Beyond Suspicion And Stereotypes: Author Mirza Waheed On Maryam & Son

One morning, Maryam Ali wakes up in her East London flat to a silence that feels off, unfamiliar, an absence she cannot yet name.

In Mirza Waheed’s latest novel Maryam & Son, Maryam Ali discovers that her son Dilawar, or as she calls him a piece of  her heart and her “Dil,” the quiet, computer-loving boy she raised largely on her own after her husband’s death, is not home. At first, the worry is mundane, almost rational, perhaps he stayed out, perhaps something delayed him. But as hours turn into days, and days into a hollow stretch of waiting, that silence begins to thicken into dread.

What she receives instead is something far more incomprehensible. Authorities show her a grainy video from Mosul, a masked man holding a sword. They tell her it is almost certainly Dilawar, that he may have travelled to Iraq and joined the Islamic State.

This is the premise Waheed, a Kashmiri award-winning author, builds his fourth book on. But as he makes clear, the novel is not about the son.

“It is not the son’s story… it is about what happens with Maryam, how Maryam deals with it,” he tells Outlook in an interview, explaining how often parents of those who disappear are “reduced to headlines.” 

From that point onward, the narrative retreats from spectacle and turns inward. Waheed is less interested in geopolitics than in the slow, devastating erosion of a mother’s certainty, how a life that once felt secure begins to fracture under the weight of suspicion, surveillance, and not knowing.

Maryam’s days stretch into a rhythm of waiting. She moves through her flat, her garden, her son’s room, holding on to the idea that as long as there is no confirmation of death, there is still hope. “He’s somewhere,” she tells herself, clinging to the fragile logic of absence.

But the novel resists resolution. Instead, it inhabits uncertainty, what it feels like to live inside a question that has no answer.

A woman beyond binaries

What makes Maryam & Son quietly radical is its refusal to flatten Maryam into a stereotype.

She is not the familiar figure of the submissive, devout Muslim mother often seen in popular narratives. Instead, she is contradictory, textured, alive. She prays regularly, but also smokes in secret, occasionally drinks, and takes care in how she presents herself. She has raised her son alone after her husband’s death, built a life on her own terms, and remained assured of her place in society.

Waheed insists that this complexity was not engineered as a corrective gesture but emerged organically from the character herself. “People are people… complicated, vulnerable, silly, mad, like everybody else,” he says, pushing back against the idea that Muslim characters must carry representational weight.

At the same time, Maryam’s grief does not conform to neat arcs. It is cyclical, compulsive. She promises herself she will not revisit Dilawar’s photographs, only to return to them night after night, as if repetition might produce revelation. She teeters between disbelief and dread, denial and doubt.

Crucially, the novel tracks how external suspicion begins to seep inward. As Waheed puts it, “this is what surveillance and prejudice and suspicion does… you begin to then question your own self, your beliefs.” Maryam starts to ask the unthinkable, did she miss something? Did she fail him?

Yet even as she fractures, she resists passivity. Waheed is clear about this: “she’s going to be many things but she’s not a passive figure.” Maryam refuses to become a symbol, refuses to perform the role expected of her, the grieving, apologetic Muslim mother.

Her relationship with Julian Chapman, the family liaison officer, adds another layer to this resistance. He represents the system scrutinising her family, yet he is also its “human face.” 

In one of her conversations with Chapman, she sits in front of him, looking him in his eyes, she talks about giving birth to a child, a boy and how she brought him up in the absence of his father. She says that when a woman says she gave birth to “that child” it is never just about the birth, it is a lot more. Birth, she says, is a big event but one among the many. 

“There’s an entire life afterwards… When you give us credit for bringing that beautiful baby into the world, you also hold us responsible for how they turn out to be,” she says, as he stands there looking at her. 

Their connection, tentative, complicated, shaped by loneliness and proximity, emerges not as a moral statement but as a human possibility. Waheed frames it simply, placing two people like this together, repeatedly, and “what will happen?”

The answer, like much in the novel, is left unresolved.

Given its premise, Maryam & Son inevitably invites comparisons with novels like Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire. Waheed acknowledges the overlap but is careful to draw distinctions. He speaks with admiration about Shamsie’s work, calling it “brilliant” and “the kind of novel that will be read 20 years from now.” Yet he also notes that he began writing his book before Home Fire was published, and for a moment wondered if the ground had already been covered.

What drew him back to the story that was on his mind for many years now was Maryam herself. He was, as he puts it, “too invested in her story.” Unlike the broader political arcs of these earlier novels, his focus remains tightly on the domestic and emotional.

This is where Maryam & Son departs most significantly. It does not attempt to explain radicalisation or provide insight into the son’s motivations. Dilawar remains distant, almost abstract, a presence defined by absence. The narrative instead centres the mother’s interior world. Waheed describes his role not as one of argument but observation. 

She is grieving, yes, but she is also something else, someone who wants, as Waheed puts it, simply “to live her own life… to have fun.” Beneath the weight of tragedy, there remains a trace of the person she once was, and perhaps still is.

Waheed wants his readers to take away not a message but a memory of Maryam where they carry her voice, her contradictions, her resilience beyond the page. And in a narrative crowded with noise, politics, suspicion, and spectacle, that quiet insistence on remembering a single, complex life feels like its most radical act. 

Kashmir, London, and the politics of suspicion

Though set in London, the emotional undercurrent of Maryam & Son is shaped by another landscape, Kashmir.

Waheed speaks of growing up with stories of enforced disappearances, of families waiting years, even decades, for news of their loved ones. “The idea of the parent left behind waiting… is a big part of the Kashmir story,” he says. That sense of suspended grief, of living without closure, finds its way into Maryam’s experience.

At the same time, he says that this experience is not unique to one place, noting that “the idea of the disappeared is not limited to Kashmir… you had it in Latin America, in Argentina.”

Even then, however, her situation remains distinct. Unlike many families who receive no answers, Maryam is given one, and she refuses it. She is told who her son is, what he has become, and yet she resists that narrative, even as doubt begins to creep in.

Waheed describes Britain, especially London, as a deeply multicultural but increasingly polarised space, where rising Islamophobia, far-right rhetoric, and post-Brexit anxieties coexist with strong support for diversity and immigration. He notes a divide between cosmopolitan London and economically strained regions outside it, where frustration is often redirected toward immigrants and Muslims.

For Waheed, literature is not about taking on the burden of correcting these tensions directly. Instead, his role as a novelist is to move beyond reductive labels and binaries, and to portray individuals in their full emotional and human complexity, offering a more intimate, layered understanding of lives often flattened by public discourse. At the same time, he resists reducing the novel to a political statement. “That’s not why you write a novel,” he says. 

In Maryam, that revelation is deeply human. “My job as a novelist… is to examine it, look at it… to show people, flesh and blood people, in all their complexity and vulnerability… to reveal what lies behind the labels.”

Waheed says that he wanted to write about the interior life of a woman under a psychological siege. “Maryam must navigate her own desire, the fierce loyalty of her sisters Zarrine and Saffina, and the matriarchal strength of her mother Ama, to reclaim her agency from the wreckage…,” he says, adding that she experiences a double mourning: the loss of her son, and the loss of her right to grieve him publicly.

“The state doesn't just take her child, it takes her status as a mother worthy of sympathy. As she says at one point, ‘I wish people talked more to their mothers. I wish more boys talked to their mums, and mums to their boys. It's not bad, mothers and sons talking’,” he adds. 

Through this novel, Waheed hopes that his main character, Maryam “breaks some hearts and makes some laugh, but I'm certain she will make some fall in love with her. She's defiant in her ordinariness, and that, I feel, is where her power lies.”