After the launch of his second book, Shamal Days, journalist and author Sabin Iqbal took some time off from writing for a conversation with Christy Varghese
Set in the 1990s, with escalating violence in West Asia serving as the backdrop, Shamal Days is the story of Abbas and of the small newsroom that brings together people from different backgrounds and with individual stories but shared editorial goof-ups to a country built and run by the expatriate workforce.
The book is a whimsical, ironic take on the aspirations and resentments of expatriate life in a tiny desert country and on the political unrest in the region.
What led you to write Shamal Days?
I am a journalist and I have lived in a Gulf country for more than 15 years. All those years I have been observing people and lives around me. I knew I had to write the story of the interesting people in a small-time government-run newspaper, which had an eclectic mix of expatriate staff. And, working in a newsroom in West Asia, which is one of the most politically happening places in the world, is quite an experience. I knew I had to write the story, and the protagonist, Abbas, and his predicaments have been growing in me over the years.
You have said that the story and characters have been with you for a decade. While good things do take time, Shamal Days is set more than 20 years in the past... What took it so long?
I did not write the book in one go. I wrote it in phases over a period of 10 years. In between, I finished and published The Cliffhangers. Even while writing it, I used to go back to Shamal Days to check what’s happening to Abbas and his colleagues. None of this is my first manuscript. I am reworking on it now and, also, on another novel set in Trivandrum around the famous temple and its underground treasure. So, I have the habit of working on multiple novels at the same time. While working on these two novels now, I am also working on a collection of 10 short stories based in the Arabian Gulf.
While the background of Shamal Days bears some semblance to reality, have you also included some raw personal anecdotes without polishing any details? If yes, could you share the story behind any one of them?
You don’t write fiction out of nothing. Your stories and characters come from incidents, experiences and memories. Shamal Days has characters who have their DNA in real-life people but I have fictionalised them, stretching their behaviours or features one way or the other. Abbas is loosely modelled on an editor I have worked with, but he is not 100 per cent him. Similarly, there are incidents which have been given a definite touch of fiction.
The expats in the Gulf countries are in a really peculiar position. What do you have to say about the fact that despite living for years they are never recognised as citizens?
The expatriates in the Arabian Gulf, I reckon, are a peculiar community. Yes, they have sought change —better living conditions for their families back home —but they live in a state of impermanence. As writer Deepak Unnikrishnan calls them, they are ‘temporary people’. No matter how many years they live in those countries, they will never own anything but will always be the ‘outsider’, with a sad box tucked under their bunker bed. Most of the Malayali expatriates in the Gulf live a life of everyday sacrifice and they pour themselves out or drain or empty themselves for their family. Of course, they seek and aspire to change, but most of them cannot venture out. They remain prisoners of their circumstances.
Aspirations and ambitions seem to be common themes in your writings. Since you have worked there, would you agree with the common perception that a ticket to the Gulf equivalent to a get rich quick card?
I am from Varkala, which is a Gulf-pocket, a small town by the sea, north of Trivandrum. There will be at least one person from a family who works in the Gulf. When I was five, my father quit his teaching job in a college in Trichy and went to the Gulf in the early days of the economic boom following the discovery of oil. While going to the Gulf is a natural option for every male at Varkala, and to an extent in Kerala, getting rich is a far-fetched dream. Of course, providing better living conditions for the family is the priority. Not everyone can become a millionaire or rich overnight. The trappings of being rich are mostly make-believe. They live like Gershom — a stranger in a strange land — and while they come home on vacation, they come with gifts and expensive goods which they hardly use and spend like the rich. But most of them go back after pawning their wife’s ornaments. A common aspiration of all of them is to build a house, in which they hardly live.
One can dream for free, but reality happens to be somewhat of a hassle. While it is always nice to be hopeful, would you agree with the notion that one can make dreams come true if one works hard enough? Why or why not?
Yes, of course working hard means your dream has more chances of coming true but in the context of the expatriates in the Gulf, they all are hardworking but their dreams seem to slip away from them. There is no room for lazing around there, there is no room for strikes or hartals. You are there to bend your back and turn your blood into sweat. But the question is, how many of them are able to make their dream come true? What’s their dream? It is to make sure they can send home money every month. How many of them are paid on time? I am not sceptical or a pessimist but I have known an expat’s life, and have lived it to say this. Unlike in the early 70s and 80s when they were treated quite badly by the locals, things have improved now but the expatriate community in the Gulf is a unique lot as they work hard in harsh climatic conditions in a strange land, dreaming every moment of their homeland.
In Malayali households, getting a work visa to the Gulf is looked at as the lottery. As Shamal Days is based in an unnamed country in the Gulf, would it be safe to assume that this book picks up on some of the finer nuances from The Cliffhangers?
It used to be a ticket to El Dorado but not anymore. People are coming back. And, that poses a challenge to the government of Kerala in two ways. One, the foreign remittance is cut, and two, how do they rehabilitate them in a State with no industries? Abbas, from Shamal Days, and the lead characters in The Cliffhangers, Moosa, Jahangir, Thaha and Usman, are in a trap. While Abbas, an editor, is almost resigned to the fact that he is unable to break free of his indecisiveness, Moosa and his friends are trying to escape from their identity. They are caught between the Jama’ath and the Hindu-right wing. They want to go away from their fishermen’s hamlet but not to the common destiny of their brothers and friends in the Gulf. In Shamal Days, we see people with aspirations, like the Chinese Li and his wife, or people living with different forms of tragedy and broken dreams. While The Cliffhangers is a novel set in Kerala, Shamal Days is a cosmopolitan novel set in a small West Asian country and tells the story of the aspirations and frustrations of people who ‘are there but are never there’, dealing with the pain of loss, deceit and separation.
(The book has been published by HarperCollins India.)
