Kamila Shamsie: The Anatomy of a Friendship

The thrum of school is friendships. Studies, sports, marks are but incidental, what matters for life­times, is who you befriend and who you unfriend. Kamila Shamsie’s most recent novel Best of Friends (Bloomsbury; 315 pages; ₹599), as its title makes abundantly clear, is about the evolving relationship between Maryam and Zahra. We first see them in Karachi in 1988, as two 14-year-old girls and then in present day London when they are in their 40s. In the opening pages, we encounter Maryam who arrives at school in a Mercedes, with “new breasts,” “a new waist”. She has recently returned from a London holiday and pooh-pooh’s her parents’ concern about the unrest in Pakistan by declaring, “Give me dangerous and keep your boiled cab­bage, Londoners.” Heiress to a luxury leather products factory, Maryam has no intention of ever leaving Pakistan. Zahra, whose father is an anchor of a cricket show on television, on the other hand is focussed on leaving Pakistan and never returning. Their worlds, whether it is London or Karachi, are worlds of privilege and access, with one of them having the advantage of legacy money and connections. Zahra is the cerebral teenager who dwells in her books and her mind, Maryam inhabits the factory and the cricket ground.

While bringing alive Karachi of the late 80s, where car bombs explode, where Zia-ul-Haq’s name is whispered, Shamsie masterfully also unpacks adolescence, that age between childhood and adulthood. The girls listen to George Michael, they read Sidney Sheldon, talk about boys, talk about kissing boys. They speculate about what their lives would be at 40, but the one thing they are certain about is that they will always have this friendship and its light.

A hundred-plus pages later, the reader is taken to London 2019. From a Guardian article we learn that Zahra Ali is now the head of the Centre for Civil Liberties and has become the “voice of Britain’s conscience,” rubbing elbows with the likes of Emma Watson and George Clooney. An article in Tech Capital News informs readers that Maryam Khan is now a top venture capitalist. Her parents moved to London when she was 15, after selling the leather company as they believed that the west held better prospects.

The ploy of using news articles to sum up 20-plus years of the protagonists’ lives is rather heavy-handed. But the prime con­cern of Best of Friends is to analyse how friendships morph and mould over time just as personalities change over the decades. Shamsie, in the past, has said that fiction is a useful place if you have questions and not answers. Best of Friends rose specifically from a question —what are the pressures that a relationship can withstand when someone has been the “through line in your life”? Do people succeed in sidestepping the fault lines and cracks? But what if you fail at doing that? Shamsie became interested in this question specifically in 2016. She was living in Britain, where Brexit was dividing people and then in the US, where she’d spent many years, as a student and then a teacher, there was Donald Trump polarising the country. She would hear people say personal relationships were being affected by these external events. Being on different sides of the Brexit or Trump divide could mean the end of relationships. She says, “I became very interested in that moment, in that question of what would happen if I took this friendship where there’s incredible love and loyalty, but there is a very significant difference in the way they see the world. What would happen if I made that significant differ­ence, something they could no longer avoid, and I didn’t know the answer to that. So, I was sort of writing my way through the friendship to that moment of what happens when you have to stand on the precipice of the fault line.”

I became very interested in that moment, in that question of what would happen if I took this friendship where there’s incredible love and loyalty, but there is a very significant difference in the way they see the world, says Kamila Shamsie, author

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Shamsie herself knows what it is like to move between countries and continents. The Karachi-born author, completed college in the US, and moved to London in her mid-30s when she was more than half way through her fifth novel. She pub­lished her first novel In the City by the Sea when she was 25. Her previous novel Home Fire (2017), which was shortlisted for the Booker prize, reimagines Sophocles’ play Antigone unfolding among British Muslims, and hinges on a brother-sister relation­ship. With her six novels preceding Home Fire, Shamsie has always “followed the brush” as a writer, allowing the story and characters to develop on page. As Home Fire took on Antigone, the plot was already at hand. With Best of Friends she is glad to return to following the brush and also realised how frustrating it can be. She says, “I always have some kind of a sense of what the very final moment will be or the mood of the final moment. So, I suppose that’s the direction of travel, but you have no idea how to get there. And with this one, initially I thought I would follow these two through the different periods of their lives. But at a certain point I realised that what I was really interested in was those early years—being 14 in Karachi, and then contemporary London. So, it was very much a case of as I’m writing, I’m sort of writing myself into it.” With this novel she felt she did not need to work at getting to know her characters, as they and their friendship landed “fully formed,” which felt like a “gift”.

