Nobody loves a pedophile. No one. Not even their mothers.

American society prefers them dead – done in by fellow inmates incarcerated in some human inferno of a prison. If that doesn’t work, it’s perpetual ankle bracelets or indefinite incarceration. Out of shackles and out of prison, a registry of their names is kept, their houses noted, their neighbors notified.

I knew some pedophiles, or presumptive pedophiles, when I was 15. They are likely dead now, as the events I describe here happened forty years ago. I was a lonely, depressed gay kid. I knew what a homosexual was because my parents, to their embarrassment, took me to Gore Vidal’s play, The Best Man, in 1960. The play is Washington-based melodrama in which a presidential candidate’s homosexual past becomes a weapon used in blackmail against him. Though I never used the word, I knew what it meant all the same. I knew I was a homosexual too, but I only told it to myself. Moreover, to escape imagined annihilation at the hands of the male heterosexual mob, I worked hard to leave no traces of my true identity in any part of the world I inhabited.

Well, I suppose, almost. I found a sympathetic listener in my drama teacher. He was a remarkably self-assured man of about 45, I would guess. I might even say he was flamboyant, given that flamboyant in a drab suburban high school in 1963 meant dressing a couple notches above Robert Hall’s, wearing fashionable glasses, and using a very fine fountain pen instead of a cheap Papermate. He walked on his heels with his head held high. He had a wonderfully full voice, and yes, a high-pitched bit of a cackle. When he got mad, whether in class or in a rehearsal, he would slam the papers or the clipboard down, and walk away rather than at us, which I find all the more remarkable now having realized how many bullies I have faced in classrooms. He was a passionate man, full of spirit. You never would have known that he had gone to a small Methodist college.

He would drive me home after school. I would hang around his office with several others, or stop by to chat after the activity period that followed the regular school day. He would offer me a lift home, and in the confines of his big white Pontiac convertible, we would talk. I lived only a mile and a half away from school, so he would circle block after block as we talked, or I talked about me, for a very long time. I remember little of what we talked about, except for one time when I solicited his support for my decision not to ask a girl to the prom. It had been put about that she wanted me to ask her, but I didn’t want to, and he said it was okay not to invite her and not to go.

I loved talking with him. I never talked with him about being gay. It never occurred to me, as I felt so comfortable just being with him. Sometimes, he would laugh and grab and squeeze my knee very hard, like how I would tickle some one now with whom I had some degree of physical intimacy.

It only occurred to me that he was gay after his roommate made a pass at me, and I met my first pedophile. My drama teacher had taken a job in California and had gone on ahead to find a house, and his roommate was to follow. Meanwhile, the two of them had a friend who worked for the Educational Testing Service and knew a lot about colleges. My teacher left it that his roommate would be in touch with me over the summer to set up a meeting between their friend and me, so that I could get some sense of what schools would be best for me.

It was a good meeting. I realized later that I had met my first lesbian couple, and they were living in respectable suburban circumstances. I learned a lot, and he drove me home. On the way, we were stopped by a very long freight train passing. His hand found my knee, not in the jolly way of his lover, my drama teacher, but in a caress that gave his intention away immediately. I turned away and simply ignored him, feeling scornful. How odd, I think now: to be scornful instead of so many other things. I suppose scorn was not a feeling, but a defensive reaction – a pose to counter his move. The train moved on, and so did we, the caress withdrawn without comment.

Two days later, he called me at home. “What about dinner and a swim?” he asked. It was so easy to say no. I knew what he wanted, and I didn’t want it. My mother overheard the conversation, and wanted to know what it was about. I was certainly not going to tell her what was really going on, that I was gay and my drama teacher’s lover was hitting on me, but I didn’t feel the need to confess or plead for protection either. I told her my teacher’s friend had invited me out, but I didn’t want to go. I ignored her interest in knowing more, and walked out of the room.

With my drama teacher confessor gone, I felt very lonely my senior year. I had sung in the school choir for four years, and was invited to join the music honor society. I was no Caruso, especially after my voice changed, and the audition was to be a trial. The assistant choir director stayed after school to help me prepare a solo piece, and he coached me with a kind of friendly dismay. He wore red socks, he was roly-poly, he made mistakes on the piano when he was nervous (which was often given that our director was a tyrant), and students made fun of him.

