Siya Turabi books

The story behind the story…

I grew up reading Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, Agatha Christie, Anne Frank and more. I love them all. Later, I found Arundhati Roy, Michael Ondaatje and Ben Okri, who all inspired me with the lyrical quality of their writing. I adore Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I love the way he combines history and magic to create universal stories.

When I turned forty in 2010, I had just finished my Masters in Art Therapy and decided to join a writing class. In the first lesson, the teacher gave us a quick exercise to do and the image of Hassan skipping across the courtyard of a Karachi house that I had visited as a child came to my mind. It was as if a seed had fallen into me and I had finally found the story I wanted to write. It wasn’t until 2018 that I developed the regularity needed to finish the novel.

A couple of years after that first writing course, I went on a sustainable beekeeping course at a charity called ‘Bees for development’. I learnt that the bees in Pakistan, till around the seventies, were a species quite unlike the bees of countries to the west or east of Pakistan. This ‘in-betweenness’ of the bees of this region interested me. Pakistan also has a certain ‘in-betweenness’. It’s a young country with different cultures and identities – resembling the countries that lie on both of its sides, yet impossible to categorise.

On that beekeeping course I also heard that, in times past, bees were sometimes transported in hives on long distances. For example, bees were taken on carts from one town to another. There was even one story of someone transporting a hive on a train between towns. I had found the last scene of my book – Hassan transporting the hive from Harikaya to Karachi. From that moment, I decided to make bees the focus of the story.

I later learnt that there was a species of black honey bees in the area – Apis dorsata – rare today. I tried to imagine how these bees would have been when they were more prevalent in the region – a mind unto themselves, hard to handle by humans, and a source of rich honey that was prized by honey hunters. My grandmother actually went blind from glaucoma before she died in 1972. Treatment wasn’t very advanced in those days and it was common practice to apply the forest honey of the Sindh to the lower rim of one’s eyes to help with such conditions. My grandmother’s story of her eyes and the practice of using honey as medicine became the inspiration for the book.

Poetry and storytelling are so key to the cultural backdrop of Pakistan and I wanted to convey this in the novel. After partition in 1947, many people came to Karachi from different parts of India. Many had come with hopes and dreams of a haven and had left behind homes and families and were traumatised. It was a hard and immensely sad time for everyone on all sides. My grandfather arrived in Pakistan in 1949 from Hyderabad in India with his family. He was a scholar and a poet who loved Rumi. His house in Karachi was a safe haven for poets who would gather in his courtyard garden and recite their spontaneous verses in the coolness of the night. My grandfather also carried on telling the traditional stories that he had told in India. Large gatherings came to listen from across the city and eventually from all over the country. These stories of loss and love were an outlet for the collective losses and grief of the time.

In England, my father would write poetry for himself and shared this love with me. I often heard him humming a tune of verse or saw him scribbling down lines. Poetry was read and sung by family and friends in regular gatherings as I grew up in Manchester. As a family, we visited India in the nineties. My father hadn’t been back since he had left at the age of fifteen in 1949. We were walking somewhere outside Hyderabad and my father recognised a man coming in the opposite direction along the almost empty road. It was a poet he had known as a child, someone who had come to my grandfather’s house in Hyderabad for the poetry gatherings there. It was an emotional encounter.

Around 1974, when the story is set, the change in the political atmosphere in Pakistan started to intensify. Private industries started to be made public as a result of reforms that swept the country. This could have been a progressive move, but unfortunately, many of those industries suffered from subsequent neglect by the government. It was an ‘in between time’ and marked the end of an era. My aunt told me how she used to walk alone to her classes at the university in the late sixties and early seventies, something that became hard to do as the seventies progressed. My grandfather died in 1973 just before this ‘in-between’ time set in.

I visited Pakistan for the first time after I left in 1981 when I was eleven. I had just started grammar school in Manchester, a world away from the Sindh province. I visited a nature reserve, not too far from a beautiful two-hundred-year-old fort that wound its way around a desert landscape, overlooking a village. That image became the backdrop for the story and Harikaya.

Karachi was full of layers upon layers of history and cultures. I saw crumbling colonial architecture, Sufi shrines, bustling bazaars, flats and sprawling suburbs standing side by side. I remember having my palm read in the square in front of a Sufi shrine in Karachi at night time. The fortune teller sat cross-legged on the floor amidst street sellers, singers and shrine visitors, with my palm in his hand. He told me that one day I would write a book.