Setting a benchmark

In this collection of contemporary short stories from Pakistan, 'India' features on the title and cover and the last story is about Bangladesh! Add to that the fact that the writers do away with being reverential or meek. It is a showcase of how Pakistani writers engage with a more 'contemporary' Pakistan, one that interacts rather than merely react to the world at large. It introduces new and old talents, produces unexpected themes, promises 'tradition' and a makeover. The collection on all accounts will seem like a bold 'coming out' venture by some of Pakistan's important writers in the vernacular (Urdu, Punjabi, Sindhi, Siraiki) and in English.

The collection takes its title from the Urdu story written by Intizar Hussain called 'A Letter from India' (translated admirably by the collection's editor, Moazzam Sheikh). The story is about the anxiety of an old man watching his brood disperse into the wilderness of the world. The narrator signs his name as 'Nameless Qurban Ali' and grieves over the vicissitudes of history and the tangible erosion his clan/family suffers. He helplessly rails at borders, overseas jobs, disgraceful marriages, the shameless modern world: "our entire family can now be considered half-partridge, half-quail, and each one of us is a mourner for we have lost our pedigree and also the wisdom of knowing who we were" (79). Even though he believes "One has never seen a dispersed family come together" he gives his nephew (the one he is writing the letter to) a daunting mission. To do as Ali has done his entire life --keep records, of (dead and alive) every member of this dark-fated family, to track out "which member is still loafing about in which country" or "has made which country his home" (80). Ali, what with his zesty exclamations, ruddy-faced exasperation and voluble roar of affection is like a delightful Polonius, a stickler for order in the face of chaos and change, affably prescribing 'cures' for warped times. Sheikh's translation is so vivid that the finer nuances belonging to the Urdu text come through even for people who do not read Urdu.

The collection gives us powerful stories. Like Nadir Ali's 'Feeqa's Death' (translated from Punjabi) in which local brawls hone in on larger Partition politics, or like Asad Mohammad Khan's story 'The Squatter' that explores the lives and last breaths of two castoffs, one a Muslim 'bastard' and the other a Hindu 'ravaged by skin disease' striking a friendship. In 'If Truth be Told' the story revolves around the journeys the narrator makes, feeling first scared, then uncomfortable, and then wearied out in trying to find his cantankerous mother who, after a-quarrel-too-many with the family, had walked out. He roams in and shrines and holy places, knowing his mother often resorted to them and had made friends there. The mother does not turn up and the twist is that the narrator slowly finds himself and comes around acknowledging an unnerving truth about himself. Such stories and characters show extraordinary Tolstoyesque human warmth that abundantly makes up for the lighthearted humour that otherwise seems to be absent in A Letter from India.

Three more stories from the collection (and there are nineteen) deserve a special mention. Among them, Moazaam Sheikh's own story called 'The Barbarians and the Mule'. This is a tale about a rookie reservist (failed novelist, disappointed in love as well) who faces his first day at work handling a 'barbarian', a middle-aged Palestinian called Yassin and his ten year old son. Despite his jitters, the rookie makes an 'Oscar-level performance" (10) by having Yassin at gun point strip and do the unthinkable in front of his son. Sheikh handles the prose well. The story is uncluttered, the politics unmuddled. The other one is Soniah Naheed Kamal's story called 'Papa's Girl' that will either make people reel or retch (depending on the reader's stomach since the author does broach a delicate topic). The narrator is the archetypal chauvinist. He recounts a trip he had taken as a boy with his father to Thailand where he had encountered the father's Thai woman (the narrator calls her "Dodo-head"). The young lad had stumbled on a scene in which Dodo-head was lying on a bed smelling like "baby shrimps in brine." She looked like a witch, "stiff seaweed" spewing from her "cinder valley". He remembers to order his wife-to-be to get depilatory treatment. On his nuptial bed he winces at his clean wife all "goosebumpy like raindrops on a waxed window" (18) and decides to teach her abstinence. So he pats her and turns to sleep to dream about soiled things.

There are unsuccessful stories too in the collection. For example, Fahmida Riaz's (a well known poet) bizarre story called 'Hieroglyphics'. She conjures an Eastern woman visiting Berkeley. Laila makes a courtesy call on a Jewish professor who greets her with a dry, preposterously-worded welcome. While discussing 'scripts and languages' the professor checks out the Eastern woman: she smells of sandalwood, wears a costume with glasswork and a gauzy, organza dupatta. The Eastern woman notices the 'golden hair peeping out from under his upturned sleeves' and the three buttons of his shirt that were open' (151). The conversation that the author had meant to sound serious, and possibly academic, is as stilted and sounds as absurd as the professor's greeting.

A little later, as Laila prepares to leave, the prim professor who had been careful to not upset any cultural norms by shaking the hand that Laila had offered when she came in, gives Laila's dupatta a gentle tug. The two take to the floor pondering "the meaning of language" (151)! All in a day's work!

In the last story 'Path' by Azra Waqar, the narrator asks rather disingenuously to her Bengali friend what message could possibly have been conveyed through the pictures of "Pakistan Army, corpses and dogs on display at the museum" (158). They do not resolve the issue of whether history was "preserved", "changed" or, as the narrator suggested, "deformed. The story is filled with a nervous flutter of emotions. The narrator acknowledges "Bangladesh" in a febrile and frankly infantalized way by identifying herself with the birds that twitter, the trees that whisper, the earth that offers 'amore'. Through her "journey" she offers this land (and the country too perhaps) her respect. Towards the end, the narrator settles for the fact that 'history has been written. Time has played its trick. We've been separated' (162). The story could have ended there, which sadly it does not. For there is to be another rhapsody, celebrating Bengali womanhood in Daisy ("she is the most beautiful woman, the beauty of Bengal…who showed me to see 'no' from 'yes'") [whatever that means!] and a paean to the magic of Bengal. Moazzam Sheikh, in his Introduction to the collection says that he had to cast aside many good writers and their stories. That a story like 'Path' found its path into a serious collection like A letter from India really baffles! There is a lot to compensate for stories like 'Spot', 'Mangoes in the Time of Winter', 'Barriers that Remained' or 'The Buffalo' that are puzzlingly artificial. The collection in conclusion is a mix, of good writing with attitude and bad writing writhing helplessly, it has some very memorable stories and some alas, very forgettable ones. A Letter From India on the whole, however, without a doubt sets a benchmark.

Nuzhat Mannan teaches English at Dhaka University.