Nifraz takes off on a Paper Plane with his first novel
At the book launch: Nifraz Rifaz
Paper Plane is Nifraz Rifaz’s first novel, and naturally he has tipped a lot of himself into the tale. I meet this cosmopolitan young author (he’s actually into his forties but you can’t guess) over mugs of iced coffee, and he reveals himself to be like his protagonist, but also, emphatically not…
In the novel, the main character Zed is a Muslim youth who grew up in a halcyon Galle Fort, amidst a lot of Sinhalese neighbours. Nifraz himself, born in Galle with his roots in Balapitiya, as a boy at Royal College, Colombo, seemed to have thought himself as more Sinhalese than Muslim, being the go-to expert in Sinhala and texts like the medieval poetry of the Selalihini Sandesaya.
Zed’s best friend was Vimukthi whose father had been killed by the LTTE. So it is with antipathy that he regards the first Tamil family he meets as an adult, in London, where he goes to stay for work.
He is friends with the family’s daughter Maya and goes there for dinner, which is when a news flash announces the Easter Sunday attacks in Colombo. Hearing his father too has been injured in the attacks, Zed, thinking the attacks were by the LTTE storms out of Maya’s house, calling them ‘bloody tigers’.
It is later that reality kicks in and he realizes that he shares the same name as the mastermind behind the massacre: Zahran. Returning home to his badly injured father and a beleaguered wedding (his father had gone to the Cinnamon Grand to arrange his sister’s imminent nuptials), from the hostility he encounters around him, Zed is suddenly made to see how the Tamils would have felt once upon a troubled time; painted villains, though they were themselves victims.
This is just the beginning of this saga (packed into 360-something pages) which then again moves to London as Zed hovers dangerously close to the extremists, and Vimukthi gets estranged and Zed is torn between a ‘nice Muslim girl’ back home and Maya in London…
Nifraz, who is a corporate communications professional currently at MAS, has lived in Hong Kong and London. The scenes in the book are real- from vibrant bustling Soho to Camden Town and Shoreditch High Street- and the Sri Lankan scenes (since he was in Hong Kong when the attacks happened) have been put together after long conversations with trusted sources.
Nifraz still recalls the ‘movie-like’ feel when he returned to Colombo to hear cousins talking about their houses being searched after the attacks – “how their almirahs were raided, their mattresses pulled and even antique guns on walls (for decoration) eyed suspiciously”.
Nifraz put himself on a diet of Booker-winning novels before writing Paper Plane. In his twenties volunteering for the Galle Literary Festival, he met many of these literary Goliaths, and professes that at the last Ceylon Literary Festival he nabbed a selfie with Kiran Desai before getting her blessings to start the draft that would finally be Paper Plane!
As a child and in his early youth Nifraz had little wanderlust. It was later, while being in Hong Kong that he discovered a sense of place. From then on he avidly collected places. After returning to Colombo, he would see with new eyes quarters like the colourful and spicy Slave Island, Chatham Street, and the old-world atmosphere in the Grand Oriental Hotel neighbourhood near the port. It was all a process of discovery of who he is: he confesses he disliked as a boy his Southern legacy and associations, but after being abroad he embraced all that easily. In fact he was delighted when, in his first Madhu river safari, the boat-owning patriarchs would exclaim: “Aah mey Rifaz-ge putha ne!”
The book is special in that each chapter heading is a song by MIA (the Sri Lankan-born rapper Maya Arulpragasam) and MIA is in fact a palpable presence in the book.
The cover picture tells its own tale. The schoolboyish paper plane set against a square symbolizes Zed, who wants to soar free but cannot do so being weighed down by race, religion and other ‘responsibilities’…
Nifraz is confident that there is plenty more left in the cupboard for a new book. In fact he’s drafting a novel on divorce, told through a woman’s eyes. “I have so many stories in my head, I can’t wait to share them all,” he says.
Paper Plane, priced at Rs. 3000 Rupees, is available at Expographic, Sarasavi, Barefoot bookshops in Colombo and also Amazon and Kindle, or by contacting nifrazrifazbooks@gmail.com
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