He offered me a ride home. As we stopped in front of my house, he asked if I wouldn’t mind answering a few questions. A friend of his was doing a study on the onset of male puberty, and my responses would be useful. He began to sweat heavily, and his upper lip trembled. I looked right at him, though he looked straight ahead. Where on your body do you have hair now? Under your arms? Your chest? Your genitals? With each of his questions, what I thought was his unease grew. I suppose now it was his arousal that grew.

I answered his questions, though I didn’t really like them. Once more, though, I knew I was in contact with a man who wanted something sexual from me, even if in this case, hearing rather than touching was enough.

I think I was just a cubby to my drama teacher, somebody he wanted to squeeze and tickle and make happy. I suppose, on the other hand, that his roommate/boyfriend liked boys. Perhaps this makes him a candidate pedophile like the music teacher. They were in their forties, and I was 16 by my senior year. Do the math.

I would hardly call myself a model of self-possession in those days. It took another six years and some pretty big hard knocks to come out. But I had felt sufficiently self-possessed, it seems in retrospect, to understand what my teacher’s boyfriend and my music teacher wanted, and to do what I wanted. Or at least to head off what I didn’t want.

Others were not so lucky. Over the years, I have heard many accounts from friends and acquaintances, women and men, about fathers, step-fathers, uncles, cousins, and big brothers who took them sexually, mostly against their wills. There must be mothers involved too, but I have never heard anything of the sort first hand.

I have often wondered: Did I in fact get a free pass? Were these more near misses than they seemed to me at the time? Was this pedophilia lite? The teacher’s boyfriend and the music teacher surely were no avatars of evil, deserving mean justice in a prison cell. Though they were surely interested in boys, I will never know where these experiences fit into their lives, and whether they had any meaning for them at all. Likely not much, to judge from a distance now.

(The music teacher might be glad he lived in another age, I might add. Just this year at my old high school, a teacher was convicted of molesting a student, and my nephew gave testimony at the trial.)

Where evil is so often imputed, I offer a cautionary tale. It is only one story, so take it for what it is worth. My story, however, makes me wary of how easily we adjudge pedophiles evil, and of how quickly we consider them less than human. When they commit crimes, they should be punished. In our time, have they ever as a class gone unpunished or been under-punished? The bar marking the age of consent has been raised and lowered from time to time, and from place to place, but it seems likely to me that an adult having sex with an under-age person, if discovered, would be punished. Rape adds violence, and adds penalties. As a lay person, it seems to me that the law is getting clearer on adult sex with minors and on sexual violence against persons of any age.

What lies beneath the clarities of law are these particular facts of life, the near misses, the halting gestures of perhaps a candidate pedophile or two, and the resolve of a gay teenager who wanted to be near older gay men, but not have sex with them. I think it would be naïve still to believe that my choice alone was the deciding factor. The two men came near, one nearer than the other, but both pulled back of their volition too.

One might say that in each of these cases a line was crossed, especially from our vantage point today. Yet one might just as easily say that a line was drawn by me or by them – and observed by both sides. Is the would-be pedophile who draws back an avatar? Is he touched by evil too?

For me, the path from judgment to justice is less secure, though perhaps it is because I got off lightly. Exactly so. These events and the lack of distress they caused then and now have awakened in me, given these times, the need to urge more careful examination of the facts in cases of pedophilia. To recover reason and proportion and to see this part of the world more clearly would be best for all.

It helps to me to think of Dante. Having reached the eighth circle of hell, and thus have practically imagined all the horror that evil can throw up at him, writes the following:

“The crowds, the countless, different mutilations,
had stunned my eyes and left them so confused
they wanted to keep looking and to weep,

But Virgil said: ‘What are you staring at?
Why do your eyes insist on drowning there
Below, among those wretched, broken shades?”
(Inferno, XXIX, 1-6)

Unlike the well loved and generally well reviewed ‘Lost in Translation’, Sophia Coppola’s ‘Marie Antoinette’ struck a mostly sour note with the critics. I take two essays, one in The New Yorker by Anthony Lane and one in the New York Review of Books by Daniel Mendelsohn to be indicative of the general position. They are both written by intelligent critics and both essays contain useful insights. Mendelsohn’s essay is more sympathetic to the movie. At least he is willing to admit that the idea of exploring the ‘inner life’ of Marie Antoinette is possible, if not explicitly interesting. Mendelsohn writes that, “there are scenes of great charm and freshness that suggest what it might have been like to be the immature and hapless object of so much imperial pomp”. Lane, by contrast, writes the following: “Coppola films Versailles with a flat acceptance, quickening at times into eager montage, and declares, in her notes on the film, that she sought to capture her heroine’s ‘inner experience’. Her what? This is like a manicurist claiming to capture the inner experience of your pinkie.”

