The concept of fate versus free goes head to head in the debut novel Abundance by Hafeez Lakhani, when the matriarch of a Muslim-Indian family in South Florida refuses treatment, bringing together her far-flung children to convince her to seek medical help.
Inspired by the health crises faced by his own family, Lakhani stitches the perspectives of a father and his three children, as they each grapple with their mother’s illness in their own ways.
“ I believe it's Flannery O'Connor [who] said, a writer need only live a childhood, to write for a lifetime and to grow up in South Florida — it's amazing,” Lakhani told WLRN. “I'm sure every city in the United States has such vibrant extremes, but Miami's extremes are the ones that I know.”
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Unlike other depictions of South Florida, Abundance, doesn’t center itself around the typical glitz and mystique of Miami, rather it offers a more prosaic yet specific image of suburban South Florida.
Lakhani, who grew up in Pembroke Pines, drops his characters in familiar scenarios, such as the father, Ramzan, who buys Air Jordans knockoffs at the Coconut Creek Flea Market or the daughter Kawal anxiously waiting in the halls of Jackson Memorial hospital.
“ You're just talking about like the perfect microcosm of Miami sitting in Jackson Memorial. And so that was fun for me to say like, ‘how do I represent this city that I love?’ All the diversity of Miami, all the different ways that Miami is a really perfect example of like the American experiment.”
WLRN’s Alyssa Ramos spoke to Lakhani about how his childhood in South Florida inspired the stories in his book and how he examines the role of destiny in life.
The conversation was edited for length and clarity.
WLRN: How much of the book was informed by your own life experiences?
LAKHANI: Like many first-time novelists, a lot of life experience goes into the world that you build. For example, my mom experienced two liver transplants before she passed away four years ago. She actually, just like Sakeena in the novel, staunchly resisted the liver transplant. And I won't give away details from the plot of the novel, but my mom ultimately was convinced to have the first transplant. When that went into rejection, she was able to be convinced to have the second. But in both cases, if she had her way, she wouldn't have taken the transplant.
She really strongly believed in this Muslim notion of naseeb, which is like destiny. And she was very comfortable saying, if this is my time, this is my time. If this is what was meant for me, then so be it. So, it was a huge scramble of spending time together, being in the hospital with her. I saw this kind of seed where a family health emergency could be the central arc of the novel.
When you look at the book cover, it's four doughnuts, and it has the colors of Dunkin Donuts because that's the franchise that the family owns. Why did you choose Dunkin Donuts as being kind of this specific franchise?
From age four onward in South Florida, I grew up surrounded by my own Muslim immigrant community. We were regular attendees at, what we call our jamaat or our mosque. You become so close, it's like a second family. As a kid, every adult I knew had a small business. We're talking about convenience stores, dry cleaners, Dunkin Donuts, cell phone stores, things like that. We saw the good and many times, the bad of small businesses — people going out of business, people having loans they couldn't pay back. Day in and day out, I saw the sacrifices that people endure to sort of make their way in the United States. So, as I created the family story and the sort of world of the novel, I knew for sure I wanted the family to have a small business.
I noticed that a lot of the characters in your book, such as Fareen, the eldest daughter found a lot of community and solace by going to their place of worship. Did any of those experiences inspire scenes in the book, and did you always know that you wanted to include that aspect of faith in your book?
It's not a religious book. It's a book of culture and identity. Of course, faith, religion, the way you see the world, this idea of naseeb — how much of our lives do we control and how much is destined for us — I wanted those ideas to play in. Fareen was, in many ways, my most autobiographical character. Fareen, like me, and I think like a lot of other people in my generation, finds incredible peace in the religious experience, attending religious ceremonies and having that as a place of balance.
Those of us who are children of immigrants, we see that maybe the way that our parents or grandparents experience culture — whether it's religion or whether it's even like wardrobe — it's gonna be a little bit different than the way that the children of immigrants experience it.
Acculturation is this sort of slow shift, but it's a beautiful thing, and it doesn't mean that you kind of flip a switch and you turn off and say, 'oh, I'm not gonna look at the world the way that my parents or grandparents do.' You're gonna find bits of it that you really do appreciate, and when my mom passed away four years ago, there was never a moment in my life that I didn't feel like faith was not there for me.
Many of the characters in your book, all of the children, it's interesting how they grapple with certain decisions that put them on a specific trajectory in their life. If our lives are predetermined, how do you view the way we should approach the decision making process?
I think that with the five members of this family, I had a lot of fun and really an intentional exploration of almost like a spectrum, right, of like how much do you attribute naseeb and how much do you attribute to your own control. And I think each member of the family is in a different part of that spectrum with certainly Sakeena, you could say, is on the farthest end toward naseeb, where she's very comfortable.
Then you can make different arguments about different members of the family. Ramzan is the biggest pragmatist, always thinking rationally about things like, ‘oh, there's more opportunity for us if we immigrate, or obviously we should take the liver transplant if it's something that's available to us.’ Then each of the three children is sort of somewhere in between.
