What happens when folklore becomes the blueprint for storytelling?
For me, the answer has always been a world where memory is more than recollection: it is inheritance, survival and song. This is the spirit behind Gajarah, my debut novel, where ancestral voices rise through the threads of folklore and lived experience to remind us that the past does not vanish; it pulses inside the present, urging us toward belonging and healing.
I grew up in post-colonial Punjab and Kashmir, surrounded by stories carried in kitchens, courtyards and rooftops. On cold winters in Lahore, milk would simmer in a brass valtoyee, metal pot, as cousins gathered close, cheeks pink from the wind. My grandfather would stir patiently, turning milk to khoya, khoya to burfi, a traditional dessert, and questions to wisdom. The lesson was never about reaching the “right” answer. It was about the practice of listening, tasting and sharing until something sweeter emerged together.
This practice of storytelling became the foundation of Gajarah. In one of its pivotal scenes, a grandmother presses a flower bracelet — white jasmine threaded with crimson roses — onto her granddaughter Emahn’s wrist. The circle is not a trinket but a permission: to remember, to grieve and to tell her story. The bracelet becomes both a keepsake and a compass, knitting together past and present, mother and daughter, grief and acceptance.
Folklore and generational memory are not ornamental details on the page; they are the architecture of stories that endure. They braid together the voices of elders, rivers, winds and ancestors, teaching us that no single thread can carry the whole truth. Within these tales lies the possibility of creating literary gems that do more than entertain: they nurture belonging, hold spaces for wellbeing, and help us learn from trauma without being consumed by it. They also serve as reclamation, recovering ways of being that colonization and assimilation tried to sever, and returning us to rhythms where community, earth and spirit speak together.
This is why the objects in Gajarah matter so deeply. A bracelet. A rooftop circle. A wooden takhti, a board used to practice calligraphy. These are containers where pain can be witnessed and transformed. When Emahn’s grandmother gives her the takhti, she is handing over a bridge, a way to write sorrow into the world and then wash it clean when the ink dries. The ritual doesn’t erase harm; it teaches Emahn how to carry it with courage. Trauma becomes less of a scar and more of a teacher.
Folklore reminds us that belonging is not abstract. It is felt when people see their own threads woven into the fabric of a story. In Gajarah, that fabric is stitched from food, memory, ritual and song. These elements insist that remembering together is how we survive together.
Literature, at its best, is both memory and mirror. Folklore shows us that there is never a perfect answer, only a path stitched carefully between grief and hope, history and possibility. My hope is that Gajarah invites readers to pause on that path, to witness, to reclaim and to imagine what belonging feels like when no part of us is left behind.
For those searching for a novel that holds both wound and wonder, may Gajarah serve as a keepsake: a bracelet of memory, and a story that feels like home.