A reader emailed me tonight and asked the following:

“Is Elena gay? I thought she might be because of her strong feelings about Noor and her love for Charlie.”

I thought the answer deserved a post.

First off, Elma is one of the characters who’s changed most through the multiple drafts of the novel. She is also, in some ways, symbolic of how Charlie changed as the novel got rewritten.

In the very first draft, Charlie was more of a frat boy - he didn’t have that wounded backstory, a mother who’d died of cancer, a rift with his father, a deep but hidden intellectual side to him. He was purely in Pakistan to make money and have as much fun as he could. Elma was someone he hit on and slept with. She was a frivolous character in herself, a sexually liberated Dutch woman, and her purpose was to be someone Noor could encounter nude at Charlie’s home. Noor concludes that Charlie’s everything she hates about the West and Western men in particular.

In subsequent drafts while Charlie stayed the same, Elma graduated into a more layered individual. She still slept with Charlie early on, but she also fell in love with him. He made her feel alive I suppose. When Charlie subsequently dumped her, because he had fallen in love with Noor, she was deeply wounded and at the end of the film she does betray Noor out of jealousy and I suppose spite.

In the last few drafts, however, I shifted Charlie’s character. (Curiously enough Noor has never changed that much). I wanted him to be fun still but I wanted him to be more soulful, to have a deeper core than becomes more apparent as the novel progresses. I felt that the early affair with Elma tarnished him and so I got rid of it, but in doing so Elma needed a whole new role. It was then that I touched on the idea of not only making her Noor’s high up boss but also the person who proposed the scholarship to Noor. She and Charlie, in fact, have almost no contact in the story whatsoever anymore.

To me, Elma is a complex individual. First and foremost she is a career woman. Her career has come before everything and anything else, and when we meet her she is desperate to get on the next rung of the ladder - the UN post. That said there is also a part of her who wonders what’s it all been for. She’s in her late 30s, perhaps she’s broody, perhaps she is looking at her life and wondering what its exact meaning is. After all she got into the aid work for all the right reasons - she genuinely wanted to help people. Yet as she explains to Noor in the book, now she is a high level manager she has lost that one-on-one part of the job that makes you actually feel like you are making a difference. And so Noor becomes a project - something that, in a bizarrely self-centered way, can make her feel better about herself.

Now in terms of her sexuality, I would say that Elma is a liberated woman. She certainly has no Anglo hang ups about sex. She enjoys it. She is able to divorce the emotion from it iand certainly has used it, and felt no guilt about using it, to help her career. Men find both her lithe looks and direct manner a huge turn on, and I’m sure lesbian and bi-sexual women do too. 

Is Elma gay? I would say no. Has she slept with the odd woman along the way, perhaps been involved a couple of threesomes? I’m sure she has. It’s sex and fun to her. That’s it. I’m sure she was also curious and enjoyed it. So maybe she is bi-sexual but her tastes for the most part tend towards men. Does she find Noor attractive? Undoubtedly. Noor is a beautiful woman and she can appreciate that. But she also sees in Noor someone who men ogle and attempt to take advantage of, in the same way she was ogled and taken advantage of as a teenager. In a bizarre way she sees her friendship with Noor as a pure thing - it’s why when she discovers that Noor has something for Charlie that she is so indignant. It’s her certain belief that Charlie has cast a spell upon Noor and by doing so will ruin her life if she, Elma, doesn’t break it.

Has Elma loved along the way? No. The devastation of her affair and pregnancy with her high school teacher has pretty much precluded that. It’s as if she doesn’t want to become vulnerable or love in case she is hurt once again. She never loved the French ambassador. What she likes are powerful men - they are her turn on.

And then Rod comes along. Initially she wants to use him - get him to write an article that will help her get her UN posting. But then she begins to fall for him; I think part of it comes about because Noor has opened her heart. By caring for Noor, Elma allows herself to care and fall in love with a man she would usually not be attracted to.

And then Rod breaks her heart. It’s as if she is seventeen all over again. The pain only worse because she is older and thus feels all the more of a fool. It embitters her. At this point you could argue that she is not sexually attracted to Noor but what she wants is to wrest Noor’s love / loyalty / devotion (whatever you wish to call it) from Charlie. There can be no sharing here. She needs to win this fight to soothe her own ego and when she loses it, her fury meets no bounds. She destroys Noor’s scholarship and reverts to her old ways - so much so that Ivor and the lure of the UN posting allows her to destroy Noor’s life.

She is not evil - she knows she’s done wrong. She hates herself for it. It is the reason she sleeps with Ivor. She feels she deserves nothing more or better in this life. If she could take back what she’s done she would. For while she’s not gay or sexually attracted to Noor, she realizes that she loved her, and as the old saying goes, in this life you end up hurting the ones you love the most.