In the final analysis, Lane and Mendelsohn both accuse Coppola of surrendering to the shallowness that she is portraying. They both seem dissatisfied by Coppola’s unwillingness to step outside of the experiences she conveys. Portraying Marie Antoinette must not be just about portraying that ‘inner life’, it must also be a critical reflection on the failure of that life, which is inextricably related to the failure of the ancien regime and the subsequent developments of the French Revolution. Coppola’s failure, then, is the failure to have said anything significant about the Revolution and its meaning. The movie, these critics seem to be saying, is utterly lacking in its own critical edge and because of that it amounts almost to an endorsement of the empty superficiality that Marie Antoinette herself embodied.

This same kind of criticism, in general, has been applied to a handful of filmmakers of recent vintage, most notably Wes Anderson. I remember a friend commenting about Anderson a few years ago that his filmmaking could be described as Mannerism. The comment stuck with me. Yet it is this same ‘Mannerism’ that rubs critics the wrong way both in Anderson’s films and in Coppola’s. So we might as well call them the New Mannerists.

Mannerism was a term first applied to painting of the late Renaissance. It got its name from the stylized, one might even say ‘affected’, way that the Mannerists painted. The Mannerists were interested in style itself. And those who criticize Mannerism tend to do so from the perspective that it is style simply for the sake of style. Thus the connection to the New Mannerists like Anderson and Coppola. In criticizing Coppola’s ‘Marie Antoinette’, Lane and Mendelsohn were essentially asking, ‘Where’s the substance?’.

But I think Mannerism has a pretty good response to that question. There is something light, even breezy, about Mannerist painting and the way it plays with style and surface, the way it seems comfortable in the world it is portraying. Mannerists are not ‘getting to the bottom of things’ in the way that some of the powerful painters of the early Renaissance do. But that is not to say that they aren’t getting at anything at all. And this applies to the New Mannerists as well. Coppola and Anderson make films that feel nothing like the great works of, say, Antonioni or even the New Wave directors or, for that matter, the films of Francis Ford Coppola. The New Mannerists are conveying a different kind of experience. They are interested in getting a certain feel or a mood right and they value achieving that sense of mood far above accomplishments in narrative or character development.

Mannerists in general are not compelled primarily by subject matter and the films of the New Mannerists are not ‘about’ things in the way that other films are. That is one of the things I find so remarkable about Coppola’s ‘Marie Antoinette’. There are few subjects of world history as fraught with content and meaning as the French Revolution. It’s a minefield one is expected to come to with strong positions and the goods to back them up. Coppola lets the camera drift around in scene after scene where we learn next to nothing about the events of the day. We simply see daily life as it unfolds.

Even when the Revolution itself begins to occur—a prime opportunity for drama and narrative arc—it does so in an oddly stilted way, as a kind of non sequitur. Mendelsohn criticizes the movie for precisely this reason. He writes,

“The final silent image in this movie, so filled as it is with striking and suggestive images, tells you more about Coppola, and perhaps our own historical moment, than it could possibly tell you about Marie Antoinette. It’s a mournful shot of the Queen’s state bedchamber at Versailles, ransacked by the revolutionary mob the night before the Queen and her family were forced to leave, its glittering chandeliers askew, its exquisite boiseries cracked and mangled. You’d never guess from this that men’s lives—those of the Queen’s guards—were also destroyed in that violence; their severed heads, stuck on pikes, were gleefully paraded before the procession bearing the royal family to Paris. But Coppola forlornly catalogs only the ruined bric-a-brac. As with the teenaged girls for whom she has such sympathy, her worst imagination of disaster, it would seem, is a messy bedroom.”

It is as if Coppola is not up to the serious events of the adult world and thus her movie must be a mockery of those events and that world. But that is not the truth that Coppola’s movie is after. Viewed from Marie Antoinette’s perspective, from her ‘inner experience’, there was no other way for the French Revolution to come about than as a non sequitur whose immediate result is best portrayed as a messy bedroom. To me, that scene in the messy bedroom is lovely, disturbing…true.

