Can you talk a bit about how “It Might Be He Returns” took shape and what inspirations fed into it?

This is maybe my oldest story or the story I’ve had in me for the longest time. Many of my stories out in the world right now were brought into being by my adult self. This story is different because the setting and framework took shape when I myself was still a child. The biggest influence was my own encounters with unhoused children on the streets of Karachi. Either on the way to school myself or coming to and from places in the city. There is no childhood for them, and no organised resource or infrastructure to resort to. This has been the case for lifetimes and continues to be so. This extreme unkindness hurts the children affected most and also impacts the rest of the city who either ignore it or respond to it ineffectively, disjointedly, and in a way that often deals with the symptoms but never eradicates the problem at its root.

How do you help? At most you can fill people’s bellies, which is what many citizens of Karachi in positions of privilege attempt to do. You can finance opportunities for education and facilitate an end to poverty for families, and to do so you yourself need to fight a bloodthirsty economy. And for practical purposes that’s pretty much it. There’s a whole conversation to be had about why this is the case, what more we could be doing, what legacies have played into this disgusting crisis. Talking to the children, you get a variety of stories. Some true, some what they are made to say by gangs or their own families. The influence of that and of the varied reactions of the people around me to that led to this story.

In my childhood version (very different from this one) the story ends with the child teaming up with the fantastical creatures of the city and ultimately gaining a victory for the city as a whole. Here I leave it a little more complex. The inspiration for that is my own relationship to Karachi and how I feel towards it as an adult.

While the story takes place on both sides of a mirror, the other world read far stranger than I’d expect from a simple reflection—for example, the horse and cat made of paper. What led you to choose a mirror as the portal between the two cities?

I think for me, looking into a mirror at a tailor’s shop or clothes shop in a mall has always been less about seeing yourself and more about looking into a crystal ball and divining which item possesses enough magic you can peacock yourself into maintaining or elevating your social status. Once you buy into the game of using conspicuous consumption to win, you have become a coconspirator in dystopia. I think dystopia exists when ideas are robbed of any floweriness and stripped down to their truest essence only to be invalidated and not accommodated despite being irrepressibly present. In our everyday life we see suffering, and many of us engage in systemic oppressions anyway. We don’t improve our lives or truly benefit ourselves despite this transaction. We’re stuck in the dystopia too. In the story I find the place beyond the mirror to be the truest form of our everyday lives and yet also unseen and unvisited. Things there appear in ways we are not used to but reflect a reality of their being. How I wrote ink and paper in their animal incarnations perhaps reflects how much life was imbued in the experience readers and writers had of them.

I found the story preoccupied with the problems of casual, acquisitive cruelty, with the mirror both reflecting and shaping the world, feeding into the ultimate question of what a city is for. What do you think a city is for?

What a city is for is such a terrible question to grapple with. I think a city should be a place everyone can call home, whether in happily chosen anonymity or in spaces made to connect and nurture one another. Cities attempt this, but mainly, cities are a repository and exporter for industrial growth, and so they are immersed in all the ramifications of that. Sadly, what people think a city is for is couched in power and who they think should have it. The attitudes towards genocide in cities like Gaza and manufactured despair and alienation between demographics makes for more loneliness and anger and real threat to human life and health. But I think many people are savvy to that and there’s more cause to hope for a future of collective happiness than not.

The story, to me, ended on something of a cynical note; Fawad is already in danger of forgetting his education, and embracing a life that is only his because of luck. What sort of notes were you hoping readers would carry away from the story?

It is cynical, isn’t it? When Fawad is putting the case of the people of the city in front of the personification of Karachi, I do get the feeling he’s championing a lost cause. I think the way Karachi and the Other Tailor gave way also seems very suspicious. But maybe they too have been disappointed and betrayed many times before as well.

This is what I think happens though, and it is only because I love this kid and have all my life: I personally think Fawad does go back. “It Might Be He Returns” is such an obvious manipulation, the only plot twist it allows for is that he WILL return. He returns, and apprentices in magic and gets an education both esoteric and practical for what counts for a hundred years on that side of the mirror. I think he then becomes some sort of Fairy King or uber Jinn Baba and remoulds the city of Karachi into something never seen in the world before. (Okay maybe I haven’t left my childhood version of the story very far behind.)

Does this put too much pressure on a single individual? Maybe that’s the next thing Fawad discovers on his quests. These things are collective, no matter how great an impact one person’s sincerity and personality has. I suppose that’s what a city is in the end. We’re all just events that happen with no real agency over the directions other events around us will be triggered into. And that’s okay. I’m thinking of Frodo now when he says, “I will take the ring though I do not know the way.” We all end up not knowing the way, only knowing our own singular role for right now, wandering forever en route to a collective change.

I think readers should take away from this story what they will, and I would love to be surprised by takes I haven’t anticipated or thought of.

Is there anything you’re working on that you’d like to talk about? What can our readers look forward to seeing from you in the future?

Two anthologies I’ve been lucky to have stories feature in: one is The Map of Lost Places compiled by the amazing Sheree Renée Thomas and Lesley Conner. The other is Monsters in Masquerade by the team at the very interesting and aesthetically pleasing OwlCrate. And I have a website, fatimataqvi.com, where my previous publications are linked.

I would also like to do a shout-out to my Clarion West cohort of 2023 who gave me feedback on this story in one of its incarnations.