Telepathy

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When I wrote my latest novel, Hunger’s Hopes, in only about a month, driven by its many inspirations and multiple twists and turns, which suddenly and effortlessly revealed themselves to me, I never imagined it would bedevil me with an apparently intractable problem, that I would be pursued by the nightmare of its associations, or that despite all my efforts, I wouldn’t be able to escape.

I had returned from a splendid trip to Kuala Lumpur, an Eastern city that had stirred me profoundly and that I hoped to write about one day to capture its mischievous vigor. There I met cultural luminaries, capitalists, teachers, women of the night, and bums in the street. A number of personalities I encountered intrigued me, and in their distinctive appeal I recognized prototypes for characters in a novel, ones that would enrich any novel. Liyung Tuli, or Master Tuli as they called him, was one of these potential characters who dazzled me. He was an extremely well-known acupuncturist, and I noted his fitness despite his age, his very sincere smile, his extreme elegance, and the way he shed light on an ancient Chinese profession. The secretary at his clinic, Anania Faruq, whose nationality I did not know for sure — a common occurrence within the mix of ethnicities in that tumultuous city — was also a memorable character. Her unusual height, her heavy use of cosmetics such as green and red eye shadow, her dresses that did not defer to any known style, her shoes fashioned from canvas and reinforced cardboard, and the army of patients and their companions who flirted with her overtly or silently, made her a living model for an Eastern princess who undertook an impetuous journey to a repressed Arab land — in a novel that had to be written someday.

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