Tayyba Kanwal’s linked story collection, Talking With Boys, stretches from Lahore to Dubai to Houston, spans decades, and juxtaposes magic, absurdity, reality TV, and the interpretation of ancient religious texts. But it’s the connections that matter most: Mothers, daughters, and sisters negotiate their circumstances by strengthening familial, traditional, and community bonds—not breaking them.
I was honored to talk with Kanwal over Zoom about the radical way her characters transcend constraint through shrewd navigation of cultural expectations, how they achieve power without abandoning tradition or community, and how a neighborhood can stretch and morph until it encompasses something greater than any geo-political boundary.
The Rumpus: Let’s talk about how your characters navigate cultural and religious expectations. They’re finding new freedoms, new expression of self, but they’re not abandoning their beliefs or community.
Kanwal: This spirit of finding agency within the normative order was an essential element. It’s an attitude I was acutely aware of growing up, watching women, young people, or anyone in a position of less power, making the most of what they have, living, and even thriving, with a certain vibrancy.
Part of it is a smart recognition of what can and cannot be controlled, a fine sensibility around gray areas, and an understanding of one’s essential needs. It’s a fierce recognition of what one cares about and is not willing to give up. It’s a practical acknowledgement of the value of the resources one has in a constrained situation.
“Running away” and “burning it all down” were ideas I came across in Western literature, in glaring contrast to what I saw around me. I saw mothers who stayed for their children, fathers who chose work that took them away from their families and had them living in bachelors’ quarters for months at a time so they could provide, young men who stayed in the family business not from lack of imagination but because of the solid ground this gave them to build a life on.
Rumpus: As I was planning what to ask you, I caught myself framing the characters’ actions as “escaping” from their circumstances, but that’s not quite it. They approach their problems very differently. In “The Girl Who Ran,” Amal marries a boy her family has forbidden her to see. Eloping could be seen as running away. But she’s using and interpreting her family’s beliefs and traditions—just for a different outcome than they intended for her.
Kanwal: I think “escape” does work in that we all need to escape our constraints. How we escape them is the question. Do you escape by breaking down the structures? Or do you escape control by finding ways to accomplish what you want to accomplish and have the power you want to have?
What these characters are doing is not a visible escape that an outsider could see. They’re doing it in ways that can’t be challenged by the people holding them back, because they’re using the language and the structures of the oppressor.
Many of these stories celebrate how women in this world dream and live fulfilled lives and don’t necessarily feel they are “escaping” something—they are using what they have to their advantage. It’s a creative exercise, one of repurposing.
When Amal gets married, in fact, to a Muslim Pakistani boy, that’s kind of what her father wanted for her. She runs away by choosing an option that fits her family’s definition of her as a daughter. She becomes a married daughter—how irksome and wholesome.
Rumpus: But she does it on her own terms.
Kanwal: It’s on her terms.
Rumpus: It’s such a problem that a Western audience doesn’t always see agency in characters if they’re not rebelling in obvious ways.
Kanwal: When you do something in big, visible ways, you’re often giving things up. A lot of my characters are managing to hold on to more. Mothers hold on to their children.
For example, Zeba could leave her marriage. [Zeba is Amal’s new mother-in-law in “The Girl Who Ran.” She also appears in “I Breathed You First,” and “Mrs. T. Receives a Gift.”] She has the means. The woman, her friend Sarah, is probably her lover. But she doesn’t [leave her marriage]. This way, she gets to have Sarah. She gets to have a beautiful house and a comfortable life. And she gets to have her son. In not burning down her house, she’s managing to hold on to more.
Rumpus: It feels like a more traditionally feminine way to see the world and solve problems—to focus on care and maintaining relationships and working within them, rather than something like the hero’s journey.
Kanwal: Perhaps the Pakistani culture is a feminine culture from that perspective because the men also don’t go off on their individualistic hero’s journey. They get to be the patriarch. They have the blessing of the mosque and the businesses and the community. If a father took off to live the artistic life of his dreams, he would be shunned. So the men, too, get their power from the communal structures. It’s to everyone’s benefit to stay within them.
Rumpus: Transformations happen within communal structures. In “Mehr,” the title character is a girl who does not want to wear the burqa her father is pressing on her, but when she puts it on, something magical occurs:
A breeze flattened the fine fabric to her back, sewing it up and down her spine, splaying it along the length of her arms past her fingertips; its pressure dissipated any lingering weight out of the top of her head, through her fingers, down her legs, into the ground. As the sun descended, her shadow lengthened, the wings pointed up and her body curved in a clean swoop down to her feet.
