Farah Ali’s The River, The Town is a gorgeous first novel about a Pakistani family navigating poverty, drought, and generational trauma. Farah and I spoke on September 27 about climate disaster around the world, how desperate circumstances lead her characters to make unexpected choices, and the idea that it’s not just food and water that’s needed for survival, but hope, care, and community.
Ali is the writer of the short-story collection People Want to Live. Her work has been anthologized in Best Small Fictions and the Pushcart Prize where it has also received special mention. Her stories have appeared in Shenandoah, Kenyon Review, Ecotone, and elsewhere. Her novel, The River, The Town, released in October 2023.
Allison Wyss: This sentence appears on the first page of The River, The Town: “Kawsar stands straighter, trying to look concerned about being caught and not about the act of wrong, trying to speak casually.” I know that feeling. Kawsar’s trying to follow his conscience without looking uncool—that is hard! It makes me think of the tendency of so many to follow the rules—or appear to be following the rules—instead of living by what they know is right. How does this relate to the bigger themes of your book?
Farah Ali: I am thinking about the wrong of anger, the wrong of hunger, the wrong of deprivation, the wrong of privilege. I am also thinking about friendship and being young, angry and defiant.
Kawsar and his friends are at an age when ideas of right and wrong are getting firmer. Because of the way they are growing up, it’s hard to create immovable rules about morals and wrongdoing. There is also the scale of wrong—how wrong is wrong? Is it wrong to go hungry? Is it wrong to be angry because of what they can’t control? Does the hunger make it okay to throw rocks at someone’s house and try to break what belongs to them because you feel they own too much? Although I think the word morality is a strong word here because of this, these boys are aware that damaging another’s possessions is not right. In this book and in most of what I write, there is a variable scale of right and wrong in between the two extreme ends of those words. Extraneous factors create tensions in these characters’ choices, and I try to give them room to change, or stay the same, or worsen. Because that’s like all of us, we don’t suddenly turn on a switch and say, “Now I’ve reached a certain age and I know for sure I’ll make great choices.”
AW: I love how this answer addresses the complexity of right and wrong and how circumstances influence that.
FA: It’s not like they have all the choices available to them. Within the set of possible paths, they choose something they think will be a good outcome for them, which is a normal human thing to do. But sometimes it might be a dubious choice.
But then I was thinking, “Who gets to call this morally correct or morally incorrect? Who gets to decide no, well, right here what you chose to do was super wrong and can’t you see the ramifications of this?”
Similarly, what is making these people angry? What is causing their recurring hurt? And can anybody even set out to fix it who is from the outside? Beyond just fixing their basic hunger and infrastructure problems, if these people take matters into their own hands, that is within the parameters of what they think is right or wrong. In a great degree, they get to call the shots on that. Maybe this is where we want to move ourselves through the protagonists’ eyes and see that okay, this is the choice this person made and this is why. It’s a sucky situation, it’s not getting any better, so what do you do in this very moment?
I don’t know anyone who thinks a twenty-year view of most actions. We don’t tend to think super long term, but make in the moment decisions. It’s the same for these people, just their circumstances are more desperate and the stakes are higher.
AW: It’s also incredibly human to act out against the world when you’re in a desperate situation—to use more emotion than rationality—even if it’s completely foreseeable that you’ll hurt yourself more than anyone else. It got me thinking that with the storytelling style you use, these characters don’t go into long rants about their feelings. Rather, we learn their feelings through these desperate acts.
FA: I wonder how much of that is linked to me who tends to act first and think later. But these characters do come from a place of hard and fast emotions that make them take big decisions because they feel like if they don’t do it now then they will lose the chance. But now that I’ve said that, I’m thinking about Raheela and how she stuck to a path for so many years, going through her own heartbreaks, so when she changed course, it probably wasn’t so much out of impetuousness.
