Your story “Kim’s Game” is told from the perspective of Helen, a woman in her late fifties who moved from Nebraska to Brazil in the nineteen-sixties, in order to work, alongside her brother, as a missionary to Indigenous people there. How did this character materialize for you?

About twelve years ago, an image came to me that I didn’t understand: a woman looking at her hand resting on her kitchen counter, with cows grazing in the distance outside her window. I didn’t know anything about the woman, other than the fact that her own hand struck her in that moment as unfamiliar, as the hand of someone older than her, as if several decades had gone by for her in what felt like an instant. My parents had both recently passed away, and I sensed that, like me, this woman was grieving a significant loss. In the next few years, I went down many rabbit holes, trying to figure out who this character was and where she lived. At one point, the story was set in the Rupununi region of Guyana. At another, in Pakistan’s Chitral Valley. Over time, Helen’s identity as a former missionary in central-west Brazil, and her relationship with the Indigenous community and the surrounding landscape, became clearer. The process of writing this story, in which the character appeared first and the research followed, was unusual for me.

Helen has lost her brother to cancer and seems also to have lost her faith, or at least her conviction in it. The story doesn’t elaborate, but why do you think she lost the missionary impulse after having converted many of the villagers to the church that she and her brother helped to build there?

Something that I wanted to explore in this story is how grief and loss can fundamentally alter us. For some, a health crisis can deepen faith, while, for others, it can cause a rupture. Helen did everything that was expected of her, and her brother still died. What was it all for? So when we meet her, Helen is grieving not only her brother but also the stability of her faith. And yet it’s clear that Paul’s death has opened up new possibilities for Helen. It has given her the time and the space to take stock of what she believes and to make her own decisions.

When Kim, a young man doing ethnographic field work in the area, starts having his mail delivered to Helen’s address, she is irritated by his presumption—and irritated by him, too, when he turns up on her doorstep. But he and the letters he receives soon come to matter to her more than her annoyance. Why do you think this particular, seemingly one-sided love story strikes such a nerve with Helen?

When Helen first starts receiving Kim’s letters, being annoyed with him gives her something to do, something to fill the vacuum created by the simultaneous loss of her brother, her farm, and her faith. While Helen has distanced herself from her life as a missionary, she’s probably not ready to acknowledge how similar some of Kim’s strategies for connecting with the Indigenous people are to those that she, Paul, and others in their group used when they were establishing their church decades ago. Helen likely has more in common with Kim than she wants to admit.

I think there’s a deep loneliness to her life that cohabiting with her brother kept at bay—and, now that he’s gone, she is forced to face it. As more of Kim’s letters are delivered, Helen becomes invested in the narrative they form, as if she were piecing together a puzzle, one that, in some ways, echoes her own past.

Kim’s family is Muslim, from Pakistan. So there are three forms of religion in the story: Helen’s evangelical Christianity, Kim’s Muslim heritage, and the religious traditions of the Indigenous people whom Kim is studying. Was it important to you to have all three strands at play?

I’m interested in the ways that the three religious traditions in the story overlap, inform one another, and occasionally create friction through proximity. As a missionary, Helen likely taught the Bible to members of the Indigenous community, work that involved both the deliberate erasure of their traditions and a deep commitment to her church. This project now seems to have lost meaning for her. Helen doesn’t relate to the idea of God acting as a guide or comfort, which she encounters through Kim’s Muslim heritage, but perhaps she wishes she could. I wanted to indicate that Helen feels curiosity about, and even a twinge of jealousy over, Kim’s relationship with his faith.

In Brazil, Kim is an outsider who is neither white nor Indigenous but a third category. Because he is singular in this environment, his religious and cultural identities don’t constrain his movements or ambitions but, rather, enable him to operate outside prescribed social boundaries. I was also amused by the idea that it’s not Kim’s being a Muslim that Helen finds distasteful but the fact that he’s an anthropologist.

The title of the story refers to a memory game that is played in Rudyard Kipling’s novel “Kim.” Clearly, there is a resonance between “Kim” and “Kim’s Game”—how does the story relate to the book, and what’s your connection to Kipling’s work?

I remember visiting the Lahore Museum many years ago with my mother, and her pointing out the Zamzama Gun, a large eighteenth-century cannon that sits on permanent display outside the museum and is often referred to as “Kim’s Gun.” In “Kim,” this is where we first meet the novel’s protagonist, Kim O’Hara, who sits astride the cannon in defiance of local rules. For Pakistanis of my mother’s generation, “Kim” is both a foundational text and one that raises an uncomfortable question: How do you square an admiration for Kipling’s prose with his exaltation of the British empire? Kim O’Hara, an Irish orphan who can switch between local dialects and English as it suits him, a young spy who lives by his wits and moves easily across the Indian subcontinent, struck me as a fitting namesake for the Kim in my story. I could imagine Kim’s father telling him the Kipling story in the same way that my mother once recounted it to me. I sense that my Kim, without fully registering the book’s imperial ambitions, has absorbed a sense of Kim O’Hara’s bold spirit, and perhaps wishes that he, too, could pass as a local. In a way, this rhymes with how he approaches his field work in Brazil. He’s enamored by the sense of adventure that field work requires and enjoys the ways that his otherness opens doors for him. But the reality turns out to be more complex than he expected.

In the novel, as part of the training to be a spy in the British Secret Service, Kim O’Hara is taught a game in which he must memorize a group of objects that are placed on a tray, and then describe them once they’ve been hidden from sight. This game, known as the Jewel Game, or Kim’s Game, is a popular exercise in the world of scouting. In my story, I was interested in exploring how objects might operate as talismans, symbols, and keepers of memory. I also wanted to play with the idea of a life existing as a kind of game, with its own particular pieces, strategies, wins, and losses.

You’re currently working on a story collection. Does “Kim’s Game” have a thematic connection to the other pieces in the book?

I’m fascinated by adaptation, allusion, and intertextual conversations, and by the ways in which the narratives we consume can imprint on us and transform across mediums, languages, and generations. Most of my stories are in dialogue with other texts or with films. In the fifties, my maternal grandfather owned an English-language bookstore in Karachi, and my mother made a deal with him that she could read any book in the store as long as she didn’t break its spine, so it could still be sold. She passed on her fascination, and occasional disillusionment, with the authors she encountered in the bookstore—including Kipling, Henry James, Chekhov, and others—to me and my brother. I often think about the books in my grandfather’s bookstore, and how they might have impacted the characters I write about. In my fiction, I’m interested in activating a kind of web between stories, and in creating new work that’s informed by my own cultural and literary associations, that engages with notions of influence, pastiche, and homage. ♦