When Faiza Iftikhar describes her lead character using an unprintable term and terms men as “oxygen masks”, you know she’s a writer who won’t stick to the script.
Though we suspect that is mostly because she has trouble with total recall. Iftikhar claims she is especially prone to forgetting the names of dramas that launched her career.
One would think that as a famed novelist and drama writer, she would have her every success on the tip of her tongue but in a lively, no-holds barred conversation, Faiza Iftikhar proved that while she takes her work seriously... herself, not so much.
“Writing was in our genes, in our upbringing,” Iftikhar said. Coming from a literary family where her grandmother was a Kashmiri novelist and her grandfather attended to both his dental practice and poetry recital sessions, summers in this bustling household of seven sisters and many cousins meant writing and publishing stories for the family’s amusement.
Her sisters, Nadia Akhtar and Sadia Akhtar, are also well-known drama writers in Pakistan. Faiza Iftikhar traces her fondness for this medium back to her childhood. She laments that while her sisters grew up to be all kinds of assorted professionals, she hasn’t been able to be “anything more” than a full-time writer. However, she does admit that the freedom to lounge in one’s pajamas and have a career is quite enticing.
Her foray into drama writing came a few years after she began writing professionally. Iftikhar began writing in earnest as a novelist, and her stories and novels were published in Khwaatein and Shuwa digests before catching the eye of actress and director Samina Ahmed, who roped her in to write a sitcom.
“The original writer had taken ill and Samina needed my help even though I had never written a script before,” Iftikhar said. “One day she was outside my house rushing me into a car to meet with the owner of Hum TV, Sultana Siddiqui.”
This meeting led to Iftikhar writing the popular and first of its kind Ramzan soap with long-time collaborator Haissam Hussain, Chodvi ka Chand.
From then on, she has penned drama after drama, effortlessly weaving the harsh realities of life with comedy, romance and, yes, drama. She is the creative force behind successful TV serials such as Zindagi Dhoop Tum Ghanna Saya, Roag, Ek Nayee Cinderella, Akbari-Asghari, Aunn Zara, and more recently Dillagi and Mein Sitara.
So what is her writing process? “I write my own stories using my own ideas,” she said. “People who have worked with me know that there is no use asking me about my story, I can’t write one-liners. In fact, while writing Dillagi, the only thing the team wanted to know was would it have a happy or a sad ending? If I’m feeling happy, then it will be a happy ending, if I’m depressed, I will kill them both.”
Iftikhar’s work is difficult to classify into the usual singular categories of drama, romance, or soaps. She agrees, saying she grew up on a generation of PTV dramas that were wholesome entertainment in a complete package that had something for everyone.
The delineation of genres is a more recent phenomenon. “In the soap, the women will only be cat-fighting,” she said. “In the sit-com, there will be only be slapstick comedy. And in the 8 o’clock slot, we will only show sweeping romances.”
If you think genres get her goat, Iftikhar gets even more fired up about the same old demands of channels and kinds of stories and women they want to portray.
“Channels just want heroines who make people shed tears,” she said. “There is a trend nowadays to portray women in binaries – either very good or very bad, very intelligent or totally stupid, completely innocent or totally devious.”
Iftikhar is equally annoyed with the representation of these perfect characters on screen and questions where they exist. Her characters are always complex, but with her trademark humour and humility, she brushes aside any praise, saying, “It is easy to write about realistic characters. They are all around you.”
Thankfully, not in her imagination; otherwise, how would we have been treated to such a wonderful array of characters as the man-child Aunn, his wise-cracking grandmother, the steely Bilquees Kaur, the masterfully manipulative Asghar and Akbari, the guilt-ridden Ayaaz from Roag and the resilient Diyaa from Diyaa Jale?
The demand of the channels to keep requesting the same kinds of stories too gets on her nerves.
Channels often tell Iftikhar, just give us what’s tried and tested. In 2013, she boycotted the industry and didn’t write anything for over a year. “When I was new in the industry I had the freedom to experiment so why should I as an established writer be bound now?” Iftikhar said.
It was during that hiatus that director Nadeem Baig asked her to write a script. Trying to fob him off with multiple excuses, Iftikhar made some stinging demands and kept them coming: “My heroine will not be slapped. In fact she will do the slapping. She will slap the hero. She’s won’t be a naïve girl, she will be cruel and mean.” An undaunted Baig agreed and Iftikhar wrote Dillagi.
Anmol, the heroine of Dillagi, is close to Iftikhar’s heart – strong, independent, hard-working and self-made. Because this is a Faiza Iftikhar character, some of her qualities might not win her audience’s empathy the way a more traditional heroine might have.
Most of Iftikhar’s female characters share that quality – they are strong and independent women but never perfect. She bristles at the way in which value judgments continue to be made about women based on their domestic prowess.
A script close to Iftikhar’s heart, which was written many moons ago, was about three independent single women with rich lives who are forever keeping men at bay so that they can remain happy. To date it hasn’t been made.
“Many women are single or without children, so are they all bad women?” Iftikhar said. “We still tend to define women by their relationships and roles rather than as unique individuals with needs, wants and their own idiosyncrasies.”
What then has been the best adaptation of her work to date? Roag, she answered without hesitation.
Roag was adapted from her novel of the same name and was a thoughtful and sensitive portrayal of child sexual abuse. Iftikhar wanted to create awareness about the issue. While she has been asked many times to write on this topic again, she responds that she would do it only if the channel can guarantee that there will be no sensationalism of the issue as we often see on the screen now.
With Dillagi and Mein Sitara, based on the heyday of the Pakistani film industry, currently on air in Pakistan, Iftikhar has moved on to future projects, which include a drama starring Faysal Qureshi and Iraj Fatima.
Another favourite drama of hers, titled Shayaad, is slated to be on Geo.
So when will we see her name on the silver screen? While Iftikhar hopes to write a film, she feels she needs to learn and master the techniques of writing a film screenplay with all its technicalities. “Both Dillagi and Shayaad are written as practice film scripts,” she revealed.
For now, it seems Faiza Iftikhar has a good hold on all the names of her dramas. We hope to catch more her multidimensional characters, nuanced portrayals of humanity and a seasoned brand of great storytelling on the small screen and beyond.
This article first appeared on Images.dawn.com.