How Naushad Parpia Uses Objects to Tell Stories About People

Quick Summary

• Objects work as stand-ins for character in his writing, often before a person even shows up on the page.

• A recipe, a chair, a jacket, each one holds a decision somebody made about what mattered enough to keep.

• He treats objects less like background detail and more like evidence in an open case.

• The method works because objects tell the truth in a way people describing themselves sometimes don't.

• There's a lesson here for anyone trying to write a real person instead of a summary of one.

Introduction

Ask someone to describe their grandmother and you'll usually get an adjective. Kind. Stubborn. Funny in a dry way. Ask what she kept on her nightstand and something different happens. The description gets specific fast. Naushad Parpia builds his portraits of people out of that second kind of answer. Instead of telling a reader who somebody was, he shows what they held onto, and lets the reader do the work of figuring out the person from there. It's a slower way to write a character. It's also, more often than not, a truer one.

What an Object Says Before a Person Does

There's a reason lawyers trust physical evidence over testimony. People shape their own stories, sometimes without meaning to. A worn armchair doesn't do that. It just sits there having been sat in for thirty years, and that alone tells you something a person's own account of themselves might smooth over.

Naushad Parpia leans on this difference constantly. Before he tells a reader anything directly about a character, he'll describe the thing that character owns. A cracked phone screen nobody bothered fixing. A drawer that only opens halfway because something's jammed inside it and nobody's dealt with that either. Small failures like these carry more honesty than a character summary would, mostly because nobody's trying to make them sound good.

The Recipe Card and the Person Who Never Measured Anything

A handwritten recipe with no measurements listed is one of his favorite kinds of object, and it's easy to see why. Whoever wrote it assumed the next cook would already know. A pinch of this. However much that looked like. This single assumption tells you the recipe passed hand to hand inside a family that trusted each other with vague instructions, which is its own kind of intimacy.

Naushad Parpia doesn't need to state that the person who wrote the card was confident, or that she trusted whoever came after her to figure it out. The card does that work on its own. Readers arrive at the character without being told to.

Furniture, Clothing and What People Choose to Keep

Move enough times and you learn what you actually value, because moving forces a choice most people never make otherwise. Naushad Parpia's essays return again and again to that exact moment, standing in an emptying apartment deciding what comes along and what gets left at the curb.

A jacket kept for fifteen years past the point it still fits says something about sentiment winning out over practicality. A chair carried through four different homes says the opposite thing about somebody, maybe, that comfort mattered more than starting fresh each time. None of this gets spelled out in his writing directly. The object just sits there in the essay, and the reader ends up doing a little detective work to understand who owned it.

A Storefront Sign as a Portrait of Someone Who Isn't There Anymore

Storefronts are objects too, in his hands, even though they're technically buildings. A hand-painted sign left up after a shop closes becomes a kind of self-portrait by the person who ran the place, whether they meant it that way or not. The lettering style. Which language it's written in. Whether it says "closed" or just goes quiet without explanation.

Naushad Parpia's storefront essays use these signs to sketch out the person behind the business without ever meeting them. A shop owner who repainted their sign every few years was probably proud of the place. One who let the paint chip for a decade might have been holding on out of habit rather than hope. The sign becomes a stand-in for a person the writing never gets to interview.

Expert Advice: Writing People Through the Things They Own

Writers who study characterization often tell beginners the same thing. Skip the adjectives. Instead of writing that a character was messy, describe the unopened mail piled on the kitchen counter and let the reader arrive at messy on their own. This is basically the technique Naushad Parpia runs on in almost every essay he writes.

Pick one object per person you're writing about, not five. Too many objects and the portrait gets cluttered instead of sharp. Ask what the object reveals that a direct description wouldn't. If the answer is nothing new, the object probably isn't doing enough work yet, so it's worth swapping it for something more specific to that one person.

Final Verdict

Writing a person directly, describing what they were like, tends to flatten them into a type. Writing them through an object they owned tends to do the opposite. Naushad Parpia's essays lean almost entirely on this second approach, and the result is a body of work full of people the reader never technically meets but somehow still recognizes. Anyone interested in characterization, in nonfiction or fiction, could learn something from how deliberately he lets a chair or a recipe card carry the weight a paragraph of description usually tries to.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do writers use objects to describe people instead of adjectives?

Because objects show rather than tell, and readers tend to trust what they figure out for themselves more than what they're simply informed of. A cluttered desk does more character work than the word "disorganized" ever could.

What makes an object a good detail for characterization?

A good object usually carries a small contradiction or an unexplained choice, something kept past its usefulness or repaired instead of replaced. Objects that raise a quiet question tend to work better than objects that just confirm what's already obvious.

How is this different from simply describing someone's possessions?

Simple description lists what's there. Characterization through objects asks what the object reveals about a decision the person made, why they kept it, fixed it, or never got rid of it, which turns a list into a portrait.

Can this technique work in fiction as well as nonfiction?

Yes. Novelists use the same approach constantly, letting a character's belongings hint at backstory instead of explaining it outright. The technique isn't tied to any one form of writing, just to a preference for showing over stating.

Why does a handwritten recipe work so well as a character detail?

Because a recipe without measurements reveals trust between people, the cook and whoever they expected to read it later, without needing to say anything about that relationship directly. The gap in instructions becomes the story.

How can a writer start using this technique in their own work?

Pick one object connected to a real person you want to write about, then ask what decision that object represents, keeping it, fixing it, carrying it somewhere new, and start the description there instead of with how that person seemed.