Interview with Andleeb Shadani, Winner of the 2025 New Voices Award in Nonfiction

By Clement Yue and John Muellner

Andleeb Shadani was selected as the winner of Washington Square Review’s New Voices Award in Nonfiction by guest judge Parul Sehgal for his piece “The Eyes of Women.” The following is an email exchange between the winner and Washington Square Review’s Nonfiction Editors.

Andleeb Shadani is a poet, essayist, and short story writer. He is working on a collection of stories, My House, My Ruins.

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WASHINGTON SQUARE REVIEW: How did you start writing creative nonfiction and who do you see your work in lineage and conversation with?

ANDLEEB SHADANI: It was always Borges. It started when I read his essays, about refutation of time, about immortality, other essays like “A History of Angels” and “An Investigation of the Word,” even his biography of Evaristo Carriago. Every piece carefully crafted like a mathematical theorem, a strange theory, something you accidentally discover in that black leather bound book, with inscriptions in a golden ink, in the library’s last stack, where even the librarian doesn’t want to go, that book which no one wants to touch, guarded by two spiders and a black lizard, the moment you put your white-gloved hand on the book, and try to take it out, they disappear like shadows at the beginning of a new day.

There was something in his nonfiction work, something beyond fiction, very layered, like all his prose, a mirror inside a mirror, inside a labyrinth of mirrors, at end of which you always see Borges standing, with his face towards the other mirror, an old blind man in a black and white suit, the minotaur of the mysterious literary world.

It was through Borges I learned how to blur that line between fiction and nonfiction, and that when you are writing fiction it should feel like a very true story, and something which can’t be made up, and when you are writing nonfiction, it should feel so strange and mysterious, something unbelievable. It was this creative liberty that he takes while writing nonfiction that was revelatory for me, and almost compelled me to write essays where I took the creative liberty, but made sure everything I said was around facts and was a true story. I started writing movie reviews—I would take a movie and only focus on themes and scenes that resonated deeply or made sense to me. I mostly wrote about films that had something in them that I have experienced or something that has happened around me or someone I know very closely.

I still remember the first movie about which I wrote. It was Farrokhzad’s The House is Black. What fascinated me in the film was the depiction of the condition of lepers.

There was a woman in my maternal grandmother’s neighborhood. Her house, very little like a matchbox, it must have been painted white, but had faded over the years, there was a little rusted gate, and while going towards the local shop, we would see her, seated in the verandah, making dolls of wood, she would carve them from little cubes of mango wood, and then paint them. If you stood near the gate and looked at her, she would open her toothless mouth and smile, sometimes she would show the doll, and signal for you to come inside. There were rumors, there were always rumors about any man and woman living alone: widowers, retired teachers, court-martialed colonels, old women and men abandoned by their children, there was always some strange rumor about them. The parents would advise the children not to go near those homes. If you went around those houses, you would vanish. There were speculations that most of the children who vanished still lived in those houses. Sometimes even the police would be called, but there wouldn’t be any children in those houses, but the parents would still say that they could hear the voices of children. Many parents hear the voices of their children, even after they have died. Many married couples keep hearing the voices of their children, even if in reality they never had any.

That woman, all day, she would just carve and paint those dolls. In the evening an elderly bearded man would come and take them to other neighborhoods to sell on his bicycle. Earlier she used to sell them directly to the children, but then their parents would get angry if they went near that house. She died when I was in Class 5, but even today, when I pass through that house, I look at that verandah, and it feels as if she is seated there, painting dolls. I also wrote in a short story that the woman died, but that the elderly bearded man still roamed around the other streets of the city selling those dolls. There must be many other such houses, and many other old women who live alone. In every house in ruins, there is a woman standing at the window, or her shadow, a woman in the verandah making dolls, a man coming from a far distance on his cycle, you never see the cycle, sometimes you see the shadows on the heated afternoon walls, sometimes you only hear the bell.

I wrote my first essay about that woman, about leprosy, and Farrokhzad’s film. There was a scene in the film, where a leper woman tries to put kohl in her eyes. That was very fascinating, and though it has been more than decade since I watched that short film, that scene is still there in my head, like faces staying inside a mirror, even if the onlooker has vanished or died. That first essay mainly centered on the way we look at ourselves, faces, the true face of every human created by God. That’s how I started writing essays about films, about writers whose stories I read as a child. I wrote one essay about Oscar Wilde and “The Happy Prince.” I also want to write an essay on the real biography of Dorian Gray. I want to write essays about other writers, such as Omar Khayyam, Cahit Külebi, about Nissim Ezekiel; one day I will also write an essay about Coleridge, albatrosses, and the ghosts of dead sailors.

