Harvard Ed.
It was early evening in Karachi,
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“Once I decided I was going to go for it, I always thought I’d go for it in a big way. I always hoped I’d be known internationally. I always had that kind of attitude: I’ll do it myself and figure it out as I go along.”
and BINA SHAH, ED.M.’94, was settling down with a cup of tea. Dinner was hours away, and she had a phone interview lined up with an American reporter. She was taking a break from work on her seventh book, a feminist dystopian novel in the tradition of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale but with what she calls a “distinctly Asian phenomenon” — that of the rising maleto-female birth rate and the consequences for society. As any talented writer will tell you, Shah isn’t sure the novel is any good. “Every time you write, you’re taking a gamble,” she says. “I am plagued by fears that it’s a ridiculous premise or that it’s completely unbelievable.” By that measure, Shah takes a lot of gambles. Not only has she published four novels and two short story collections, but she’s also a journalist, contributing regularly to The International New York Times, Al Jazeera, and Dawn, Pakistan’s oldest English-language newspaper. She posts regularly on her blog. She’s active on Facebook and Twitter. Her writing, it seems, is everywhere. Pretty impressive for someone who never really planned on being a professional writer. When she came back to Pakistan after her year at Harvard, where she had been drawn
to the Technology, Innovation, and Education Program (tie) and to professors like Eleanor Duckworth and Gerald Lesser, and a year writing medical manuals for a software company outside of Boston (plus four at Wellesley as an undergrad psychology major), she had no idea what she was going to do. “I was dislocated. I was very lost,” she says. And so she started to write. For two technology publications, using her tie skills. For cultural websites and literary journals. And then for herself: short stories, which led to her first collection, Animal Medicine, and then a year later, her first novel, Where They Dream in Blue. “The writing really helped me find myself.” And so, she jumped in headfirst. “Once I decided I was going to go for it, I always thought I’d go for it in a big way. I always hoped I’d be known internationally,” she says. “I always had that kind of attitude: I’ll do it myself and figure it out as I go along.” the first time shah had to figure it out as she went along. Just after she was born in 1972, her parents took her to live in the United States while her father, Shafqat, was getting his master’s degree in foreign affairs at the University of Virginia. The initial plan was to live abroad for two years. “He decided to stay on and complete his Ph.D. That decision was influenced in part by political events,” she says. Her uncle, Zulfiqar Ali Shah, had been jailed by then-Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, (the father of future Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto), for his association with Pir Pagara, a spiritual leader of the Sunni Muslim order of the Hurs. It was feared that Shah’s father might be next. “So he made the swift decision to stay on in Virginia,” she says. As she wrote in a piece published on Medium, the decision was not only swift, but also nerve-wracking. “In a midnight escape more thrilling than the screenplay of any movie, my father, mother, and I fled to the airport, where friends arranged for us to be driven straight onto the tarmac, avoiding passport control and Bhutto’s cronies in the immigration department,” she wrote. “We boarded a plane
