On Writing the City
by Shahriar Shaams
When you are born and live in the same city all your life, as have I in Dhaka, what else can you write about? Any city invariably becomes Dhaka for me. Whether it is the futuristic citadels in my genre fiction or the unnamed exteriors in my pursuits of realism, the city proves itself stubbornly present. I cannot brush away the life I inherited for it is inevitably sown into the fabric of my stories. It is present in the discomfort of slogging through a sea of people or in the abuse of sugar in tea at roadside tongs – images that act as atlases to my world.
But the city is also a conscious effort of world-building. Here, we tend to be less honest. We want our cities to be what they are not, we want them to have certain types of cafes and libraries so our characters can behave inside them much like the characters of the novels and TV we consume. We treat the city as furniture, changing its qualities to fit our sense of style, but this only becomes a reflection of us. In fiction, our way of life and reading tastes often colour the city we portray.
I have learned that questions of where to set a story, if to use a real city or an imagined one, if it must be named or left unattended and neglected, are often meaningless. R.K. Narayan created the city of Malgudi to serve as a “microcosm” of India, yet it is rarely that. Malgudi is Narayan’s home. Mysore’s shadow looms large over Narayan’s much celebrated town. So heartfelt are his characters’ aspirations, so honest his descriptions of sweetmeat shops and schools that I’ve long suspected that Malgudi can never be a generic backdrop to the author’s otherwise charming characters. Perhaps Malgudi succeeds so resolutely because Narayan’s descriptions are far more truthful than some of the real cities we write of with discordant and cherry-picked information, where our intention is evidently self-serving.
A few years ago I came across an old Kazuo Ishiguro interview. When asked that his latest novel (Never Let Me Go at the time) is set in England but “it doesn’t sound very English”, he answers, peculiarly, “I call it ‘England’, but it’s just an imaginary setting. When I wrote The Remains of the Day, which many people think is a very English novel, that England too was a very made-up England.” But was it really a made-up place? I have re-read much of his work, and a delightful sense of Englishness, however an artifice, is present. It is what makes his stories so brilliantly powerful. This boldness is missing in Ishiguro’s fifth novel, When We Were Orphans where Shanghai is vague and nondescript, a furniture for use.
When I write my stories in Dhaka, I often find that I want to be couched within history and I end up showering importance to places where there is no need. I want this city to be mine the way Istanbul is Pamuk’s. I suppose we imagine our stories as generalists and it is the city that gifts us specificity, that grounds us to a reality. Even when I am consciously writing of other imagined worlds, meticulously painting in geography and history, I can only do so for the broader strokes. To be intimate is to go back to my memories of home.
It seems, therefore, puzzling how we can celebrate or even resist our own city in fiction. They seep through us onto the pages. The city is a ‘setting’ in fiction the same way ‘space’ is a setting or continuum in the universe. Not something on which other objects are but an intrinsic part of these other objects, whose existence and ours all depend on each other.
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