WSR: Where do you get inspiration for a piece? And once you get started, what is your writing and research process like?

AS: Most of the stories I wrote—almost everything that I have written—is about my city, Lucknow. I am trying to create an alternate history, a very personal history through my stories and essays, and even some poems. I write about families, about houses that don’t exist anymore. I am trying to create the city of my childhood, of a past that doesn’t exist anymore. My research process is long, and sometimes goes for months. Writing then becomes very easy—I write the first draft in a day or two mostly, and then leave it and don’t look at it for a long time, then come back, edit, and leave. Then after a while I come back, work, and see if I want to leave or if it’s done. Like a mother coming to watch again and again the sleeping child in the crib—when she is assured that he is asleep, she goes back and starts reading that detective novel she’s been trying to finish for weeks, she reads and then dozes off, when she wakes up, the house is silent, like those houses where the whole family has left for Arkansas. She wakes up like one wakes up sometimes in someone else’s house, they look around here and there, is it my house, they go back to sleep thinking they would wake up in that previous house again, like that married woman who goes back to sleep after her wedding night thinking she would wake up in her lover’s arms again.  No one wakes up in a house that has since been demolished, no one wakes up in the arms of a lover who is now a mere memory.

Most people, while living in a house, keep thinking of that previous house where they used to live. Most people while in love think of their previous lover; most people who fall in love for the first time have to invent a previous lover so that they can think of someone. You need someone in your past, some place where you once lived, even a dream would count—a house that only exists in the memory of a dream, an imaginary lover, an invented child. That mother, when she wakes up in that house and doesn’t hear any child’s cry, runs to the crib, but in that room there is no crib, nor any child. Most women become pregnant in dreams, you need to be careful while making love even in dream. Most children are born like that, most houses also constructed like that, most of my stories are also invented like that, some are extensions of a dream I saw, or forced myself to see, most of my stories are just a transcription of nightmares and personal traumas.

WSR: Because “The Eyes of Women” isn’t something you experienced directly, what convinced you to write it? What was compelling about telling a story through someone else’s eyes?

AS: What was fascinating in this case, and in most of the cases that I explore, was human relationships—in this piece, the marital relationship of my aunt and her husband—or a lot of people I know or have written about: couples who against all the odds want to get married, and then within a span of time, again against all odds want to get separated, and can’t live together anymore. All my stories—fiction, nonfiction, even micros, even a poem—have a love of story at the center. My literature is an exploration of love, a psychoanalysis, a trying to understand why people fall in love, how they fall in love, and how do we stay, and then why do we leave, and who is that person whom we love, is he or she an extension of our own desires, a projection of our dreams. I am interested in the sociology, philosophy, ontology, and phenomenology of love. One day I will write an essay about the history of love.

WSR: The use of kohl—its history and application—in the piece was particularly arresting and lovely to see braided into the narrative of your aunt and cousin. How important are central motifs in your work? Which usually comes first: the idea of an object or the narrative?

AS: It’s always the idea. I need to have a clear picture of what I want to write about, sometimes you discover new things when you are writing, but then still I can’t start until I have a clear idea of what I am going to write about, and it has to be very exciting just at the time of invention and dreaming.

WSR: You bring up the idea of different worlds throughout the piece. The refrain of “aren’t we the two most beautiful women of this world?” and the use of mirrors reflects a world parallel to ours that’s close enough to touch, yet too distant to engage. Do you feel like an alternative life is accessible to any of us?

AS: I don’t believe in one alternative life, but many, as many as there are mirrors and there are faces, and dreams. I live inside a dream that someone else is watching; I know who. I don’t see a difference between a dream and reality, and even between life and death. I think of other worlds, other places, other cities, cities that only exist on the map. I think of the world in which I am alive, and I think of that world in which I might die, or rather the world which I might reach after my death. They say there are stairs inside the graveyard that you climb, like little children climb to go to the roof, and then you reach that place where all the dead are assembled. I think of those worlds that I created in dreams, in those lonely afternoons of my childhood. Life is also like a continuous dream, which may have certain pauses, but restarts again, like switching on a television.

WSR: Finally, are there any projects that you’re working on right now that you'd be excited to tell us about?

