Where did the inspiration for the individual characters come from? Of the pure fiction ones, Saleema from “Things She Could Never Have” lives inside me, while the widow in “Come Listen to Me” is me–that’s my voice, especially the final couple of paragraphs. “This is Our Secret,” “The First” and “Stealing Apples from Heaven” are a blend of fiction and memory for me and therefore the ones I most strongly identify with. Which character or situation from these do you most identify with personally? Before that, I just thought writing was something smart people did. It wasn’t until I was assigned M.G.Vassanji as a mentor during a writing course at Humber College that I realized perhaps it was alright for me to take my writing seriously. Each time something bothered me–caused me sleepless nights–I wrote a story. The others were an acknowledgement of the therapy that writing is for me. I tried first person, third person, and longer and shorter versions of the same story, and if it wasn’t for M.G.Vassanji, who finally helped me lay that story to rest, I would still be fiddling around with it. I wrote several versions of that story and over the course of several years.
I wrote the first one, “This is Our Secret,” as an attempt at badly needed therapy for myself. SDTC: Did you have it in your mind to do a short story collection from the onset?
This collection of short stories pierces through Western assumptions and into the hearts of the flesh-and-blood characters that Khan has written with sensitivity and truth.įrom the love story of two young trans women in Karachi (“Things She Could Never Have”), to the nascent sexual encounters of college girls (“The First”), to the violent chain of events triggered by one false accusation in “Whisperings of the Devil,” you won’t be able to put this collection down. Tehmina Khan’s Things She Could Never Have is a riveting window into the lives of modern Pakistanis–both here in Toronto and in Karachi.
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