To say that the New Mannerists are good is not to say that they are the only game in town or that goodness must now be measured with a Mannerist criterion. But when New Mannerism is good it is exceptionally so and it is producing movies that capture something important about the mood of our time. It captures a gesture, a moment, the passing of a moment that gets at something about who we are right now. It isn’t a comprehensive picture, admittedly. The films of the New Mannerists succeed often in the degree to which they give us smallness, writ large.

There is a scene in Marie Antoinette, where she is riding in a carriage toward Versailles for the first time. Bored, she breathes onto the window, which leaves a steam mark that she proceeds to draw on, doodling absently as the motors of History churn away elsewhere. It is a moment just right, small and brilliant and beautiful.

Australian poet and author Peter Nicholson writes 3QD’s Poetry and Culture column (see other columns here). There is an introduction to his work at peternicholson.com.au and at the NLA.

In The Guardian in March 2007 Ruth Padel listed what was styled as the top ten women poets, perhaps better noted below the headline as ‘her favourite poets who happen to be women’: Sappho, Dickinson, Bishop, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Plath, Carson, Duffy, Shapcott, Ní Dhomhnaill. Personally, I couldn’t think of anything more insulting than being gendered up in this way. Surely one is either a good poet or not, not a good woman poet or a top ten male poet. It is very easy to play these pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey listings—six critical booming bores, seven preposterous pronouncements on poetry at Bunyip Bollocks, five Collected Poems that would be better off halved, and so on. People have their own ideas about culture, and they seldom coincide with other points of view, which is just the way it should be.

Whilst I can agree with a large swathe of the poets listed as being very good poets, I can’t then refer to them as good woman poets. As far as I’m concerned, Dickinson sends nearly all poets down to the lower slopes of Helicon, whereas I have never understood wherein Sylvia Plath’s greatness is supposed to reside. I should very much like to say that I can see the greatness, but I can’t pretend. 

A bad habit has developed in some discussions of Australian literature—the reduction of writers to a supposedly representative handful who are then meant to stand in for the many. Subtle readings that bring out the complexity and breadth of Australian writing are not helped by this kind of simplification, and someone from another planet, or the United Kingdom, might get the idea that Australian poetry was restricted to a choice between two or three somewhat self-serving aesthetic billabongs. Professor Geoffrey Blainey’s well-known formulation that Australian history and culture had been formed under the pall of ‘the tyranny of distance’ had its literary equivalent in the strangely disjunct yoking of cosmopolitan yearnings and parochial machinations. With a smallish readership, and when some of the poets concerned also reviewed, the resulting attempts at creating instant canons of the various orthodoxies were probably inevitable.   

‘Woman poet’ in Australian literature used to mean Judith Wright, famous for her love lyrics and evocations of the Australian landscape, but even then it was an inaccurate  pinning down of history to a convenient holding pattern. Now, good as Wright is, I think there is one poet who is not only one of the best Australian poets, but one of the best poets of her time: Gwen Harwood. Harwood did not fetishise fashion accessories (Sitwell/Moore), get caught up in an historical terror (Akhmatova) or put herself conspicuously forward (Plath). Neither does she come trailing woe-is-me poisonous bon mots or turning her personal life into verbal stigmata. Born in Brisbane, Queensland, but spending most of her life in Tasmania, in Kettering, far from the madding crowd of supposed hot spots, she produced a remarkable body of poetry and librettos that still awaits its international due. Her poetic concerns were the suburban round, friendships, philosophy (Wittgenstein) and music. Her work is amenable to a wide readership and, though she is satirical—especially about academe—the warmth of her personality comes through. Harwood sometimes wrote under pseudonyms, the poems adhering to differing personas—Walter Lehmann, Francis Geyer, Miriam Stone, Timothy Kline. She was not above being rude with acrostics in poems to editors, but generally there is a clear bringing forth of the resolute certainties:

From A Young Writer’s Diary

A day, a night, a day, another night,
Frau Schmidt fingers her washing. It’s still damp.
Sunset hangs out its washing. That’s not right.
Four days without a word—a sort of cramp

stiffens the heavy sameness of my thoughts.
I read the paper I’ve already read.
(Horrible sentence). so-and-so reports   
from Moscow: Is the Russian Novel dead?

