How, I guess, as a writer, do you approach that question of audience as you think about what sounds to me like a mission? Like there's something in your heart that's driving it.

I think I gave myself a kind of responsibility that usually authors shouldn't give themselves.

Their only responsibility, I think, is their obligations to their craft and to writing.

But because of where I come from and the experiences that Afghanistan in general had and the misrepresentation of it, for as long as you can think back from the Cold War, from the Great Game onwards and to this day, but also the experience of my people, the Hazaras within Afghanistan, all these connections and me being in the center of them and also a person who is Canadian and writes in English and in Canada, it gives me an obligation to write about things the way I see them and the way that is closer to reality.

Because in news media and also in popular culture and fiction, Afghanistan has been very hot topic at least for the past 20 years but at the same time because it is such a complex story such a complex society and for authors and for news media in the in the west to make this complexity more digestible for the audience they have been oversimplifying it to the point that it doesn't make sense.

The complexity of that country and why it is going through all these chaotic times doesn't translate with the reality.

People don't understand what's going on.

But, Jamal, tell me about your relationship to this ubiquitous book, this book that was everywhere for a time.

Mm.

Because for one thing, I admire and appreciate Khaled Hosseini's, um, efforts that he introduced Afghanistan to, to audience that, um, [lips smack] hadn't been done before.

As you said, you know, how many copies the book sold, and it kind of piqued the curiosity of the world about Afghanistan and kind of familiarized them with that country.

Um, but I think it's, it's challenging in the way that it has been portrayed, um, the Afghan, um, story.

There are-- You know, I was talking, um, a couple days ago with a friend who was a Hazara, and he, we were talking about The Kite Runner, and he says Khaled Hosseini has been very brave to, um, to call out the Pashtuns on the, on the atrocities that they have committed, the Taliban and, you know, the massacre of the Hazaras in, um, in Mazar-i-Sharif and all that.

And in The Kite Runner, he comes out very clearly and boldly and says that these are the atrocities that the Pashtuns have, um, committed, for which, you know, um, he should be admired for his openness and for, for his courage to do that.

But at the same time, when it comes to, um, talking about the Hazaras, the novel and, uh, fails to, to rise above this, this, this narrative, this main narrative that was created by Abdur Rahman Khan, um, the king who massacred or ordered to massacre 60% of the Hazaras.

Where in the writing of this book did your novel fit in? Were you writing Nothing Good Happens in Mazar-i-Sharif on Wednesday at the same time that some of these essays were being written?

How do you, particularly as a newly arrived Afghan, how do you cope?

It is very difficult, to say the least, because you are uprooted.

And whatever life you had built for yourself, whether that was your social connections, whether that was the accumulation of lived memory in that place, whether that was your business and financial side of things, You leave all of that behind and you arrive in a place where you have no memory of it, of the land that you are on.

Your financial situation is all over the place.

Especially one of the experiences that I had, finding work was so, so difficult.

Everywhere you applied, there was this term they called Canadian work experience, which I did not understand.

I said to myself, I just arrived.

It's quite something that what scared you was was a place of what would look to most people of safety.