RM: Across the collection, women often move between states of being from human, spirit, bird, myth, to rumor. What does metamorphosis mean to you in these stories: is it escape, self-assertion, or another kind of captivity?

TMK: We are all constructs of our own minds. And sometimes, to others too, we transcend our physical selves and become representations of something larger, a thing free of time and space. For example, the character Mailee, of ‘Mailee and the Saint of Horses’, gives legitimacy to madness for the women of her village, becomes a seer of truths, a mother to stories people need to hear. Throughout the collection, as the women’s stories emerged on the page, their states of mind and their physical reality fell onto a continuum, the language of the story moving freely between depictions of emotional, psychological and physical states. How the women felt, what they felt, often remained the only reality the story was interested in. So, in a way, what appears as metamorphosis if seen literally, is not an escape as much as an acknowledgement.

Domestic spaces are compressed chambers rife with the tensions of the world at large.

RM: Your stories inhabit a space where moral boundaries blur. Characters often act out of need, fear, love, and sometimes self-interest. As a fiction writer, how do you think about sustaining that moral complexity on the page? Do you see ambiguity as an artistic necessity?

TMK: Art emerges out of ambiguity like weeds out of cracks in a paved path. Each story here is the pursuit of some question, that then spawns others in its wake. When a character needs something different from what their environment has handed them, they must make choices, prioritizing certain things – safety, relationships, passions – over others. When a mother chooses her husband over her child, when a sister sacrifices her own honor to shelter her sibling, we are playing with a Rubik’s Cube of moral planes, and sometimes peeling those stickers off when no one is looking.

RM: How do you negotiate writing in English about these deeply local, culturally textured experiences? What is lost, gained, or transformed in that linguistic translation?

TMK: Though English is my own primary language of expression, I would say it’s more my language of rationalization and argumentation. In my head ring my mother’s laments and admonitions in Urdu, my cousins’ banter and my grandmother’s scolding in Punjabi, the cadences of the Arabic of the Quran I memorized passages of as a child and heard in the markets in the United Arab Emirates where I was growing up. And so, my narrators and my characters are first speaking in their own tongues. The telling that emerges on the page is, in a way, a translation before it is ever written – a translation in my mind of the forms of expression and sentiments I hear and understand emotionally before I express them in writing. There are times when it will not suffice to render a character’s thought or a narrator’s observation in contemporary English expression. It is necessary then, and even joyous, to lean into a complexity of meaning and implications in a word or phrase that English may not imbue it with, or state something more passively or obtusely because that is how it would be done by an Urdu-speaker. 

Domestic spaces are compressed chambers rife with the tensions of the world at large.

RM: Does your writing take more of a gardener’s approach or an architect’s? How long did it take you to write Talking with Boys?

TMK: Gardening – how apt! The first drafts of my stories do grow in spurts, sprouting from some nugget of inspiration and then pausing, biding their time until some clarity, some pressure forces them to grow in a certain direction, a shape. Some stories have sat for months, even years, between their first sections on the page, and the fleshing out of the rest. But architecture, too, comes in at a later stage. During revision, when I can step back and look at the whole, there is often a very intentional restructuring of the chronology of events, and even more so, the order that information is revealed in. Considering the earliest starts of some of these stories, this book had been in the making for over a decade, though the bulk of collection was written in three years.

RM: What stories or writers stayed with you while working on this collection?

TMK: Mohammed Hanif for his boldness, experimentation and humor; Toni Morrison for her masterful control of voice and characterization; Bonnie Jo Campbell for her empathy and multilayered complexity in scenes; Yoko Ogawa and Ottessa Moshfegh for their straight-faced embrace of the strange; and so many, many more including Dickens, Chekov, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

RM: How do you balance your work as a writer and an editor? Does your editorial practice shape your writing – or vice versa?

TMK: The practice of editing has undeniably improved my own craft. At the macro-level, when you continually read submissions of contemporary work, an accumulation of patterns in storytelling, the places a story can stumble, all seep into one’s subconscious writerly mind. To twist a classic opener: many unsuccessful stories are alike; each remarkable story is remarkable in its own way. However, the most important lesson for me has been to not treat my stories as precious after the first draft is down. Once intuition and inspiration have had their playtime, the true art for me lies in revision, the intentional molding of the story – every word, every line, the whole shape open to scrutiny and recasting.