He can afford to travel, on that grant.
Rose, peach and saffron clouds invade the air.
A grand but natural style, that’s what I want.
Light comes from nowhere and from everywhere,

rinsing the secret pathos from this room
until materials say what they are.
My things summon the visions they become.
That wineglass flares like an exploding star.

The west, solid with colour, glows above
earth that seems a mere pretext for the sky.
I stare at the chrysanthemums with love.
Night falls. Hell stirs again, and so do I.

Frau Schmidt is beating schnitzel. I believe
she’s pregnant. Women have an easier life.
Blessed Franz Kafka, comfort me, receive
my prayer: What could I offer to a wife

or want from one? Grant me the honesty
of evil thoughts, of torture, nightmare, fear.
Messy poeticism clings to me
like sensual wax. Let me be quite sincere.

The banging stops. Frau Schmidt is practising
her English phrases in a lazy drawl.
She’ll never master them. I’ve heard her sing
sometimes, in her own tongue. Across the hall

life, life! They say that Hogarth tried to paint
The Happy Marriage and then gave it up.
I read the journal of my patron saint
and drink enchanting tortures from his cup:

last hopes of every kind, extremities.
Frau Schmidt comes out to put the spade away.
How like a gentle animal she is!
A night. A day. A night. Another day.

Deceptively simple, yet full of fierce solicitations.

Harwood’s mordant eye can work up a kind of invective, but generally she loves too much to really hate:

Suburban Sonnet

She practices a fugue, though it can matter
to no one now if she plays well or not.
Beside her on the floor two children chatter,
then scream and fight. She hushes them. A pot
boils over. As she rushes to the stove
Too late, a wave of nausea overpowers
subject and counter-subject. Zest and love
drain out with soapy water as she scours
the crusted milk. Her veins ache. Once she played
for Rubinstein, who yawned. The children caper
round a sprung mousetrap where a mouse lies dead.
When the soft corpse won’t move they seem afraid.
She comforts them; and wraps it in a paper
featuring: Tasty dishes from stale bread.

How good it is to come across a poet where there is no look-at-me subtext going on. Meditative, rueful, this is writing one can immediately relate to. Harwood’s philosophical bent has made her world the tangible one we all know: about the house, glimmers of beatitudes, thinking on the meaning of friendship, loves remembered, nature’s beauty holding off darknesses. Eloquent music. A memorable and hard-earned calm in the face of the telltale X-ray or the tragicomedy of having the large sensibility in the small-town environs. And there is passion too.

Carnal Knowledge l

Roll back, you fabulous animal
be human, sleep. I’ll call you up
from water’s dazzle, wheat-blond hills,
clear light and open-hearted roses,
this day’s extravagance of blue
stored like a pulsebeat in the skull.

Content to be your love, your fool,
your creature tender and obscene
I’ll bite sleep’s innocence away
and wake the flesh my fingers cup
to build a world from what’s to hand,
new energies of light and space

wings for blue distance, fins to sweep
the obscure caverns of your heart,
a tongue to lift your sweetness close
leaf-speech against the window-glass
a memory of chaos weeping
mute forces hammering for shape

sea-strip and sky-strip held apart
for earth to form its hills and roses
its landscapes from our blind caresses,
blue air, horizon, water-flow,
bone to my bone I grasp the world.
But what you are I do not know.

Reputations. Swings and roundabouts. It often all seems quite absurd. Yet genuine writing goes on, unaccompanied by the usual bling. In Tasmania the genuine writing went on, music and philosophy special joys close to hand, the Antarctic winds that sometimes blast Tasmania finally reaching Gwen Harwood in 1995.   

Since I cannot do justice to this poet here, I can only encourage others to discover Harwood’s poetry for themselves. The Collected Poems 1943–1995 of Gwen Harwood, edited by Alison Hoddinott and Gregory Kratzmann was published by the University of Queensland Press in 2003 ISBN 0 7022 3352 8.

When in the fall of 2002 Thalassa Ali was introduced to the crowd gathered for her debut reading at the Brookline Booksmith, a taste-making independent bookseller in Brookline, Ma., her agent, Jill Kneerim, admitted taking many months even to open the manuscript of A Singular Hostage, Book I in Ali’s Paradise Trilogy.  “Thalassa had by far the worst background I’d ever heard of for a novelist,” Kneerim explained.  “She was a Boston Brahmin and a stockbroker.”  That got a laugh, but no one walked out. And at the conclusion of the reading — I was there — when all suspicions as to what kind of novel it was had been banished, sales of A Singular Hostage were brisk.   

