{"id":313,"date":"2026-06-01T13:37:57","date_gmt":"2026-06-01T13:37:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=313"},"modified":"2026-06-01T13:37:57","modified_gmt":"2026-06-01T13:37:57","slug":"jamil-jan-kochai-on-unmooring-memories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=313","title":{"rendered":"Jamil Jan Kochai on Unmooring Memories"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This interview was featured in the Books & Fiction newsletter, which delivers the stories behind the stories, along with our latest fiction.<\/em> Sign up to receive it in your inbox.<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Your story \u201cThe Twice-Widowed Khala Helai\u201d is a kind of companion piece to another story, \u201cOn the Night of the Khatam,\u201d which appeared in The New Yorker<\/em> in 2024. Can you explain how the two pieces fit together, and what made you want to return to that fictional gathering of Afghan refugees in Sacramento?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Read more The Tally<\/a><\/p>\n

Initially, I\u2019d intended \u201cOn the Night of the Khatam\u201d to be a much longer story, switching back and forth between the men\u2019s side and the women\u2019s side of this gathering, but it became too unwieldy, and I settled for focussing on the men\u2019s side first, knowing that I would return to the women at some point in the future. I knew that I wanted the two stories, the two sides of the khatam, to sort of mirror each other, or be in conversation.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

Both stories are told in a collective voice. When we discussed \u201cOn the Night of the Khatam,\u201d you said, \u201cI just decided to let the singular first person evaporate into a collective voice, and it turned into this roving, bodiless, almost omniscient presence that is attempting to speak for (and about) the men in the story but, I think, is failing in the process.\u201d Why was that failure important to you, and did you have the same experience when narrating the women\u2019s evening?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Barry Hannah once said, \u201cYou don\u2019t have to be much but a stumbling fool\u201d when writing in the first-person P.O.V., and, in general, that\u2019s been my own approach to writing fiction. I stumble around, I make mistakes, I write sentences that are too long, and create worlds that are too strange, and failure becomes an essential part of that whole process. It\u2019s what really allows me to experiment and be playful in a story. Because the casts of characters for both \u201cOn the Night of the Khatam\u201d and \u201cThe Twice-Widowed Khala Helai\u201d are so large, and there is so much going on at once, I was stumbling and making even more mistakes than usual. Even now, I\u2019m not sure if I\u2019ve done Khala Helai justice, if I\u2019ve given her enough time and space to properly tell her story, but I just have to hope that even the shortcomings, the absences, are meaningful to the reader.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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We hear many snippets of conversation and short anecdotes from different women, but the fullest story comes from Khala Helai, who recounts something about her history that she has never revealed before: that she was married once before she met her second husband, who recently died. Why has she withheld this story from her friends?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Part of it, I think, is out of practicality. It was a short-lived marriage and a painful memory, and so I imagine that it was difficult for her to discuss it. And it\u2019s the sort of personal history that might have made her children and her second husband feel uncomfortable, so I wonder if she might have kept it to herself for their sake. Initially, I hadn\u2019t planned for Helai\u2019s second husband to die, but it made more sense to me that she would tell her story after he\u2019d passed away, not before.<\/p>\n

Khala Helai\u2019s story has a profound effect on the other women, making them feel distant from themselves, their bodies, and even their souls. Why is it so meaningful to them?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Read more Jonathan Franzen on Talent, Theatre, and His Next Novel<\/a><\/p>\n

I\u2019d known from quite early on that Khala Helai would tell a final, impactful story to the other women at the khatam, but I didn\u2019t come up with the story of Helai\u2019s reunion with her former mother-in-law, Bubugul, until very late in the drafting process. When Bubugul evokes the ghost of her lost son, I think it is the ambiguity of this final story, the question of whether or not Bubugul was actually visited by the dead, that sort of unmoors the women from a stable sense of themselves.<\/p>\n

Of \u201cOn the Night of the Khatam,\u201d you said, \u201cAt a gathering like this you may find yourself witnessing intense moments of vulnerability. One man might describe how he was tortured as a prisoner of war, or another might recall the day his brother was hauled away from their home, never to be seen again. But, even amid these memories, these recollections, so much is left unsaid that you can leave the encounter feeling that you know even less about the person, or the community, than you did before.\u201d Is the same true for the women\u2019s revelations and reflections, or do these women leave the khatam feeling they know a lot more about Khala Helai by the end?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The thing is that a khatam can be a very familiar sort of gathering. It\u2019s all your old friends coming together in a home you\u2019ve visited dozens of times before. Often, there is a set routine to the khatam, and the regularity of it all can be both dull and comforting. But, every once in a while, you may encounter a story at a khatam that totally shatters this sense of normalcy or comfort or stability, and suddenly, in the middle of someone\u2019s memory about a torture dungeon or a massacre or a drone strike, you come face to face with an unfathomable horror, or with the fact of your own mortality, and I think something like that happens when the women hear Helai\u2019s story. They learn more about her, but, at the same time, she becomes even more mysterious and incomprehensible to them.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Twice-Widowed Khala Helai\u201d appears in this year\u2019s Fiction Issue, which has a family theme. Many families populate this story, but there are also informal family-like groups: the Bibis, the new arrivals, the former in-laws. Even the women form a kind of extended family, as do the men. What is the relative importance of the bonds of marriage, blood, and origin among these characters?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Well, I think those bonds have a dramatic impact on how these characters view or understand themselves and what is possible in their lives. That\u2019s one of the reasons I chose to experiment with the first-person-plural point of view in the first place. It\u2019s an odd and sometimes unwieldy perspective, but, for me, it has also been a much more expansive way to unfold a narrative. I see and hear things among the characters that I wouldn\u2019t have noticed in the first-person singular. In the shift from the \u201cI\u201d to the \u201cwe,\u201d from the individual to the group, time changes (collapses or stretches out) and so, too, does the shape of the world itself.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

Read more Aidan Turner Can\u2019t Stop Smoldering<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Deborah Treisman interviews the writer Jamil Jan Kochai about \u201cThe Twice-Widowed Khala Helai,\u201d his story from the June 8, 2026, issue of The New Yorker.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":312,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-this-week-in-fiction"],"yoast_head":"\nJamil Jan Kochai on Unmooring Memories - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=313\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Jamil Jan Kochai on Unmooring Memories - City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Deborah Treisman interviews the writer Jamil Jan Kochai about \u201cThe Twice-Widowed Khala Helai,\u201d his story from the June 8, 2026, issue of The New Yorker.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=313\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-06-01T13:37:57+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"6 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=313#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=313\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3e7ce0c0c60d21e12a5ac61fb2b786d4\"},\"headline\":\"Jamil Jan Kochai on Unmooring Memories\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-06-01T13:37:57+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=313\"},\"wordCount\":1170,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=313#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/06\\\/e8605e67253e26817ccd9563d31f391a.webp\",\"articleSection\":[\"This Week in Fiction\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=313#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=313\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=313\",\"name\":\"Jamil Jan Kochai on Unmooring Memories - 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