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Tales From Two Places
The first place is Assam, next door to Bangladesh.
In fact, Next Door (Penguin India, 2008) is the name of this collection of eleven stories by Jahnavi Barua. Reprinted above, the title story gives some clue of the author's willingness to depict Assamese life in the raw. The book's strength lies in its blend of convent school perfect English with an inherently languid Assamese core, where the tonalities of modern life - as Assamese, like people everywhere else, travel abroad, study at Harvard, live in America, come back to their homeland for visits - flow easily into a language that can frequently, and comfortably, adopt, slip in and out of, Assamese phrases and words. The lives depicted, the setting in which they take place with its blend of greenery and low-scale urban structures, and the thoughts of the characters make these stories Assamese - and through them all flows the Brahmaputra! Yet, to the surprise of many of us ignorant about modern-day life in Assam, as noted above, its tales of its upper class acting like the upper class anywhere in the subcontinent, flying in and out of their land, toting along accessories and brands that the more 'developed' among us were supposed to be familiar with makes them something a little apart from what is expected.
Some of the stories have political overtones, representative of voices living lives on the margin, about innocence lost, or deliberately manipulated, or cheated. Concealed within the story 'River of Live', with its central character a retarded boy, are barbed statements that perhaps a fellow Assamese or pahari or any number of other marginalized and exploited peoples of modern-day India, or indeed the whole world, will instinctively understand: Trust no authority (especially those appointed to look after your interests: the Supreme Court, the government, the politicians), fight to keep what is precious in your culture safe from destruction, do not be embarrassed if the outside world thinks of you as 'backward' or 'retarded' (for it is so only by their definitions). Other stories are quieter, more in the realm of the domestic, as in 'The Favourite Child' where four daughters gathered around their dying mother become sisters together again, then break apart over their collective past. All the stories straddle the space between these two poles, and this first ever collection of stories by this Assamese writer indeed holds much promise of things to come. Barua lives in Banglore, trained as a doctor, but now is a full-time writer. In 2006 she was awarded a Charles Wallace Trust Fellowship to study creative writing in the UK.
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The second place is Pakistan.
Mohammed Umar Memon is a professor of Urdu, Persian and Islam Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in the USA and editor of the prestigious The Annual of Urdu Studies published from the same university. Memon has been a steady translator into English from Urdu, as well as from English and Arabic into Urdu. He has published several collections of Urdu short stories translated into English: The Tale of the Old Fishermen, The Colour of Nothingness, Domains of Fear and An Epic Unwritten. His latest collection of translated short stories titled Do You Suppose It's The East Wind? contains the works of thirteen Pakistani Urdu writers, published by Penguin India in 2009.
Memon's short introduction to the broader context of Urdu literature and the place of the short story within it is both feisty and erudite. He is stern against the unfair "conflation of a language with a religious community" that has led Urdu to its state of near extinction in the land of its birth, India, its marginalization in the wider world of literature, and association by guilt with a state that spawns 'terrorism' - Pakistan. Amid all the political hullabaloo people tend to lose sight, he says, of the very secular traditions of Urdu literature. Memon's erudition is displayed in a masterfully compact tour d'horizon of the Urdu short story, from its birth in Premchand, to the ruinous didacticism of the Progressive Writers Association prevalent in the 1950s through to the present day, to its 'post-realist' phase, where "all the spatial and temporal coordinates are often rigidly withheld in order to present experience in its pristine essence, without any kind of mediation or comment." Memon also notes that where fiction is concerned, Indian Urdu writers show a "greater propensity for innovation, daring and independence of will."
Be that as it may, Urdu writers from Pakistan in this volume are no slouches either when it comes to storytelling gifts. The title story by Altaf Fatima is about a Muslim woman who thinks about her Hindu boy playmate now in India - while the east wind, symbolic of old wounds, blows. Manto, of course, is here, and his 'For Freedon's Sake' entertains and critiques Gandhi at the same time - a very Mantoesque feat! A striking story is Tasadduq Sohel's 'The Tree', about exile in London and the bittersweet return home. Hasan Manzar's 'The Drizzle' subtly poses a pertinent question about dominant societal values, while feminist poet Fahmida Riaz takes us to Kazakhstan. The translations are first rate, benefiting from Memon's experienced hand at the tiller. To South Asian readers curious about how and what writers in the other languages in the subcontinent are up to, this volume gives a satisfying reply.
Khademul Islam is literary editor, The Daily Star.
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