Speaking from London, 49-year-old Shamsie says that un­like her protagonists she left for London at a very different stage from Maryam who leaves when she’s 15, and Zahra who moves at 18. Today she is far more attuned to life in London and there­fore chose to write about Karachi of the late ’80s and London of today. Today Shamsie lives near Lord’s Cricket Ground, and as an avid cricket watcher (not a player, the one game she played for the Author’s Cricket Club, she was out for a duck on the second ball) she mentions that she can literally hear the goings on of the stadium in her flat.

While it is reductive to draw too many parallel lines between characters and their authors, it can be said that Shamsie, Zahra and Maryam all enjoy their place in the world, whether it is London or Karachi. For Shamsie this sense of belonging was important. She says, “I don’t think either of the characters sit around navel gazing. ‘Am I British’ or ‘Am I Pakistani?’ I don’t think that’s the kind of questions they ask. And again, I think it’s because they grew up in Karachi, they very deeply feel their Pakistani-ness. And then they moved to London and they became Londoners. It can be uncomplicated. Very often I think it’s told as if it can’t be uncomplicated. Very often you have writing where you’ve people who are attached to more than one place, and it is regarded as some kind of crisis or con­flict, and I’m pushing against that. Because for them [Maryam and Zahra] there is no crisis or conflict, you have two places, great! You can draw different strengths from both of them.”

Even while they belong to both worlds, they place them­selves very differently in this “insider-outsider” situation. Decisions that they make regarding someone from their past will truly strain the fabric of their friendship, forcing one of them to tell the other, “A part of me has always hated you,” in the penultimate pages.

At one point in the novel, Maryam who now has a daughter with a lesbian partner thinks to herself, “Childhood friendship really was the most mysterious of all relationships, it was built around rules that didn’t extend to any other pairing in life. You weren’t tied by blood, or profession, or an enmeshed domestic­ity or even—as was the case with friendships made in adulthood—much by the way of common interests.”

Very often you have writing where you’ve people who are attached to more than one place, and it is regarded as some kind of crisis or conflict, and I’m pushing against that. You can draw different strengths from both places, says Kamila Shamsie, author

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Shamsie is interested in the knowable and unknowables of friendships. Childhood friendships are mysterious in many ways, for what binds friends together and what causes them to lose touch. But more importantly how old friendships are often pegged on who we were rather than who we are. She says, “There is the mystery of character. In the novel one of the characters says something about how sometimes when you’ve known someone forever that can mean you know them really well, but it can also mean that you’re holding on to some version of who they used to be, right? And you’re failing to see who they’re becoming. A 44-year-old is very different from a 14-year-old. And sometimes you just decide very early on this is what this person is all about.”

For Shamsie, the joy of writing this book was the joy of investigating what keeps friends together and what pulls them apart. While admitting she had a lot of fun with this book because childhood friendships have been vital to her own life, she says she enjoyed moving through the decades with her characters. An incident that blots the first and second section of the novel involves a boy who makes the girls feel threatened. It is a moment, which nearly all women have experienced, when they sense something could go very wrong very soon. Speaking about it, Shamsie says, “That was ter­rifying to write, but also really satisfying, in some weird way. And then to think about the two of them and sitting with the aftermath of it.”

There is a moment in the London section of the novel, where Zahra enjoys a morning on a park bench, sipping her coffee. She thinks to herself, “It was a triumph, if you were a woman, to move between visibility and invisibility in a way that suited you rather than being scrutinised and ignored in equal, infuriating measure.”

For Shamsie, this was another telling moment in the novel, as a 40-year-old Zahra has an ease that she never had as a 14-year-old. The 40s, says Shamsie, if you’ve been fortunate to make your own decision and follow your path, is a time of knowing oneself and being comfortable as one is. The 40s is also a time when “you become aware of things like your parents’ frailty. And possibly the fact that you’re going to be the next genera­tion to reach that frailty.” She adds, “It’s an interesting moment where you can have that sense of ease and comfort and your life being in a very good place. But there’s also a sense of precarity. In a way that in your 20s you don’t have. And so, I wanted to write into that.”

By charting the changing nature of friendships Best of Friends reminds us all of who we once were and who we might be today.

About The Author

Nandini Nair

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