Author of the new novel, The Flames of a Cherry Tree
Kashmir Lit (KL): What was the first feeling that led you to write Flames of the Cherry Tree?
Leena Khan (LK): I have always believed in the transformative power of stories, having been fundamentally altered by the books I read myself. Stories have expanded my capacity for empathy, deepened my understanding of history, and softened my sense of humanity. Reading changes people, and by extension, it changes the world. I wrote Flames of the Cherry Tree because I wanted to wield this power for Kashmir.
I grew up with a general sense of Kashmir as a troubled nation. As a child, I spent summers in my grandparents’ home, listening to their discussions on current affairs and reading newspaper clippings on the coffee table that reported seemingly endless human rights abuses in their country of origin. But it was only as an adult that I grasped the real gravity of Kashmir’s suffering. I read horrifying accounts of the Jammu Massacre. I read about the political fraud committed over decades to dissolve any chance of Kashmiri self-determination under occupation. I asked my grandparents questions about their own childhoods, about all that they had known and lost to this conflict, and I came to recognize that this struggle was my heritage. I wrote Flames of the Cherry Tree through both a sense of duty and honor about the place I am from. I wrote it for my grandparents.
KL: The cherry tree, what does it come to signify for you over the course of the book?
LK: The cherry tree is an ode to my Dadi. As a young girl, she used to climb the cherry trees in her family orchard despite strict orders from her parents that this was forbidden. My Dadi, rebellious in spirit and generous in heart, would climb to the top of her cherry trees and toss the fruit to her siblings watching her from the ground, who would promptly scatter as soon as her father came marching into the vicinity after spotting the ruckus. While her siblings always escaped, Dadi remained stuck on the tree with no choice but to climb down and face whatever punishment awaited her. And no matter how brutal it might have been, you could always trust that she would be in the same spot the next day, touching the clouds from her perch in the sky.
KL: How did Kashmir as memory, landscape, or wound shape the voice of this work?
LK: My hope for this story was to tell Kashmir through layers. The mainstream media narrative about Kashmir is that it is the battleground upon which two enemy nuclear superpowers sacrifice to their rivalry. And it is. But it is also a place with its own independent history, culture, and language, and I strove to capture that through this novel. There are descriptions of Kashmir’s astounding artisan culture, the masterful craft of Kashmiri embroidery passed down through generations. The landscape itself is its own character; I wanted to showcase the magnificent beauty of this paradise on Earth. There are musings on self-determination, on Kashmir’s rich political life, on imagining how true autonomy might feel. The goal was for Kashmir to take a life of its own. Of course, it is impossible to represent every angle of such a rich, ancient place, but these are the parts of it that feel closest to me.
KL: Many writers struggle with telling intimate stories that bear collective pain – how did you navigate that balance?
LK: There is an enormous responsibility in representing the history of an entire people, one that feels even heavier when writing from the diaspora, where that pain is not at all my lived experience. I have come to believe that the only honest way to navigate this is to narrow the focus: to ground history in characters, to give them lives and personalities of their own so they exist as real people, deserving of their own stories. When the work is about them — their relationships, their emotions, their contradictions — there is something far more solid to hold onto. If you build characters you love, or even characters you hate, as long as they are people you feel deeply for, their stories begin to carry themselves. I was less interested in recounting history directly than in creating lives that invite empathy, where history is learned naturally through experience. These characters may hold pain others recognize, or endure realities I could never fully imagine, but the stories remain theirs.
KL: Was there a particular scene or passage that was especially difficult or necessary for you to write?
LK: Rather than a scene, I think it was quite difficult for me to write a specific character: Dadaji. I pictured my own grandfather while writing Dadaji in the novel, and because of that, he was essentially flawless by the time I had finished my first draft. This was to the detriment of the book at large — going through the editing process, I realized that he seemed too perfect, too unreal. It was hard for me to separate my personal impressions of my own Dadaji while writing the fictional one, and it felt almost painful to write faults into him as I went through my rounds of editing. But in the end, I did (which the real Dadaji definitely grumbled about to me after reading the final draft).
