Beauty, At a Price

Everyone loves a hero. Qaim Deen, a feisty Pakistani Robin Hood who creeps through a seething jungle to steal livestock from across the border, is the best kind—jaunty, full of fantastic tales. Then, comes the flood— ‘Around three o’clock, the river swallowed its bank and started licking at the crops’—and the reckoning. Life is nasty, brutal and very often short in the 12 spare tales of rural Pakistan which make up Ali Akbar Natiq’s What Will You Give For This Beauty?

Daily life is overwhelming in this haunting short story collection, the rustic figurative language used to render it sometimes more plaintive than more sophisticated constructs: ‘Rao Jamil felt as if Noora’s voice was coming from deep inside a well,’ concludes ‘Despair’, whose Noora, forced into the roles of pimp and ‘bastard, the son of the entire town’, must somehow avenge the honour of his women, who are forced to cater to the rich. Natiq’s great gift is his affinity for foreshadowing, that ace card of the writer: in Noora’s path are ‘honourable’ men like Shaukat Khan, and mini potentates like Rao Jamil, whose ‘every word was like a mountain crushing him’; ‘Each man sitting at the farm seemed like a ghoul who would sink his claws into Noora’s chest and claw his liver out if he did not hurry away from the place.’ Only tragedy can come of this, it is obvious.

Born in village 32/2-L near Okara, 40-year-old Natiq’s ancestors migrated from Faizabad, near Lucknow, to Ferozepur district in Punjab, and finally, after Partition to Okara, in Pakistan, recounts his translator Ali Madeeh Hashmi. Natiq first specialised in domes and minarets, working with his hands to support his family and travelling for three years through Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Iran as a labourer. Reading widely and earning a Master’s on his own, he published his poetry in Pakistan’s Dunya-Zad and India’s Asbaat, and came to the attention of the Urdu literary world. Two collections of poetry, his short story collection Qaim Deen and a first novel last year, Naulakhi Kothi, all followed, in Urdu.

Natiq’s characters, living as they do in the harsh world of the farm and the flash flood, are at the mercy of heart-stoppingly cruel forces. Perhaps most awfully the victim of ‘Jeera’s Departure’, the village’s charismatic storyteller who must appease the village’s thirst in more ways than one, with the usual illogic: ‘Sher Ali placed his turban at Moday Shah’s feet and said, “Hazrat, the river is disappointed with us. We made a mistake. When we stopped offering sacrifices to it, it stopped our livelihoods.”’ And, of course, the hero of ‘A Mason’s Hand’, who seems to plumb every depth of the immigrant in Saudi, ending up barefoot and destitute; so close yet so far from the glories of the holy city. There is some beauty first, that vivid, redeeming glint in the desert: ‘He put his bag next to one of the trees and entered the moonlit orchard. In the final hours of the night, the moonlight filtering through the date trees in the desert transported him into a world of wonder. Ripe dates lay strewn on the sand.’ But not for long, paradise.

I first read Natiq through this solemn tale (published in Granta) and its pathos returns on a second reading. His world rushes out into the room with us; yet, not quite. So, Ghafoora the dimwit finds himself unexpectedly, in ‘Jodhpur’s End’, but we don’t see enough of the reasons behind his change of heart, or any real connection he might have with his beautiful wife Kareeman. Baba One-Eye Timepiece lives and dies without his family in ‘The Male Child’, filthy and unloved, ironically claimed only in the end. ‘Pandokey’ gives us some action in a Romeo-and-Juliet-style quickie nikah by the tombs of Bulleh Shah’s parents, Kalashnikovs and minarets completing the scene; but it leaves us strangely flat. Perhaps the unforgiving and overwhelming presence of religion in these stories adds to a certain predictability, as unavoidable as it is. Thus, the stories and particularly these characters remain powerful, their rawness palpable but at a slight remove.

There is a sort of muteness to this translation which may or may not have to do with qualities that do not translate from Urdu. Natiq’s stories hold the resonance of fables, and he has been likened to Premchand and Manto; indeed some of his conceits are similarly constructed. Yet, there is less nuance here. His melancholy and black humour, evident particularly in conversation, justify his ascendance in the contemporary Urdu literary firmament. But there is something missing.

The feudal subjects of Pakistani American Daniyal Mueenuddin’s accomplished In Other Rooms, Other Wonders speak in their own voice here, through one of their own, and this is the special quality of Natiq’s prose, still finding its footing: authenticity and fire. Yet, this collection does not satisfy as a whole. Perhaps English cannot give us all of this world. But we must not do it the disservice of expecting less.

Ali Akbar NatiqAli Madeeh HashmiWhat Will You Give for This Beauty?