For Pakistani writer Ali Akbar Natiq, who made a debut in English with an engaging collection of short stories, inspiration comes from the daily lives of other people and more often not, his own.
His anthology of 12 short stories "What Will You Give for This Beauty" has been translated from Urdu by Ali Madeeh Hashmi, who is Faiz Ahmed Faiz's grandson.
Natiq, who had gone to Saudi Arabia in search of work as a mason dips into own life experiences for his stories.
In the short story titled "A Mason's Hand" the protagonist Asghar travels to Saudi Arabia for work and ends up becoming a victim of pickpockets, something taken directly from Natiq's own life.
"Almost everything that Asghar goes through except towards the end, is my own story," Natiq told PTI over telephone from Islamabad.
The 38-year-old author makes for an unlikely literary star. To support his family he began his work as a mason, specialising in domes and minarets and whenever time allowed him he says he used to read widely in Urdu and Arabic.
Acclaimed as one of the brightest stars in Pakistan's literary firmament, Natiq has published two volumes of poetry and a collection of short stories in Urdu earlier.
"What will you give for this Beauty" originally published in Urdu in 2012 has been translated to English and published this year by Penguin in a nearly 220-page collection.
"I spent around three-and-a half years in the Middle East and the experience evolved me as a person. I saw a lot of people, situations they were in...Hence, characters in my stories are real. I might cook up the plot, but characters are more or less real," he said.
One of his protagonists Qaim Deen sneaks across the Sutlej, into India to steal cattle - braving cobras, wild boars and the border patrol - and gives generously of his earnings to those in need.
In another story, young Nauman's forbidden love for Nuzhat leads him to seek refuge in a holy place, at a terrible cost to his family. In the next, Maulvi Abdur Rahman and his neighbour's bull terrier engage in a hilarious and unrelenting battle of wits.
Natiq brings alive the world of the Punjab countryside very vividly, with an undercurrent of violence and poverty, through feuds and feasts, hunts and marriages, mobs and floods, elopements and gossip.
Acrobats, holy men, thieves, peasants, landowners, masons and courtesans populate his stories that leave readers yearning for more, as sometimes they are open-ended.