AW: Oh, Raheela is an amazing character! I’m interested in how the book’s sequencing allows for such complexity in her. The first part is about Baadal when he is a teenager and his mother, Raheela, is pretty terrible to him. Then we go back in time to learn about Raheela’s past. At that point, I was skeptical that I could grow to empathize with her, but I really did. Later, we learn about her doing something that strikes me as unforgivably cruel. But I understand it in a much more nuanced way due to how I’ve come to know Raheela and have been on this rollercoaster regarding my feelings about her.
FA: My original idea for the book was that it will be one person and one point of view, told in a forward-looking manner with little to no flashbacks. As the story went on and the characters emerged in the life of this person called Baadal, I became deeply curious about why the others were behaving the way they were, especially Raheela. So I wrote into it to see what her beginning and growing up were like. The more I wrote it, the more I saw that this is a story about troubles carrying on from generation to generation, no leisurely time given to recovery.
AW: It doesn’t seem to excuse her behavior, though.
FA: No, I don’t think so. When we explore someone’s cruelty in fiction, it’s not to excuse it. It’s a way to see more about that person. Any excusing lies in the hands of the person dealing with that cruelty. As readers, we can see that person’s life as a complete tapestry of events.
Raheela had a complicated upbringing because of the loss of her sister and brother and their changing circumstances. Then she grows into this adult equipped with no manual—none of us have that—but in her case, she is not only not equipped with how to raise children, but also how to raise children in this horrific circumstance with no solution presenting itself. So she’s making it up as she goes along, but her mind hasn’t had time to cope or repair or understand what the task of bring up a child requires. She’s really cruel to her son, but I like how you said that looking into her past does not excuse how she is in the present. Cruelty is cruelty, and he’s innocent. And for him, she was the world, his mother, and she let him down big time. But then what next? Is there no hope of redemption? Is she never going to turn a corner? I didn’t want to end it there for her.
AW: I’m also very interested in Baadal’s determination not to seem poor when he lives in the City. For a while he can pull off that lifestyle, but after he loses his good job, he keeps spending, even though it will lead him more quickly back to poverty. The idea he has of himself has become more valuable to him than things to sustain his body. Other characters are like this to some degree as well. Only Meena never cares about looking poor—and she is frequently chastised for it!
FA: In the small setup of Baadal’s new family, when it’s him and his wife Meena, he denies his reality not because he intends to cause harm but because he feels that looking at the problem in its face would be accepting defeat.
AW: When I think about it, many of these characters’ actions are about keeping up hope, not just finding food or water. The way they go to the river, name their children, Baadal’s refusal to see that he has lost everything. Is hope a basic need?
FA: Yeah, it is. It is the vehicle that keeps them going from one day to another, from one decision to another. When making decisions, there is some hope imbued into it.The persistence of carrying on with relationships, of having children, of shifting cities or countries if they can, is always in search of faith that they can remove themselves from this situation. So even the people who go to the river, theirs is a more obvious act of faith, because they are putting the blame on themselves, thinking the causes are more intangible for what’s been happening to their town.
AW: Maybe this is related to hope, too. Throughout the book, people do desperate things for water or food or the tiniest anything. But then they are almost always turning around and giving it to someone they care about. At one point, Baadal won’t help his friend, but it’s only because he’s giving all his money to his parents. Another time, he’s giving everything to Meena. And even when Raheena doesn’t know where Baadal is, she leaves all of her food in a place he might be. I keep thinking about how beautiful this is. Other stories so often have people turning on each other when things get rough. But as bleak as this world is, there is so much community care and love. Why is it important to you to portray the characters and community this way?
FA: I like so much that you talk about care and love. I am obsessed with exploring that in people. Sometimes, despite our shortages, there is a part of us that wants to give someone else a break. In this book, there are no immutable boxes of “good person” and “bad person.” I like to think that the people in the book are the kind of people that we are, only in different circumstances.
AW: Maybe caring for others changes the way we make decisions. It’s not following a law, but taking care of the community and relationships. And maybe this community care is also about the survival of hope, the survival of not me only but the people I care about.
