Stronger Together

In a world exclusive, Bazaar photographs literary powerhouses Tishani Doshi, Fatima Bhutto, and Tahmima Anam. And through their stories on writers from the subcontinent who continue to inspire them, we see the enduring bonds of sisterhood.

The night Scheherazade lay down with King Shahryar, she began to tell him a story. All night long, the angry king listened, enthralled. Before the morning and her execution—(the king was grieving his wife’s infidelity; as part of his recovery, he married a new bride every night and killed her in the morning)—Scheherazade stopped her tale but didn’t finish it. And so the king let her live, only to hear the end. But every story revealed another story and another and another.

1,001 nights passed and with them the king’s fury. Alf Layla wa Layla was the book’s Arabic title.

In October, I will publish my second novel, The Runaways. I named one of the main female characters Layla, night in Arabic.

Like Scheherazade, Layla is a secret-keeper and a storyteller. She survives by changing her story every night and by believing that dawn will break a thousand times before she must finish her tale.

My father gave me an illustrated edition of One Thousand and One Nights when I was a child and I, like the angry King, was forever captivated by Scheherazade and her stories. I grew up in awe of storytellers and all those curious souls who play with words, observing the self and the world as though their lives depend on it. I read Tishani’s poems 10 years ago after hearing her at a festival in Mumbai. I normally give away books after I read them, but I kept a 2008 issue of Granta only because it contained a story written by Tahmima. Who can speak of women writers without saluting Fahmida Riaz, whose Urdu feminist poetry raised so many of us? Who didn’t love The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri? Rohini Mohan, Meena Kandasamy, Eunice de Souza, Sonia Faleiro, Bapsi Sidhwa; it is impossible to pick just one out of this constellation.