KL: How do questions of history, loss, endurance, resistance, and belonging surface in the book, are there specific scenes you want readers to engage with?.
LK: In this novel, we live inside the mind of the protagonist, Aafreen, who is a child at the start of the story, completely absorbed in her own family, a world no larger than the orchards in her backyard. As she ages, her eyes sharpen to both the subtle and not-so-subtle injustices afflicting her people and her land, and we make these observations alongside her. We confront the begar system, the forced labor imposed on Muslims by the state to develop its infrastructure. We come to understand the barriers to education, the exclusion from state administration, and the deep-rooted systemic discrimination against Muslims under the Dogra regime as Aafreen walks through these realities herself, exiting the safe world of her home. Resistance, hand-in-hand with endurance, develops in the book through coming-of-age: learning the world through the eyes of a growing child and reckoning with how to understand one’s place within it.
I invite readers to engage with these questions especially toward the end of the novel, when a growing sense of animosity between Dadaji, Aafreen’s beloved grandfather, and his childhood nemesis — now a Dogra officer — climaxes in an epic confrontation. What appears on the surface to be a clash driven by personal resentment is in fact shaped by far larger forces. Their encounter stages an unequal power dynamic between a Dogra officer whose role is to tax, discipline, and extract from the population in service of an exploitative state, and a Muslim doctor whose very education and professional stature represent an exception to the order he is meant to remain subject to. One man carries a gun; the other, a stethoscope. Yet the confrontation also complicates any easy moral binaries. Both men have been wronged, both men have done wrong. While the structures of oppression are stark at the level of the state, the ways individuals live within, negotiate, and sometimes subvert these structures are far more ambiguous. Things are not always as clear as they might seem.
KL: Did writing this book change your relationship to Kashmir or to your own perceptions and memories of it, or something else that is necessary for us to grasp?
LK: Writing this novel profoundly transformed my connection to Kashmir. While I wrote it to bring Kashmir to the world, more than anything, I think it enlarged Kashmir within myself. I have always been aware of Kashmir as a place of struggle in the modern context, but doing the research for this novel on an era well before Partition helped me understand that this reality is far from an invention of our contemporary world. Kashmiri suffering is deep, it is ancient, it has shaken me to my core. This novel has made me own this history, and to honor it as an intrinsic part of myself. I have never lived in Kashmir and have largely only experienced it through the eyes of my grandparents, who were my anchor to our heritage when I otherwise had no real link to it. But now, I feel much more connected to it as an individual. I see now that there is power in knowing where you are from.
KL: What literary or oral traditions do you feel closest to in this work?
LK: My work is inspired by my favorite historical fiction authors who have shown me the power of narratives in bringing an audience so much closer to a time, place, and people. Susan Abulhawa is a Palestinian author who has written several outstanding novels chronicling the occupation of her land and people through intergenerational stories that carry you through the tides of history as if you are surfing them yourself. I hoped to emulate her in my own writing. Elif Shafak is also a supremely talented historical fiction author who crafts masterful prose. I definitely took inspiration from her lyricism and poetry. Marjan Kamali, who writes historical fiction on Iran, is so good at centering her stories through characters that feel real; I wanted to do the same. These names only touch the surface of the ocean of authors that I have had the privilege of reading and being shaped by. Writing is this beautiful process of being inspired and, in turn, inspiring; I think every new book I read makes me both a better person and a better writer.
KL: What do you hope Kashmiri readers might recognize in these pages, and also what do you hope non-Kashmiri readers might learn to sit with?
LK: I don’t think I will ever feel like Flames of the Cherry Tree is fully complete. I love my characters too much; there is always more to their story. But I think that it ended where it should, at a moment with the future generation, inviting both reflection and hope.
KL: Leena, after completing Flames of the Cherry Tree, what questions still linger for you, and what creative works are planned in future?
LK: In terms of my next novel, historical fiction is gratifying to write, but it is difficult because of the research involved. I think I want to write something closer to my own lived experience. I definitely have ideas.
Check the book at Daraja Press
https://darajapress.com/publication/flames-of-the-cherry-tree/