Thus began an unlikely literary career that would unfold over the next five years in the U.S., in Europe and ultimately in Pakistan, where as a bride and then a young widow, Thalassa Ali lived for many years and raised her children, and where, not coincidentally, The Paradise Trilogy is largely set.

The novels that make up the trilogy — A Singular Hostage, A Beggar at the Gate, and Companions of Paradise — tell the story of a young Englishwoman in the 1830s, Mariana Givens, a clergyman’s daughter haunted by the loss of her baby brother some years before.   Not without wondering what else fate may hold in store for her, Mariana is on the lookout for a husband in India, where a marriageable girl without a dowry can expect to nab a British officer and embark on a life of the utmost conventionality and Englishness.   Knowing only this much, you might feel set up for a ladylike novel of a Punjab that never was — the covers of the books seem to promise just that.   However, the opening scene of A Singular Hostage, wherein an elephant struggles under the absurd and horrible burden of British picnicking equipment, including a vast folded tent, leaves little doubt how the Empire is perceived in these pages.  Impressively researched historical novels of the Raj are easy enough to find, and readers looking mainly for that will hardly be let down by The Paradise Trilogy.   But there is more intimacy with life on the sub-continent and more relevance to issues in our own day than they may have bargained for here.   For Thalassa Ali did not merely research and observe the life that, decades later, she would write about, but entered it and lived it fully. The improbable result is an outwardly English novel that owes its essence to Sufism — and you simply surrender to the story.

A few weeks ago, after her return to Boston from Karachi, I conducted a wide-ranging conversation with Thalassa Ali.  The author is a student of military history, and we spoke of the First Afghan War that figures so prominently in her fiction.  Though The Paradise Trilogy was in the planning stages many years before 9/11, after that, how to write about Islam would be a freighted subject for historical novelists and for others.  Ali, a convert to Islam, spoke of her experience of the Sufi Path.  The question of Orientalism arose — can an Anglo-American writer setting a story of adventure and passionate quest in the time of the Raj evade this charge?  Should she?  Highlights of our conversation are posted below.

EH: Were you surprised to see your books finding such a large readership in Pakistan?

TA: Yes and no — the books are set mostly in Pakistan, and they’re suspenseful.   I wouldn’t necessarily expect an historical novel to appeal to younger readers when there’s so much good contemporary Pakistani fiction around, but then people like to read a well-researched book about their own history.   In the beginning, when I told people in Pakistan I was writing a novel set in 19th Century Lahore, the first question I got was, “Where are you doing your research?”  Readers also seem to be drawn to the books because they’re not only historical adventure stories, they’re Sufi allegories.    I have noticed that a new popular interest in Sufism has surfaced in Pakistan.   When I moved to Karachi in the 1960s no one spoke about it, but now things are different.   Someone came up to me after a reading in Karachi and said solemnly, “I have much to learn from you.”   Very flattering, but not necessarily the case!

EH: Something to do with Pakistan being modern enough by now that looking modern doesn’t count for as much?

TA: I’d like to know what other people think about that idea.   I would say that the Pakistanis I know are more conscious of their culture and history than they were 30 years ago, but I can’t say that the popularity of Sufism is because of that.   Perhaps there’s a general need all over the world for something more — something that satisfies the heart.   I read a little while ago that Jalaluddin Rumi is the most popular poet in the United States. 

EH: In all three novels, you write about a family of mystics in Lahore — they play a larger role in the trilogy than anyone other than your protagonist, and they live on very accepting terms with the supernatural. It took me back to reading Thomas Mann’s The Transposed Heads — the ease with which these characters slip into and out of that mode.   I’m wondering — what on earth can have prepared you to write about this?

TA:  I’ve been a Muslim for 23 years.   For seven of those years I was also a rigorous follower of the Sufi Path, getting up before dawn to do zikr.   Doing that taught me a lot about the country of the heart: about what is seen and what is unseen.   Also, my murshid, Syed Akhlaque Husain, was very interested in umls, practices like curing poisonous snakebite through recitation.   He taught me a great deal.   Every example of a supernatural event in my books is a genuine Sufi practice.  He also taught me not to put too much emphasis on these things.   A British reviewer once said that she liked my ‘matter-of-fact’ approach to mysticism.   I have Akhlaque to thank for that attitude.