AS: I’m working on a collection of stories, My House, My Ruins, stories and essays about houses and families that don’t exist anymore. What happens to a house after the families who inhabited them die or vanish? Most of the houses become ruins, then memories, part of oral history. Some of the houses end up becoming mere black and white photographs. I still remember that elderly man who had a Seiko watch in his hand that wasn’t working. He told me it belonged to his father, who was a bookseller. I met him at a tea stall when I was conducting some interviews with families in the older parts of the city. We started talking, and I told him the purpose of my interview. He put his shaky wrinkled hand in his old kurta’s pocket with that Seiko watch—an old steel watch, the glass broken, and I think it wasn’t working. The kurta had stains of betel leaves, like the stains of blood you see on a butcher’s cloth.

He took out a photograph, a black and white photograph of his old house. He told me in a little stuttering voice that the house was demolished, and now an arcade of shops exists in its place. I put the photograph on my palm. There was a courtyard, I could see a tree in a corner, even the leaves fallen on the floor. There was a room that was closed; this belonged to my father, he said. “After he died, we closed the room. Even after his death, sometimes we would hear someone lighting a cigarette or coughing, that’s how we always knew that our father was in the house. He talked very little. Someone had told him that if you talk very little, if you stop talking altogether, one day you would start hearing the voice of God. My poor father, he didn’t even speak a word for more than two decades, just to hear the voice of God. Why would someone want to hear the voice of God? And how would he know that it’s the voice of God, and not of Satan?” That old man laughed, showing me his uneven teeth, painted red with the betel leaves he was chewing. That evening when the dusk was still a few centimeters away from that tea shop where we were seated, he was still showing me that photograph; pointing at the stairs, started telling me about his childhood. My siblings and I, all day we used to run up and down, and our mother would cry from her room, “Don’t play all the time,” she would say kids who play all the time never grow up, and if you don’t grow up, no one would marry you.

That elderly man, with the help of that photograph, gave me a house tour. He pointed his finger at the courtyard and said, “Under that pomegranate tree.” There was a little grave, with some dry roses kept over it. “This is the place where my sister is buried, she died in her infancy, my mother always wanted to have a daughter, even after her death, she would buy clothes from the market, girl’s clothes, even a wedding gown.” His eyes became teary. “They said my mother is mad. They said that’s why my father had stopped speaking, or if he would talk he would have to speak to my mother. My neighbors used to say that if you talk with the mad, you would become mad.” He wiped his tears with his wrinkled hand, and then pointed to the hall beside the courtyard, “This is the place where we ate our lunch and dinner. Lunch we ate alone. My father was always at the bookshop. My mother was at the neighbor’s house. Dinner all of us ate together, even if Abba was very late.” There was a guest room beside the hall. It wasn’t visible in the picture, most of the rooms and the other places weren’t visible in the picture. But he kept on revealing the secret architecture of that house, telling me about each and every locked room, about those who lived in those rooms, but are now dead. He then put his finger on the roof, “This is the place where we kids played hopscotch.” He kept on telling me everything he knew about that house, as if through the telling of the tale he was trying to polish his old memory. I saw him a few more times seated on a wooden bench on that tea stall—he would be showing that picture to some other man or boy, telling them everything about his old house. He would see me sometimes and smile, like the way that old leper women used to smile, showing me her toothless mouth. Even today when I close my eyes, I feel like I am walking inside his house, as if he played a trick on me, and made me enter inside that house. “Most of the empty houses need families, men and women to stay inside,” my mother used to say. Houses in which no one lives get possessed by ghosts, some of the houses in themselves are ghosts, some are just ruins, some get demolished, few will be resurrected.

Most of the people in my city, even today, if you go and meet them, they have a story to tell. Most of the men and women in my city have houses, which are either in ruins or don’t exist anymore. My childhood house doesn’t exist anymore. There are just the photographs in old family albums. Like some houses, some families, some men and women, after a point they are just mere photographs, some aren’t even that, just memories, and then they vanish with those people, the secret guards of those memories, like a rose garden that vanishes and dries up the same day the gardener dies. The gardener dies, the garden vanishes, but now in the place where the rose garden used to exist there is a children’s park or a cinema hall. Even today in those places, the smell of roses is always in the air. That’s what I am trying to do, that’s what my whole writing is about, trying to capture the smell of dried roses, inventing the vanished rose garden, resurrecting the crucified gardener.