“Interlude” by Hananah Zaheer

4/13/2022

Hananah Zaheer is the author of Lovebirds (Bull City Press, 2021). Her work has appeared in places such as Kenyon Review, Best Short Fictions, Alaska Quarterly, Michigan Quarterly, etc. She serves as a Fiction Editor for Los Angeles Review, and as senior editor for SAAG: a dissident literary anthology—a project focusing on experimental South Asian art and writing. To learn more about Hananah Zaheer’s work, visit her website.

Shachi Kulkarni is a first year MFA student at American University in Washington DC. She was born in India and raised in Texas. Shachi writes about young people, relationships, and the awkward aches and pains of growing up. She is interested in the in-betweenness of adolescence in immigrant communities.

Introduction to “Interlude”

By Shachi Kulkarni

Since 2009, when Hananah Zaheer was published in Electric Grace, the world has become a startlingly different place. The Vice President is now the President. There’s hardly a Blackberry phone in sight. We have lived through more than a decade of exponential change, and Zaheer has traveled around the world, had forty-five other works of fiction and poetry published in various magazines, and published a chapbook with Bull City Press. We are so lucky to have her back in the DC area, returning to the US after adventures abroad. Looking back at 2009, perhaps the only thing that has stayed constant is her name, her love for books, and her writing about women’s small acts of rebellion against social norms.
She remembers the time Interlude was first published as a time of exciting new beginnings. She had recently graduated with her MFA from University of Maryland, signed with a literary agent, a new teaching position, and was starting down the path of her writing journey. She warmly recalls meeting Richard Peabody, and being accepted into the small but supportive community of DC area writers. Since then, she has lived in Dubai and in the Philippines.

Her journey around the world has helped her understand who she is as a person and as a writer by taking her out of the contexts she is used to, making her reconsider who she becomes when she leaves a place and acclimates to somewhere new. This has been a process of reflection and looking back. Zaheer reflects on how different the energy of the country feels now that she has returned to the United States—this country is not the same place that it was before a global pandemic and the Trump presidency.

She is now the fiction editor of the Los Angeles review, and a senior editor at SAAG: a dissident literary anthology. SAAG is a place for South Asian writers who create experimental works and question the status quo. This is something that has become increasingly important to her as she realizes how early in her writing journey, she found herself writing things that catered to the gaze of a mostly homogenous literary community around her. She was frustrated with her work because it did not feel truly authentic. Since then, she has vowed to write what she wants in the way she wants to, and to create a space for herself to be authentic. By joining a community of writers who are seeking to support other writers from the South Asian community in their writing careers and to promote diversity in the publishing industry, she hopes to start making it easier for others to do the same.

In October of 2021, she released a chapbook, Lovebirds, “a book about love and all the ways it can ruin and all the ways it is beautiful, and all the ways it can die.” In the process of talking about this book, Zaheer realized that many of her stories have women and their “little moments of ‘fuck you’–small rebellions–even when they don’t end well.”

In Interlude, the main character, Maya has a “fuck you moment” against her controlling and toxic husband, Ari. The story opens with a chance encounter, an old flame back in town runs into Maya as she is getting coffee for herself and Ari. The story is told through interwoven flashback, flash forward, and the events of this encounter, allowing the reader to savor every moment of pain, regret, and anger as well as every delicious second of desire, hope, and lust. In the end, the reader gets to see Maya struggle with the doubts and the regrets of what could have been and reclaim her power.

In the flashback scenes, we see a young Maya dating Ari, later to be her husband, but always feeling more connected with Ari’s roommate. We see Ari growing jealous, and Maya holding herself back, and never truly allowing herself to explore any possibility of a relationship with Ari’s roommate. However, when she sees him again in the coffee shop, all those could-have-beens and should-have-beens come crashing back to her.

Seeing the old roommate feels like a redo button has been hit, and she has the chance to see what life would have been like if she had chosen him instead of Ari, and this time around she takes her chance. She goes back to his apartment and explores her physical attraction to him. Old roommate remains unnamed, suggesting that the choice Maya makes was never deeply about him specifically, but rather about her taking back her power over her sexuality and her agency. In the end, she leaves, satisfied that she has tied up a loose end in her life. To her, she does not need to pursue a relationship with this person, rather, she wants to indulge herself in order to explore what it might have been like, and that is enough for her.

When she returns home to her husband, we see her explaining that she saw Ari’s old roommate again at the coffee shop, and that she did not blow him off completely, like Ari would have wanted. In these flash- forward scenes, the writing is very to the point, almost cold and clinical, directly contrasted with the description of the unnamed man who she was just with. It is as if any spark there was with Ari is well and truly dead. Now that the last loose end of this relationship, the potential connection with the ex-roommate has been explored, Maya is done and ready to check out of this chapter in her life. In a way her actions are a rebellion against her husband, and a welcome back to herself.