EH:  How did you come to follow the Path?

TA: I read a lot of ‘fairy stories’ when I was young — a typical example would be the story of a young prince who is hunting with his brothers when they meet a beggar in the forest.  The brothers push him aside, but the young prince takes pity and gives the beggar something.   He then proves to be a sage who offers the prince a magic sword and sends him on a long journey towards a fabulous goal.   Those stories set fire to my imagination. Later, when I studied Sufi philosophy and poetry at Harvard, I realized that those fairy stories had been Sufi allegories. Madly in love with all of it, I resolved to embrace Islam and become a Sufi practitioner, but when I married my husband Bobby and came to live in Pakistan, I found that Sufism was not discussed.   It was close to a taboo subject.   It was 21 years before I found my murshid — 12 years after my husband Bobby died of a sudden heart attack.

EH: What year was that? I know the children were very young.

TA: In 1972.   My children were seven and four.   I stayed on for several years — the children were Pakistanis, and I wanted them to have the life they knew, but ultimately there was a political shift.  My friends began to leave for the Gulf, and I knew it was time for me to return to Boston.   It was very hard to do.   I can understand why the West is so lonely for many Pakistanis and others from South Asia.

EH: How often have you gone back to Pakistan since you left?

TA: I’ve gone back almost every other year since I left it.  Since I left the brokerage business, I’ve been able to go back for months at a time.   Bobby used to say that the one thing one absolutely had to do was attend weddings and funerals, so I do that as much as I can.   It was on one of those trips, in the middle of my stockbroker phase, that I met my murshid, and embraced Islam.   My children have kept me emotionally in Pakistan, too. They identify themselves as Pakistanis and Muslims, and always have. My son is a banker in London, and my daughter is producing the first indigenous educational television show for the children of the sub-continent — she travels constantly between Pakistan, India and New York.   It is a little different going back with a book or three to sell, though…

EH:  How did it feel to go back to Pakistan with the published novels?

TA: It was strange.  When I first went there, I was Bobby Hakim Jan’s American fiancee. Then I lived there as his wife and the mother of his children, and later as his young widow.   After that I was Thalassa the visitor, who kept up with people.   Now I’m someone who comes with an offering, a gift for Pakistan: a trilogy of books about this part of the world, and about the softer side of Islam.   Of course it’s up to the people whether they want the gift or not…

EH: I like these photos!   You’re the only writer I know who had a book party in Dubai. But what were some of the high spots of the book tour in Pakistan?

TA: I did four readings, a book signing and a lot of print and TV interviews — some 10 TV interviews in all — and a radio interview.   One highlight was being on a very popular television show that non-Pakistanis can’t believe exists — The Late Night Show with Begum Nawazish Ali. The hostess is a cross-dresser, and quite funny. We got along very well.   I was also interviewed by Dawn, The Friday Times, The Herald,  Newsline, SHE Magazine, and other periodicals.   This photo shows the most fun of all the events –a dramatic reading from Companions of Paradise in Rehana Saigol’s garden in Karachi.  Rehana is a well-known TV personality, President of the Pakistan Bridge Association and one of the most generous people alive. Imran Aslam, the other reader, is a journalist, and is now president of GEO TV, an influential news network. Afterwards there was a reception for several hundred people. Rehana put on a huge tea with pani pooris, fresh dahi burras, and other desi dishes, not to mention latte as well as tea. It was all very thrilling, and would have been fun even if people hadn’t been buying my books — which they were doing.

EH: You mentioned earlier that a well-researched historical fiction meant something in and of itself to Pakistanis.   Could you tell me a little about the research?  I’m especially curious about how you conducted research for the final volume, Companions of Paradise, which was set mainly in Afghanistan.

