or narrative work were you undertaking? As a female writer from a region where both uttering the word and being branded with it can signal a kind of social annihilation, did it feel like reclamation, defiance, or something more complicated?
MS: As a child or a teenager, I felt this cultural charge you talk about more viscerally – Urdu swear words about women were not to be used by women, When I used the word randi, I knew the two sisters it was being hurled at would understand what it meant in the context of their world. Honestly, I don’t think I thought about it doing anything other than building a picture of the patriarchal world the two girls in the story live in – swear words aren’t too complicated for me anymore, and don’t carry the same charge they used to. Maybe that’s just because I have some distance from the person I used to be, a more nuanced view of the world, an opinion about the type of men who hurl these insults at women.
RJ: There’s a persistent atmosphere of fear in the book – not always spectacular, but ambient, passed down quietly from woman to woman. How did you think about fear as craft – as something structural rather than episodic? And did you see it as something your characters are trapped within, or something they attempt to calibrate?
MS: We should be afraid of the time we are living in. These are terrible times. And I think this ambient sense of things going from bad to worse has been slowly getting stronger over the past couple of years. Some of this fear has seeped into the stories – these women are aware they are alive in times they have to fight to come out of unscathed. I was aware of this when I was writing the stories, the characters sense an impending doom and scramble to extricate themselves from it. It wasn’t so much craft, or structure as much as it was this feeling I wanted to convey – things going from bad to worse, interspersed with moments of joy, without which of course it would be hard to live.
RJ: Becoming, in this collection, often feels criminal; it is “uneasy, sweltering”, but also ghastly in places. Girlhood tilts into something unruly, sometimes violent, sometimes grotesque. What does “becoming” mean in your fictional universe? Is it liberation, metamorphosis, contamination? And was this emphasis on becoming something you set out to explore from the start, or did it emerge organically as you wrote the stories?
MS: Maybe it is all of the above, liberation, metamorphosis and contamination all at once. Right? I think that feels true in What Kept You? as well. Jahaan seems to be straining against her current life and reaching for something new, but also so aware that she will never be able to escape her past. Girlhood is strange and intense and hard to make sense of while you’re in it, and it’s also hard to exactly pinpoint when exactly it ends – does it ever end? I didn’t do it consciously but in retrospect it was nice to examine it from every angle, to really let myself be steeped in its strangeness.
RJ: There is grief in this collection – between people, between continents, even between languages, English and Urdu. But the deepest current of grief seems to run between mother and daughter. What is it about that relationship that draws you in? It feels as though the stories orbit it, returning to it even as they meditate on other forms of familial entanglements.
MS: You can love your mother and not want to be her while being aware that you are turning into her – while also experiencing pain because of all the ways in which you are different from her. I’m interested in all of these things – the ways in which women absorb the hopes, dreams and sorrows of their mothers (and grandmothers!), how that impacts their lives into adulthood and informs their world view. I’m not sure you choose what you are obsessed with.
Mahreen Sohail was born in Islamabad, Pakistan. She has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied as a Fulbright Scholar, and was a Writing Fellow at A Public Space and a Charles Pick Fellow at the University of East Anglia. Her work has appeared in Granta, The Kenyon Review, Pushcart Prize XLII, and elsewhere. Small Scale Sinners, her debut short story collection, is a finalist for the 2026 PEN/Faulkner Award, and was longlisted for the 2025 Republic of Consciousness Prize.
Raaza Jamshed holds a Doctor of Creative Arts from Western Sydney University, where she is an adjunct fellow. Her writing appears in Guernica, LitHub, Meanjin, Sydney Review of Books and Australian Book Review. Her short story ‘Miracle Windows’ was a prize-winner in the 2019 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. Raaza is the Editor-in-Chief of Guernica. Her debut novel What Kept You? was released by Giramondo in 2025 to critical acclaim.