FA: I think as despairing as my fiction gets, I’m equally obsessed with chasing who is caring for whom or people chasing companionship or care or being cared for. I like the idea of people coming together and helping each other out. It’s such a nonrealistic way to think, in some ways. However, you sometimes see such a small example of people caring for each other. Moving a stick out of someone’s path. You don’t know who the heck is going to come along but you do it. These are small tiny ways, but we see examples of them. I love that we have the capacity for it.
We’re not built for selfishness. We’re not built for being by ourselves. Humans are beings that require a community, whatever the size of that is. And not just community, but on a closer level, relationships. I like that. Or at least understanding that people have the capacity for it. So I kind of stick it in my stories somehow.
AW: A distinction The River, The Town has from many other stories of catastrophic events is that the drought and poverty are ongoing for generations, instead of occurring all at once. I sometimes think that the sexiness of sudden catastrophe, followed by some heroic action of a handsome savior, is an obstacle to taking real action on climate change. Harm mitigation for an ongoing problem will save lives, but it’s not a thrilling story. So we need stories like this one.
FA: The format of a novel usually gives you moments from characters’ lives. Not all of them have to be formative moments but they add up to something. I wanted to show that what’s happening in the story started before any of the times that the book mentions, from the very beginning when the river was first formed, what its path was like throughout the centuries or millennia, how the lives of the people on its banks bloomed or suffered.
There aren’t quick fixes for climate change and the effects it has upon our lives. To understand why a river is drying, we need to go into the past to see where crisis started. As well, the “fixing” creates false optimism and makes us think we can be completely absolved from our part in worsening a problem. If we talk about “repair” instead, we allow for scars to show, for the mending to show. So a repair would be to go into the history of an area, to take care of the people living there, listening to them and letting them take charge of the problem.
AW: Can you talk more about the difference between a fix and a repair? I wonder if that ties in at all with a complex sense of right and wrong that we keep coming back to in this conversation.
FA: The idea of fixing tends to make us feel unreasonably optimistic. I’m not saying we should deal in despair daily. That’s going to sink us. But fixing connotes the idea that everything related to a problem will take care of itself once the thing is fixed. Let’s fill the river with water somehow and magically everything will be resolved. All the people will get their lives back and on track emotionally, healthwise, economically. But that’s not how it works. Everything can’t be fixed with a glue stick.
Repair is a more cautious, long term approach. Kind of like therapy, I think. It’s painful. it’s gross sometimes. It requires so much work and there are so many wonky fault lines and scars and stuff and it’s a daily slog but there it is. It’s a repair, not a fix.
AW: Does it tie in at all with the way people in the town go to the river? Living there is about atoning for sins and bringing better times to the Town. But it’s also scorned by other people in the Town.
FA: I’m so glad you talk about the river and the spiritual beliefs of the people who go. They are trying to find solutions. In a right way or a wrong way, they are holding themselves accountable. They have faith in something bigger than themselves.
Whereas other people like Baadal and his mother, when they persist in carrying on, it is because of hope, not some glorious golden hope, but just enough to remove from their difficulty. I think there’s a lot of faith built into people’s lives.
AW: You’re not necessarily talking about religious faith. Some of it is religious, but there is also just faith in the future or the self or the community. What do you think that faith is in?
FA: That’s a good question. It’s a general idea of faith in some indescribable betterness out there. For the people who go to the river, it is religious faith or an aspect of it. I am a practicing religious person, so for me the idea of faith is something that I see in the characters. Having faith does not mean that you have a pat answer for difficulties or shrug your shoulders and say, “oh well, it’s all meant to be.” You can have the faith while acknowledging this is a really shitty situation. So for some characters, it was just a general idea. But for others, it was important to show that they’re practicing in the space of whatever faith they know.
AW: Faith seems strong in many people’s lives, whether or not they are religious. But we don’t talk about it that much.
FA: It’s a belief! Whatever that belief. In continuing from day to day and carrying on in some idea of some good out there or good that you’re going to do for yourself. When I say “good,” I don’t mean in a religious sense but good like a hope, right?