TA: I’d collected books on the 19th century in northwest India for over 20 years, not really knowing what I intended to do with them.   When these weren’t enough, I went to London, and spent a lot of time in the Oriental Collection of the British Library.  Lucky for me that my son lives in London! At one point I knew I would need an Afghan advisor, but Fatana Gailani, the only Afghan I knew well, was up to her ears in refugee work in Peshawar, and not likely to have time for my questions. Fortunately I was invited to a dinner to benefit Fatana’s organization. Determined to find my advisor, I spotted a well-dressed lady in the crowd and followed her, balancing my dinner plate, dodging other guests, hoping she was the right person.    I sat down, introduced myself and asked casually what she did.   She was a researcher, she said.   On what subject?  I asked.  History, she replied.   That’s how Kamar Habibi, who is also a linguist, became my friend and guide.   Throughout the writing of Companions of Paradise, she saved me from mistakes, offered nuances of language and thinking, and gave me an understanding of Afghanistan and Afghans that I would never have found otherwise.

EH: In the wake of the U.S. bombing campaign in October of 2001, you and several other Boston women, including me, formed an Internet-based fundraising group to send money for Afghan refugees to Fatana Gailani. Was Companions of Paradise in the works then?  What might we learn about the present from the period of the Afghan Wars that you were writing about?

TA:  Actually, at that time I was writing Book II of the trilogy, A Beggar at the Gate, set mainly in Lahore.  It wasn’t until the U.S. had invaded Iraq that I began work on Companions of Paradise, and the parallels jumped out at me.   And they are indeed striking.   The most obvious are the politically driven British invasion of Afghanistan  — carefully explained by a series of lies — and their consistent misunderstanding and underestimation of the population of the country they now occupied, which led to military disaster.    We’ll have to see what happens this time around.

EH: I’ve been reading through the press about The Paradise Trilogy — in the States, in the U.K., where it was simultaneously published, and in Pakistan, where the U.K. edition was distributed. While the work has been well received and has obviously sold very well, some Pakistani writers who sincerely like the books want to talk about Orientalism — with you or without you. Is it ever a fruitful discussion?

TA:   Edward Said’s book has been with us for nearly 30 years, and he makes many excellent and accurate points for everyone to think about. It’s certainly an important issue.  Orientalism is at least in part about standing at a distance and regarding people as quaint and picturesque and not wanting them to change.   It’s about superiority.  I think sensitivity to slights is very refined at this stage in history, and some of what I wrote clearly set off alarm bells.  It could be partly due to the somewhat old-fashioned style of my writing, which is appropriate both to Sufi allegory and to the early Victorian era, but might appear to be exoticism.  It could also be that I used the word ‘native.’   I chose to do that because it was a usage belonging to the time and to the main character’s point of view when she first came to the Punjab, but it may have been an inflammatory choice.  Other mistakes popped out of some wrinkle in my past, too.  But I was a little amazed at that reaction, given my personal history, and that I had made a point of telling my story from both sides. That said — you write, you send what you write out into the world, and people have a perfect right to interpret it any way they like.

EH: You mentioned that you were pleased that young people in Pakistan were reading and enjoying your novels.   What else do you notice them reading there?

TA: There’s a real literary scene in Pakistan now — so much great stuff to read, compared to when I was young and living there.  I can’t talk about fiction in Urdu, but Mohsin Hamid is certainly the most brilliant and successful of the new crop of writers in English.  There are plenty of other young writers too.  Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography was short-listed for the Llewelyn Rhys Award.   Uzma Aslam Khan’s Trespassing was short-listed for  the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and Nadeem Aslam’s novel, Maps for Lost Lovers, won the Kuriyama Prize. I’m pleased and proud that amidst all this, there’s room for me too.

EH: Is it too soon to talk about another book from you?

TA: Definitely.  My mind is a complete blank that way.  But I hear that’s normal.  The Pakistan earthquake of October, 2005 has been occupying me lately.  After I finished Companions of Paradise, I joined a group of concerned Pakistanis in Boston who were raising money for the Bugna Goat Project, a livestock replacement program in six villages in Muzaffarabad, one of the areas hardest hit by the quake.   I went to Bugna last summer, and will probably go again before long.  We’re working with the Human Development Foundation, founded by a group of Pakistani-American physicians. They have adopted a total of 400 villages in all provinces of Pakistan.  The HDF will be celebrating their 10th anniversary with a conference on human development in Chicago later this month. This work is where my focus is right now.

EH: I’ve been hearing a lot about the HDF lately. One of the things I noticed about your site, www.thalassaali.com, was the links page of Web resources about the First Afghan War, Sufism, and the poetry of Rumi and Hafiz. I’m pretty convinced this is still your material, even after a trilogy. I’ll check back in with you about what’s next another time — thanks!