Kanwal: This image was not one of the earliest that came to me. Rather it was the opening scene of Mehr in her bird form, teasing her father in the bazaar. Mehr’s transformation had to emerge naturally. It had to not feel like inexplicable magic. The story is more about discovering unexpected, new freedoms within this apparent constraint, in a way, a metaphor for what we’ve been talking about. Most of the story is Mehr moving in the world in her new burqa. She is surprised at what it steals from her, but also what it allows her to do in anonymity, and even a decorous respectability it bestows on her. And so comes a time when she has to decide whether she will stay within it, or rather, understand whether she can even shed it.
Rumpus: How else do transformations happen in Talking With Boys?
Kanwal: I was exploring the trajectory of migrations.
I intentionally ended with the story of Zoya [“Bungalow”]. Although it may seem quieter than the others, it is almost the biggest rebellion. She’s the only one who’s not choosing a partnership. She’s making her own home as a single person. That’s really radical within this culture.
It’s the kind of bold escape younger, contemporary Pakistani-Americans are able to choose. If Zoya were in Pakistan, she wouldn’t even be thinking of that.
But here, given her education, her job, her ability to support herself, she can. But also, she’s lost family members. She’s lost her mother. So her circumstances have allowed her to think more broadly. She has realized she has this deep need for home, but she’s going to make her own home.
Rumpus: Is her story still within the bounds of making a better life within her culture, community, and family?
Kanwal: She’s really valuing the people and not just the technical relationships. So this is also how she’s radical.
She respects Haroon for their personal relationship and everything he does for her. He is father-like, and she is not respecting him just because he is “father.” She respects his crabby mom because she fed her.
Rumpus: We learn this in “Bungalow,” but also see the seeds of it in “A Shade for the Window,” when Zoya is a teenager and living with her mother.
Kanwal: And she has a connection with her mother as a person. She recognizes her mother did something essentially radical in her own universe and compromised on her own principles to provide her with this home. She married some old guy so he would give up the coffee shop and let Zoya inherit it. In the story’s opening [“Bungalow”], Zoya is irritated with her mom for that, but she comes around to the fact that this was an act of love that has allowed her to make her own home.
Rumpus: I’d love to talk more about home and migration. The characters aren’t running away, but they’re moving around—between Lahore (or nearby), Dubai, and Houston, which are geographically far apart. Yet when family members and neighbors appear in all three places, it makes that massive span of the planet into a single neighborhood. Can we see these distinct cities as creating a fourth landscape?
Kanwal: A fourth landscape—how wonderful!
This reminds me of a mathematical concept in topology—that the surface of a teacup and a doughnut are essentially the same, each a two-dimensional torus. The connected points remain connected, whether they’re far apart physically or close together. When you morph the teacup, it’s the same as the donut when you think about connected points. You can stretch it and bend it and squish it.
So there’s a different kind of relation that is beyond physicality, beyond location, beyond even language and education.
So it is with these characters, connected to each other through generations, stretching the relationship lines across continents, and yet, essentially remaining one family, remembering, carrying on, never far from a shared root that defines something about them—even Zoya, born in the United States, who barely knew her father and has never set foot in Lahore.
When Huma, for example, goes to Dubai, she has this moment of connection with Fazal [“Huma and the Birds”]. She loves how he swears, and that takes her back to the boys of her village in Pakistan. That moment was so real to me.
I was raised in Dubai from the age of two to seventeen. But after that, I came to the US. My connection to Pakistan was that we went home every summer for two or three months. But even now, when I’m around people who speak Urdu, or Pakistanis, or anywhere on the spectrum, the feeling I get is entirely unique.
It’s what holds these people together throughout these stories, no matter where they’ve moved.
Rumpus: How much of this fourth landscape, this donut morphing to teacup, do you make possible because these are linked stories, instead of a novel or collection of unrelated stories?
Kanwal: I had written a third of these stories before it became a linked collection. Then I fell in love with Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales. The way those stories connect changed everything for me. Sometimes things were connected by people having crossed paths in space and time. Once I became aware of those possibilities, I started recognizing characters as versions of other characters. They had the same sensibility.
Fazal, the dad in “Talking with Boys,” is a great example. I’ve always worked hard not to flatten my characters. So him just being a grumpy dad was not satisfying to me. I knew there was more to him. As the father, Fazal won’t pick up American sign language because he wants to control his own body and not be taught new languages for his body. Fazal also became the young man who was abused by the cook in “Huma and the Birds.” It was natural that he would later be protective of what he chooses to do physically.
So it’s making those connections between formative moments and how people were acting that helped me see two characters as the same character.
And for the final story [“Bungalow”], I wanted a young woman making her own home. But who was this woman? To me, the most natural character was Zoya, whose mother abandoned her. At the end of “A Shade for the Window,” I felt her mother could not choose to remain in the US anymore, because she had one hope of a real connection with somebody, and that person, Haroon, disappointed her. I got so excited at the thought that her daughter chose not to go with her. She’s an American citizen, and she chooses to stay in the country of her birth. It felt so right, and it had to be the same people.
