A Splintering

In 2021, and more recently in 2024, early spring, I conducted writing workshops with students at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad. My ties with the university run deep. My father attended in the ‘80s, during Zia-ul-Haq’s regime, and regaled us with stories throughout our childhood, of organizing with the progressive students’ party, attending classes on American history, and spending afternoons huddled over chai at the makeshift tea canteens. The university has always struck me as an architectural marvel—strict, angular modernist architecture, the one South Asia embraced so devotedly in the ‘50s and ‘60s with the skin-shedding fervor of the post-colony, surrounded by wild growth in the form of shrubs, ancient trees, and embraced, finally, by the Margalla Hills.

This spring, the workshop was focused on land and place. I asked the students to write a letter to a stranger, describing their hometown. Because QAU is a federal university with students coming in from around the country, almost everyone was from a different town or city. One of my favorite letters was written by a student from Zhob, a city at the northern edge of Pakistan’s most impoverished and neglected province, Balochistan. He wrote, in beautiful, polished Urdu, a letter inviting the stranger to his city. He instructed the stranger to take the bus in, get off at the station, then go to a certain stall for the sweetest chai of her life. He described the bite of early mornings in the city, and the warmth of nights spent in cozy rooms surrounded by loved ones. Later, the student mentioned that he had learned the love of vatan, or homeland, from a Soviet poet. He was speaking of Rasul Hamzatov, an Avar poet from Dagestan, a republic in the Eastern hinterlands of Russia. Hamzatov’s book, My Dagestan, is an ode to his homeland, full of nostalgic yearning for the simplicity and hospitality of the life he abandoned for Moscow. The Urdu translation that the student was mentioning is a brilliant piece of work. It is one of my father’s favorite books.

Later still, the same student admitted to complicated feelings about Zhob—having left it for the capital city, there were certain provincialities that he detected when he returned home for visits, totems of backwardness that had only made themselves visible to him after he left. He didn’t know whether he had changed, or the place had, in the few years that he had been away. He was intelligent enough to have a guess.

**

I’m thinking of the student today, his beautiful letter, his move from periphery to center. The tale of the provincial migrant, her travel set against a rapidly urbanizing region, is perhaps the most significant story of modern South Asia. I’ve been thinking about it for a few years now. In fact, I wrote a whole book about it. My second novel, A Splintering, is the story of Tara, a young woman who leaves rural poverty through marriage to a city accountant, only to realize that her ambitions far outstrip the fruits of middle-class respectability. She wants more, more, more. And she will do anything to get it.

Tara’s character came to me while I was swimming in Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels—”swimming” feels right, because while I was reading them, the novels became my atmosphere, the air I was breathing—and once she came, she would not let me go. I was enthralled by this woman, who would stop at nothing to get what she wanted. She is a biting, unruly character in a lot of ways, but one of the things that fascinated me the most was the violent hatred she harbored for her hometown. Perhaps I wrote the book as a rebellion against books like Hamzatov’s, which I admired so much but which struck me as unequivocally masculine in its unchecked, unqualified nostalgia for the past. I have only ever met nostalgic men. No woman I know wants to unconditionally turn back time. Tara remembers her hometown for its enclosures, its stifling walls plastered with dung cakes, its narrow provincialities. Unlike my student, she saw no redemption in the place. I advise for balance in real life, but in this novel, I was working determinedly against the well-rounded character, the believable, realistic character who feels like a bit of everything. I didn’t want a character that was good and bad, meek and loud, funny and sad, a person with pH 7. I wanted a woman who was acid rain.

There’s more to the novel than the move to the city; the real adventure begins after she arrives. There’s marriage, and motherhood, and a shocking, life-changing decision. There’s the background of fin de siècle Pakistan—hobbling adventures in democracy, regime change, the War on Terror as it permeated the heartland, the liberalization of media, and more. It comes out in September 2025 with Duckworth Books. It is very different from my earlier work. I hope you will read it. To get updates on pre-orders, book covers, back story, et al, please do subscribe to the newsletter if you aren’t already.

Best,

Dure