The following is an excerpt from Strange Girls by Sarvat Hasin. She is a novelist and dramaturg from Pakistan who currently lives in London. She received her masters in creative writing from the University of Oxford and has published three award-winning and bestselling novels. Her next novel, Strange Girls, is her US debut.
Strange Girls is about two estranged friends who are forced to reunite over one feverish weekend and reckon with the choices that tore them apart. It is now available from Dutton.
I wake up in Aliya’s house.
I know it is Aliya’s house because it is quiet, there is no hiss of a broken boiler, no howling housemates, because my eyes open of their own volition and not with the shrill shriek of my alarm springing me from my bed in a flood of adrenaline. I open my eyes and I am in a soft, sweet‑smelling room and there is nowhere urgent for me to be. Late‑afternoon light puddles into the room through the lace curtains. I am out of time. It is light enough to still be day, but I can’t tell how close to dinner we are. There is sleep crusted against the corner of my mouth.
I know it is Aliya’s house because the poster in the corner of the room is the same Pre‑Raphaelite she had at university. Aliya had a thing for the Pre‑Raphaelites. She wore long dresses and begged me not to cut my hair. It was weird and very charming. It made sense to me that she liked them; her models of femininity were always sort of folkish and strange, candles in the bathtub, cheap lavender perfume, sheets with white frills at the edges, but never heels or blowouts or fake lashes or anything normal. I lie in the bed and press my palms to the tender soreness of my eyes. There is a bookshelf in the room, and earlier, I pulled down a few things when I thought I was too wired for a nap. I found a ticket stub from a gig we’d been to together at the Roundhouse in her copy of Gaudy Night. Aida D’Souza, who couldn’t sing but whose vibe we liked, whose velvet jackets and waistcoats we admired. She’d spun fistfuls of confetti into the crowd and the room rose to grab them with a roar. We’d wound our way out of the crowd holding hands, our fingers sticky with sweat, Aliya’s dark curly head floating in front of me, confetti stuck in every strand.
I never fall asleep reading, though I wish I could. The words just jumble as my brain gets tired, and it never really relaxes me. The idea of falling asleep reading feels chic, scholarly, Virginia Woolf–ish, the kind of thing you might expect a writer to brag about every time they are interviewed. I’m reading all of Rushdie right now, but I fall asleep to Dickens, they might say. There is a certain intellectualism that is prized among young literary women—a casual pretension. You must read everything but pretend not to care. You must have one vice that you talk about loudly enough that your personality doesn’t stiffen—enough to lighten your intellect but not enough to cancel it out. You can’t watch Love Island, but you may admit to a fondness for Agatha Christie. When we were younger, Aliya and I would study those profiles, Zadie Smith in the LRB, and try to come up with our own answers. Hers were always earnest and mine were always arch. I try to think how Aliya now might answer them and realize I don’t have to wait very long to find out.