Rumpus: A character might first appear as somewhat peripheral. Later, we’ll get more of their story.
Kanwal: A key ordering principle I landed on was irony. Not in a tongue-in-cheek way, but as a destabilization, as a deepening. I found myself obsessed with a storytelling approach that shed a new light on past revelations, complicated further what we thought we had learned, perhaps twisted an assumption we had made when we last met the characters.
For example, we learn about Huma’s rascally half-brother in “Huma and the Birds.” In a later story, “Little Mother,” we see his birth. What his birth meant to his mother stands in stark contrast to how he turned out. If the story of his auspicious birth had come before we got to know of him as a disappointment as a young man, it wouldn’t be as much fun.
Rumpus: It emphasizes that even the people we don’t notice are people. There’s a whole universe inside.
Kanwal: I think so!
There’s Teresa in “Huma and the Birds,” who we see closely. Once we know her, we think of all the young women that Huma later shares an apartment with. Because this is the linked collection, and we get to know Teresa’s life more deeply and Huma’s, we can imagine their lives, that there’s more to them.
And Zoya’s neighbor, who she calls The Ancient [“Bungalow”]. She probably has an interesting story. She made me laugh with her weirdness.
Rumpus: But the stories do stand alone.
Kanwal: Yeah, I did absolutely want them to be able to be read on their own. The one I suspect might be the hardest is “Telling Tales,” because there are so many connections in there. But conceptually it is standalone and unique.
It’s probably secretly my favorite story.
Rumpus: It’s gorgeous. Shireen learns that the mirror absorbs terrible or shameful secrets and feels pain. But when she considers her own worst memory—watching the murder of her mother by her father—she decides not to shroud the mirror but to clean it. She seems to say witnessing is worth the pain.
Kanwal: The telling of a story is a holding of truths in a crucible, exposing them to extreme pressures, and seeing what emerges and what dissipates.
I had been trying to write that story for a long time, especially the extended idea of the mirror cracking under its own weight of heavy secrets, and the secrets floating back into the world to do the bad things they always would have done. I had that framework, but it wasn’t coming together significantly enough for me. Once other stories were written, I had the material for it, the meaningful secret.
Rumpus: That makes sense. The deepest meaning of those secrets would come from having written the other stories.
Kanwal: Though I do include other secrets in there!
I have a nod to my favorite Pakistani writer, Mohammed Hanif. The American diplomat’s wife talks about a secret that leads to the assassination of President Zia-ul-Haz. Hanif’s book, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, builds up a series of possible events that lead to the plane crash, including that a case of exploding mangoes had been loaded onto the plane by discontented farmers. In real life, there are all sorts of conspiracy theories. So I put into my storyline another possibility.
Rumpus: So your stories connect to each other, and they reach outside the book, too.
They also interact with some ancient stories—The Potters’ Book in “Mailee and the Saint of Horses,” and the way Shireen considers Hajar’s story, in “Telling Tales.”
I thought of Hajar who ran back and forth between the desolate peaks of Safa and Marwa to find a drop of sustenance for her wailing infant. How abysmal her search must have felt; how hellacious it must have been to keep faith in salvation to come, to see a purpose in her abandonment by the father of her son, God’s own prophet who believed in a bigger design; how the only thing that kept her from succumbing to a suicidal stillness must have been the fact of her parched child. I, my sister’s keeper, tried, but in the end, I did not know if I had Hajar’s strength.
Kanwal: I’ve attempted something I don’t see often by writers of Muslim origin.
Shireen is trying to see herself in a historical Muslim story, thinking about Hajar and how difficult it must have been for her to stay alive, not give up, because she had her baby and was abandoned by Ibrahim.
I think people are scared of writing into Islamic stories or taking them out of their specific religious context, because culturally, it can be fraught. But I’ve tried to do it with extreme care and in a personal way.
It’s not changing or challenging Hajar’s story. It’s seeing more in it. I see that done with biblical stories in Western literature and I wanted to try that. I’ve always wondered why we don’t talk more about these moments psychologically and what they mean to us, as lessons in our literature, in our storytelling.
Rumpus: It epitomizes what the collection is doing. It’s not burning down, or running away, but looking more deeply. Do you think it’s radical?
Kanwal: I do. I do. I was terrified to write it, but I respect these Muslim stories deeply. It’s part of my culture. It’s what I come from. I want to be able to talk about them and what they mean to people.
It may be radical to bring up these questions. But I’m not challenging anything, really: only because I don’t believe it needs a challenge. I think it needs a look.