AW: We keep coming back to hope. And yet, these characters are persistently in distress. There is not enough water or food. Sometimes there is no safe place to sleep. Even when they have enough, it’s temporary. It’s excruciating to read this and feel the realness of it. I hope it doesn’t feel trivializing if I ask about that from a craft perspective. How much did you think about modulating those life-or-death stakes of thirst and hunger with the more interpersonal conflicts that happen?
FA: There’s a wonderful word for contentment in Urdu, sukoon. It has more weight than happiness. We try to maintain this state, trying to minimize the effect of stressors upon it. If there are extraordinary stressors on a person then the striving for sukoon is so much harder. In the novel, the whole meaning of living is different, as are the factors that define equilibrium. But even in that, it is different for every individual, because of their relationships, their mental makeup, their personal histories. Even though food security and permanent shelter are what they all want, they’re seeking other things as well that make up their idea of sukoon.
I like that this question is from a craft perspective. I tend to get really inside a character’s head. So when I would be writing about Baadal, I would be thinking about what he wants, and what he would do to get it, and then along would come some situation that he is not in control of. I was not super conscious about creating a set of inward struggles and a set of outward factors. I was writing more from inside a character’s mind, aware of the outside world, which had its own causes and effects.
AW: That seems like how we live as real people. We’re thinking of our inward struggles, but the outside problems are just there, and we can’t help bumping against them. And the conditions in this book are real. We’re not in an imaginary world, but on this earth, and people are really going through these things.
FA: These places are fictional in my head, but the situation is not fiction. The lack of water is not fictional. Even in a really large city like Karachi, which is where I grew up, there are infrastructure problems from water to power to gas for stoves. And then reading so much about this huge growing gap between the people who cause the trouble and those who bear the brunt of what they’re causing, who live in “far-flung” areas of the country, places they don’t have to see, so they don’t have to have their consciences prickled by it. The sense of all of that became the setting, the problem, and the people for this book.
I remember reading years ago, there was this mother who said when her child complains of hunger, she just pats their back and makes them go back to sleep because what she can do? She can’t get him water or food because it’s not there. That particular incident was specific to Pakistan, but there are lots of parts of the world where this is true, and you don’t have to be in a rural setting or in an especially economically challenged place either. It can just be the policies of a country that don’t reach out to everyone equally.
So I did have specific situations in mind. Maybe by not naming things, it became more general, but I did prefer it that way. I experimented with putting actual names and it didn’t feel right to me. Maybe because I was afraid of people making a snap judgment. Like, okay this is a story from Pakistan so it’s bound to be about all this. They’re going to say it anyway, but I just wanted to not make it so easy for them to say that.
AW: It also feels archetypal calling it “the river.” It’s obviously a specific river going through a specific drought, but maybe it could also be any river.
FA: Absolutely. Just this summer I moved to London. There was no water in streams. I’ve visited this place many times and I’ve never seen it o parched and burnt out. That’s all the result of climate change. So the effects of this are everywhere. In wealthy countries or in less wealthy nations or in one form or another.
AW: I live close to a waterfall that completely dried up. It was shocking. But it didn’t affect my ability to survive. There was always going to be water from the tap. So I feel bad that I was so terrified.
FA: It’s okay to be terrified by that. One doesn’t have to shrink down the scale of the problem by always comparing to other places. It’s good to be terrified by a shrinking waterfall.
AW: And yet we need to have hope still.
FA: Oh gosh, yeah.
AW: I love your book for being about that. Things can be so desperate and people still find hope.
FA: Can’t give up. Can’t just throw up our hands and say oh well. Now we’re living in this horrible situation. We have to continue working toward something. We’re still here.
Allison Wyss is the author of the short story collection Splendid Anatomies (Veliz Books), which was a finalist for the 2022 Shirley Jackson Award. Her stories and essays have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Cincinnati Review, Water~Stone Review, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. Some of her ideas about the craft of fiction can be found in a monthly column she writes for the Loft Literary Center, where she also teaches classes.
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