Friends offered a warm listening ear, including Monica Jain, Ismat Khatri, Barbi Lazarus, and Wei Su. Also, Nandita Bajaj, Barbara Center, Neel Desai, Mike Farley, Berna Ozunal, Bruce Poole, and Andrew Scorer supplied imaginative ideas for book promotion. Catherine Houle created a beautiful animated website at www.soniafaruqi.com.
I read lots of research in writing The Oyster Thief, but I particularly appreciated Josie Iselin’s photographic books, An Ocean Garden and Seashells.
I’m indebted to my parents, Shaista and Amin Faruqi, for their love and support. I’m also grateful to my parents-in-law, Shamim and Nazir Hasham; my siblings-in-law, Erik Desrosiers and Maha Hasnain; and my extended family, including and especially Zia Aleem, Javed Aleem, Perveen Matloob, Sultana Ali, and Shireen Begum.
Reading Guide
This guide is intended for book club and classroom discussions. Please note that it contains spoilers.
What animal would you choose if you could have a muse?
Rhodomela says: “In order to heal others, you have to first heal yourself. . . . Success is an outcome not of imitation but of authenticity—of not abiding by the rules but changing them. The questions are more important than the answers.” What do you think?
Do you think Coralline makes the right decision between Izar and Ecklon?
What if merpeople existed? How do you think our relationship with them would be? And how do you think their lives would be similar to and different from the depiction in The Oyster Thief?
Why do you think Abalone views and treats Coralline as she does?
Izar expects his discovery of underwater fire to make him rich, even as merpeople go extinct. If one person or company profits at the expense of everyone else, should it be permitted to continue?
“Infidelity is not an act but a feeling,” Altair says. What’s your opinion?
If there were an elixir that could save the life of someone you love, but if it were accompanied by a curse, would you try to find it?
Abalone says that the biggest mistake of Rhodomela’s life is her refusal to settle. “She could have married someone else, even if not the love of her life, and she could have built a pleasant enough life with him. But she had an all-or-nothing approach—and so nothing is what she got.” What do you think of an all-or-nothing approach to love and life?
How would you compare the merpeople relationship with the natural world to the human relationship with the natural world?
A Beautiful World
This section provides a behind-the-scenes look at the writing process for The Oyster Thief. Please note that it contains spoilers.
The idea of an underwater world fell into my mind on January 1, 2015. It was a freezing-cold morning in Canada, and I wished I could escape into tropical waters. But it was too expensive to book a last-minute flight, so I decided to escape in my mind. With a cup of tea in hand, I started inventing an underwater world.
As Izar’s underwater-fire invention required several steps for completion, so did my underwater world. I describe the steps here in the hope that they are helpful to those working on their own creative pursuits.
A Discovered Culture
I pretended that merpeople already existed and that I, like an anthropologist, was simply “discovering” them.
Given that they already existed, they, like all other life on earth, would exist in accordance with the laws of science and nature. For one, merpeople would be a kind of fish, just as humans are a kind of mammal. The traits they would share with fish would include gills, scales, and a cold-blooded, streamlined body.
I would have liked for skin color to range widely in the water, as it does on land—Coralline, as I originally envisioned her, was dark-skinned—but, if merpeople did exist, they would not have dark skin. Skin color varies among humans because of melanin, a pigment that acts as a protective biological shield against ultraviolet radiation. People from the southern hemisphere tend to have dark skin because they require more melanin to protect against intense sunlight. People from the northern hemisphere, meanwhile, tend to have light skin because vitamin D is a greater concern than ultraviolet radiation, and melanin can prevent them from producing enough vitamin D. Due to a lack of direct exposure to sunlight, merpeople would lack melanin, and so they would have pale, fine, almost translucent skin.
The ocean is vastly deep—its average depth is about two miles, or three-and-a-half kilometers—but much of its life, and all of its photosynthesis, is concentrated in what is called the Sunlight Zone, a range of six-hundred-and-sixty feet, or two hundred meters, down from the waves. I would have liked for merpeople to live deeper than the Sunlight Zone—to live in the Twilight, or even Midnight, Zone—but it would have meant living in the dark.
As for merpeople clothing, I leaned originally toward flowing gowns and robes, but I came to the obvious conclusion that such clothing would be cumbersome—the fabric would tangle constantly with tails. I opted for corsets and waistcoats; they would end at the hip, and their fitted design would ensure the fabric did not fly up while swimming.
I decided on shells for currency and jewelry because some cultures on land have historically also used shells as such. The phrase “shelling out money” originates from such use.
A Scientific Setting
Over the course of snorkeling, diving, and swimming with sharks, I’ve been fortunate to see lots of marine animals in their natural environments. But in addition to relying on my firsthand experiences, I read books and hundreds of articles relating to the ocean, homing in specifically on algae, animals, and plot-specific topics like oil spills.
Researching the ocean is not like researching things on land, I quickly realized. Of the millions of species thought to live in the ocean, the majority are unknown to us. Even those that we know of, we don’t know well—for instance, we don’t know the life spans or social habits of whale sharks.
Our knowledge about the ocean is also biased toward life close to shore, because it’s more accessible, of course. If we take algae as an example, what this means is that the algae we know best (including some of those mentioned in The Oyster Thief) grow in fairly shallow waters.
I sought to create cultural uses for algae that were in keeping with our knowledge of them. Buttonweed, dulse, pepper dulse, ulva, and undaria are eaten in certain parts of the world, so I figured they could also be eaten by merpeople. Devil’s apron is a sugar kelp, so I imagined it as a dessert. Desmarestia is an acid kelp known to be poisonous, so I retained it as a poison. Sea oak has a wide variety of medicinal uses on land, so I treated it as a remedial algae. And, just as there are plants on land without any specific uses, there are algae in The Oyster Thief without any specific uses—like the oyster thief itself.
Several sorts of stones are found underwater—among them, shale, slate, limestone, sandstone, and olivine.
As for light, bioluminescence is common in the ocean. The compound luciferin, found in many marine organisms, including bacteria, generates light in the presence of oxygen.