Between the Lines with Shubnum Khan

Written over eight years, Shubnum Khan’s sprawling and evocative novel The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years is an ode to love and belonging, and finding home in an alien world. Endlessly playful and richly imaginative, this vibrant debut delves into the transformative powers of memory and grief as it explores the legacy of South Africa’s complicated past.

In conversation with Kartik Chauhan for HarperBroadcast, she talks about how the novel was conceived and how it has evolved into its current, unforgettable universe.

Q. Deeply immersive and visual in its unfolding, the novel ties moving emotional strands to tell a story of love and loss—one that will continue to stay with its readers for a long time. Tell us a bit about your writing journey that has led you to narrate many parallel stories in The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years.

Shubnum Khan: I think I wanted to tell a story about generational experience and my initial idea was to have a young person move into a block of flats and listen to an older character tell them their story which included a love story. But over time (I spent 8 years working on this novel) the block of flats turned into a house and then the house moved onto a hill and then all these side characters started to fill the empty rooms and then a djinn and a ghost joined them and the story really grew to encompass all the things that interest me: history, fear, hope, my city of Durban and of course, love. It was as if all the things I had collected that interested me over the years began to fill the house and shape the story.

Q. As the title hints, there is a djinn in the novel… In India, the figure of the djinn represents and elicits a compendium of feelings, from fear to reverence. There are shrines in India that worship djinns even today. In a recent essay for CrimeReads, you write how ghosts can serve as “political messages.” Could you tell us about some literary influences for your own djinn in the novel and whether this djinn holds a political (or poetical) message that readers can discover?

SK: Actually, I was hesitant to add a djinn character to my novel because I was afraid, so I softened the character quite a bit – I purposely chose the western spelling of ‘djinn’ to keep a distance from the creature, I don’t give it a voice in the novel and its role, while significant, is small. But it was important for me to include because I felt the ‘djinn’ has been so encompassed by western media, especially as this blue genie trapped in a lamp that grants wishes and this has nothing to do with the source of the djinn: which is seen to be as an invisible race on earth made of fire and mentioned in the Quran. I wanted to take back that story in my own way. I can’t say I have a literary influence for the djinn but certainly I saw it as a character that represents our most innate desires and what happens when we choose to let our emotions engulf us; if we let grief overwhelm us, we turn into grief. And of course, as a plot device, it was the perfect, almost magical bridge between the past and present storyline.

Q. Would it be appropriate to suggest that the novel blends the Ramsay brothers’ brand of Bollywood Horror with the delicate and opulent tropes of expansive Romances that Bollywood is also known for? How were the mining of love and horror in the narrative influenced by Bollywood Horror movies and Indian literary histories?

SK: Ha, I love that. Certainly, there is melodrama that is reminiscent of soap operas and telenovelas and then there is a more sweeping romantic world so I think I would agree with that! I grew up with a father who sang romantic Bollywood sings from the 50s and 60s and I grew up in the 80s when Bollywood was at its boldest, brashest and bloodiest so my story had to meet somewhere in the middle!

Q. In the CrimeReads essay, you have also convincingly written about decolonisation of the Gothic. The book is rife with rich histories of folktales and fairytales as well. What are your thoughts on this global heritage of stories that we share, and how do you think this has been obfuscated in the past?

SK: In the essay I argue that the Gothic is still considered a very western concept, however, essentially the Gothic was born through a period of social anxiety, which was in existence all over the world, particularly in colonized countries including India and South Africa where the Gothic has long been in existence using local myths, folktales and superstitions. The Gothic is nothing new or revolutionary in these places and they shouldn’t be portrayed as such in the west. The Gothic has always been universal.

Q. Talking about the mansion in the novel, the original owner builds it as a pastiche of cultures, of sorts, almost yoking together architectural elements from across the world. In such a way, the mansion per se becomes a metaphor for the linguistic composition of a cosmopolitan world, with borrowed words and phrases from foreign languages made “local.” As a diasporic writer, how did your own understanding of displacement, identity and belonging trickle into the protagonist Sana’s narrative—and your use of language as a conduit of that narrative?

SK: I think as a South African Indian I get to be a part of two great cultures with rich, incredible, and painful histories and it does mean at times I can feel caught between identities and cultures. Over the time I’ve found my own way to embrace both and while I feel wholly South African, being a second-generation Indian means I am drawn to my Indian cultural heritage. The language my family speaks at home is a mixture of English, Urdu, Afrikaans and Zulu; they stitch an entire language together in conversation. So even if I wasn’t completely aware of it, I’ve always been thinking about identity and displacement and language and what it means to know who you are and where you are from. One of the first questions Sana asks in the novel, is where is home? I think anyone who struggles with their identity can feel inspired by the home Akbar builds; he attempts to make all these contrasting elements work, to achieve his dream, even if it may not work in the end.

Q. The novel presents an alternatingly despairing and hopeful portrait of memory. The mansion is somewhat stuck in limbo, as are its residents, until bridges of the past are constructed by memory and the testimony of that memory. Tell us about the almost-physical presence of abstractions like memory and forgetting and the interrelations they carry with love, longing and loss, as explored in the novel.

SK: I think I’m always interested in the outliers and the misfits of society; the people who are forgotten and I wanted to explore what it means to be forgotten. And that’s where memory comes in; because memory can bring the forgotten to life, memory tells a story and a story brings light to the dark places. If you dig deep enough into anyone, like Sana digs into the house, you find all sorts of extraordinary things hidden behind the doors; you just have to curious enough to look. I think the point I’m trying to make in the novel is that nothing is forgotten; there is always a sign of existence of something that happened before. No act ever goes in vain even if it may seem that way and every existence has worth. Something Sana realises in the novel is that ‘a memory can make you whole’ and I believe that – I believe a memory can return you to a moment that mattered in your life and it takes just that one moment to make life a full and beautiful thing.