Ausma Zehanat Khan on Writing Injustice and Empathy

When I was a child, my young and adventurous parents embarked on a road trip from England to Pakistan with all their kids in the car. We drove through Europe—including the Balkans, which unbeknownst to me would form the backdrop of my first mystery novel—before transiting through Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan. My memories of the trip are hazy: I remember a field of white seashells on the shores of the Caspian Sea, and a rather traumatic car accident in Turkey, but I don’t personally recall the stories my father told of the famous hospitality of Afghans as our car broke down on numerous occasions and we were cared for by the kindness of strangers. As I grew up, I would learn that hospitality and the offering of refuge are cornerstones of the Pashtun code. The term “Pashtun” (Pathan in the Urdu language, Pukhtun or Pashtun in the Pashto or Pukhto language) refers to a group of Pashto-speaking people who live primarily in southern Afghanistan and northwest Pakistan. They make up one of the largest ethnic groups in Afghanistan and are the second-largest group in Pakistan. I come from a Pathan family that speaks a number of different languages, but was raised in an Urdu-speaking environment, a language heavily influenced by Persian and Arabic. This likely explains my love of complex worlds and identities, and how I began to imagine the world of The Bloodprint.

As a teenager, I traveled to Pakistan often, spending entire summers in the company of an extended network of my Pathan or Pashtun relatives. On one of our more memorable visits, my father took us to the threshold of the Khyber Pass—a route through a narrow gorge loomed over by towering mountains, and a place of unbridled romanticism. Afghans, Persians, Greeks, Mughals and the British all marched through the Khyber Pass at different periods in its history. Some Pashtuns believe they are descendants of Alexander the Great’s Macedonian army, which may be an explanation for the green-eyed members of my family. The pass connects Kabul, Afghanistan to Peshawar, Pakistan, and spurred by my father’s stories of Khyber, I dreamed of traveling through the Khyber Pass one day.

Peshawar is my father’s hometown, and as a teenager it was a magical place to me: the more time I spent there, the more I learned about the customs of its people. Eventually I would come to understand that these were my people and that many of their customs were still being practiced by my parents in a city on the Canadian prairies. If we were tempted to mope or complain about life’s setbacks, my father would remind us that Pathans should demonstrate courage and focus on honorable behavior. My siblings and I still remind each other of the teasing refrain “real Pathans don’t cry.” Yet looking at the present, the Pashtun people have much to mourn, much that tests their resilience and endurance. Decades of war, an unresolved refugee crisis, the proliferation of guns and drugs on either side of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, the coming of the Taliban (a group that consists predominantly of Pashtuns), the Taliban’s war against women and girls and non-Pashtuns, staggeringly high levels of illiteracy, and oppressive authoritarian rule in Taliban-held areas.

All of this was inspiration for The Bloodprint. I imagined a group like the Taliban run amok, using a people’s own traditions to undo them. Though the stark and vast beauty of the landscape were easy to describe—I had my own memories, I had my family’s photographs and stories, and thanks to the Internet I had unlimited tools for research—it was not as easy to conceive of a way to write about the impact of authoritarian rule on vulnerable groups without demonizing a particular group. I realized that the best way to tell the story of The Bloodprint was to imagine what women could do to change things if they held knowledge and power in their hands. So characters like Arian and other members of the Council of Hira would find their strength and courage within their own tradition, a tradition that speaks of human dignity.

I love characters who stand against injustice but who also understand the social and political conditions that bring injustice about. Though Talisman rule in The Bloodprint is oppressive, the people the Talisman recruit are Arian and Daniyar’s own people, people they have empathy for, people they will fight for, even when they stand against Arian and Daniyar’s hopes for a kinder, more tolerant world.

This was the world my father tried to show us with the stories he told us and with those visits to Peshawar. It’s why I still hope to travel through the Khyber Pass one day.