about taking that child and sending him to the Edhi. Home or to the SOS Village for Children, far away from his life on the street where he would face degradation and danger every day of life.
     I couldn’t pluck the boy out of his circumstance in real life, but I made it happen in fiction, in Where They Dream in Blue. The novel is in fact an exploration of what might happen if somebody actually did go through with my plan --- the thoughts, the fears, the feeling of hope and perhaps even arrogance at thinking that you could be so instrumental in changing a person’s entire life out of your own feeling’s of generosity or self-importance or whatever. I explored, through the fiction, the consequences of these actions, and I decided to take it down a certain avenue --- in the books Karim’s actions have disastrous results. In real life something else might have happened. But this allowed me to make this character endure tests and trails, opposition, and come through a major struggle in order to learn some very hard home truths about himself and his ideas about the world.
      So, my characters are many things at once: aspects of people, behaviours and events that I have observed in real life; aspects of myself and my own thinking and beliefs; and only very rarely possessing and characteristics or habit that I have seen someone else own in real life. Each facet is important to create a solidly believable character, and a , and a skillful writer will meld all three seamlessly in order to take you for a ride. But for the record, don’t worry. The next time you read something I have written, just remember: there is more of me in there than you.