Tasleem Thawar’s Gothic Toronto literature
Tasleem Thawar is proof that creative writing can be worthwhile—that it can get you on billings with some big names. The emerging Toronto writer talks about her international travels and the haunted hotel that inspired a story she’ll read in the presence of living legends. By Katie Hewitt If you met 32-year-old author Tasleem Thawar, she’d probably tell you that her creative writing career is a fluke; and she is genuinely humbled by its happening. It must have been some fluke that has her reading a story she penned, amidst pages by Margaret Atwood and Ann-Marie MacDonald, at a small church in Toronto’s west end. Thawar is one of the writers featured at Gothic Toronto: Writing the City Macabre, an event for this year’s Luminato arts festival. She’s to read her haunted tale to an audience in about an hour — along with a foreword written by Atwood and a story by MacDonald. Visibly nervous, the business graduate tells me about her chance encounters with the arts. “I had big dreams of being a CEO or a stock broker, or something silly like that,” she says, laughing. “I always thought [arts] would be a hobby. I thought, ‘this isn’t a real job,’ so I never took it seriously.’” Thawar and I are holed up in a predictable Starbucks franchise, arm-to-arm with strangers at adjacent tables. She uses the phrase “stroke of luck” repeatedly, over the Queen West customer requests for soymilk and the hissing espresso machine. Born and raised in Toronto, Thawar has family roots in India and Africa. But she didn’t think of traveling until she was taken abroad as part of her commerce degree. She found herself in Japan, though her heart was set on Europe; India, only because her trip to the Philippines was cancelled; and Africa, a place she’d “never dreamed of going,” despite her familial connections. In Kenya, Thawar recalls waking at five a.m. to make homecooked meals for career couples with little time to cook, only to be met with complaints or sudden disagreements over payment. Thawar says this informal
economy is common practice among many immigrant enclaves, and one that traveled with her family to Toronto. It was the social aspect of this small economy that intrigued her. And Thawar says she began to think of her life in terms of its impact on others. “What is the life that someone else needs to be living in order for me to live the way I do?” she says of her thoughts that often carry over to literary themes. She started to write so these thoughts could escape. While most liberal arts majors were seeking job security in MBAs, Thawar was re-thinking her business career. A frantic fiveday writing binge resulted in her first short story. In 2006, Thawar submitted Packaging Parathas to Diaspora Dialogues, doubting that she’d be accepted into the program that supports and mentors emerging artists with the first piece of fiction she’d ever written. She considers her acceptance “very lucky.” Helen Walsh published Thawar’s first story in a selection for Diaspora Dialogues, and thought of the young author when she commissioned works for Gothic Toronto. Walsh was looking for writers whose literary fiction showed “expansive imagination” to pen stories set in Toronto’s various neighbourhoods. The stories were published in a limited edition chapbook of the kind sold in 18th century London—an ode to Edgar Allen Poe. When Thawar accepted, she had no idea the chapbook’s roster included Atwood and MacDonald, as well as established Canadian fiction writers Andrew Pyper and Nalo Hopkinson. She first read about it on the Internet. “My friend called me at seven o’clock in the morning on a Thursday, I even remember the day, and said, ‘Oh my God, I saw your name in the paper and it’s next to Margaret Atwood!’ I said, ‘Are you on drugs!?
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There’s no way!’” Thawar got out of bed and ran to her computer; everything her friend had said was true. Admittedly, says Thawar, a panic attack ensued. But she soon got over it and settled into the idea, counting on low expectations. Naturally, she says, no one will expect her story to be as good as the others, “so it won’t be a total disaster.” She’s nothing if not extremely modest. I’m standing outside St. George the Martyr Church on John Street — me and about three-dozen others. We’re early for the reading. Volunteers in costumes reminiscent of teenage goths are slackening the theme of Victorian gothic; and they’re turning people away. The small church is at capacity, and at risk of fire code violations. On-site copies of the limited edition chapbook soon sell out. A sympathetic Thawar emails me her story entitled Her Hands, along with hints of the genuine bewilderment that seems to serve as a default reaction to her own achievements: “I heard they were
turning people away — crazy!” When I finally read it, her subtly scary tale about a migrant worker form Bombay and his encounter with a ghost that reminds him of his mother — it’s rife with symbolism, history, themes of isolation and urban decay. It carries slightly Oedipal undertones. Any lit major will tell you that there’s no better formula for gothic. It’s hard to believe Thawar’s claim that she’d no previous connection to a dark world, or for that matter, a gothic Toronto. Her tale takes place in Scarborough, of all places. The choice of location happened by default, after Thawar learned that “most of the little ideas” she had were spoken for—Queen West and St. Andrew’s Church, for instance. She picked Scarborough at random, and only later thought, “where am I going to find something gothic in Scarborough?” She found the historic Guild Inn, an abandoned hotel overlooking the Scarborough Bluffs that serves as haunting grounds for a local group of paranormal researchers. It was here that her character encountered a guest that
only he could see. Toronto has been granted an unusual amount of literary attention recently, with the Lit City series at Open Doors, the Luminato Festival and the Harbourfront’s weekly reading series and annual author’s festival. Thawar attributes this to the city “shedding its adolescence.” She says this new artistic vision of Toronto is our way of defining it through expressive means that reflect its growing cultural diversity. When I ask her if Toronto is a gothic city, she thinks hard before answering. “I think it can be. I’m sure there’s lots of dark stories here, maybe we just need to start writing them.” Her own story, for instance, “just got creepier and creepier.” And the ending, once it came to her, just had to be written. “It couldn’t have been anything else,” she says. In gothic fiction, nothing happens by chance. The end is written into the beginning and the characters are generally plagued by powers beyond them. Everything is fate; nothing is fluke.