Urdu Immortal

A newly translated selection of stories finds irony, poetry and wasted opportunity in the troubled history of the Subcontinent

Intizar Husain, the great Urdu short story writer, novelist and journalist, evokes in his work a paradise—a syncretic, coherent, aromatic and, above all, harmonious Subcontinent—that has been irreparably damaged. His characters, tormented, exhausted by loss, carry that paradise in their heads, unable to reconcile their memories (or imagined memories) with the desolation of their present.

It is the storyteller’s condition: to imagine, to dream a world so much more compelling than that which is ‘real’. As Husain writes in ‘Circle’, the opening story of The Death of Sheherzad, a slim compilation of 15 stories newly translated by the scholar Rakhshanda Jalil: ‘When will I see that one dream, the hope of which has been sustaining me all along? When will that dream be united with my wakeful self? When will I write my story? Or will I forever circle round and round in a gyre?’

In this way, both oblique and plain, Husain, born in 1923, deals with the ur-trauma of the Subcontinent—Partition. Basti (1979), which some critics have declared the best novel about Partition, made Husain’s name as a writer, sophisticated enough to invoke the storytelling traditions of Hindus and Muslims and European modernism, all of it— Kafka, Woolf, Turgenev, Hindu folk tales, Abrahamic parables—grist for a writer mourning the tragedy of his nation. That nation, Pakistan, is the imagined paradise lost, the dream soured by reality. It is not just Partition that stains these pages, but, more significantly, 1971 when Pakistan lost, Husain suggests, not just its Eastern appendage but its hope.

What is the correct response to your nation unravelling? Experience renders many of Husain’s characters mute, bewildered by what they have seen, unable to explain or, more appropriately, explain away. In ‘Sleep’, Salman returns ‘from there’, to the astonishment of his friends. “Tell us what happened there,” they demand. “Yes,” he replies, “that I can tell you… If I begin to describe all that I have seen, you will break out in goose pimples.” Salman’s friends wait, ‘rapt in attention.’ Finally, annoyed by Salman’s silence, a friend points out, “Yaar, you haven’t told us anything yet.” “Yaar, yaar,” Salman says, casting about for his words like an incompetent angler for fish, “I don’t know what to say. I can’t remember anything.” Silence, confusion, black laughter are the only responses Husain’s characters can muster in the face of reality. In ‘The Wall’, men clamber over to the other side, never to return, until one decides to see what there is to see on the other side while having his friends hold him with a rope so he is not lost. He is split in two, his ‘bloodied torso’ torn in two: ‘Amasa laughed. “Mandaris has turned himself into an object of ridicule over a pointless exercise… look at him… half his body if lying here and half on the other side.”’

Ghosts haunt Husain’s characters, handcuffed to their dreams like the characters in Virginia Woolf’s short story, ‘Kew Gardens’. There, Woolf writes of a character, ‘He talked almost incessantly; he smiled to himself and again began to talk, as if the smile had been an answer. He was talking about spirits—the spirits of the dead, who, according to him, were even now telling him all sorts of odd things about their experiences in Heaven.’ This old man is like one of Husain’s lost men, maddened by a vast, ultimately unknowable grief, attuned to the spirits, unprepared, unable to forget.

In ‘Circle’, quasi-autobiographical and essayistic like ‘Between Me and the Story’, also included in this collection, Husain revisits his first short story ever, ‘Qayyuma ki Dukan’ (Qayyuma’s Shop), first published in 1952, wanting to write it over again because it should have been about the person who ‘stayed behind… rooted in that land; he did not budge when the rest of us were leaving’ (from ‘Circle’).

There is, Husain warns, ridiculousness in man’s pointless exercises but also great harm, even evil. In ‘Between Me and the Story’, about Pakistan and India becoming nuclear ‘powers’, he writes, ‘If anything, life’s dark night has become even darker… Man has poisoned not just the air in the garden, but the entire world.’ This is not mere hand-wringing. Writing, telling stories, when the world around you is tearing itself asunder, is an act not just of defiance but of faith. Husain sets for himself Sisyphus’ task of rolling the boulder again and again to the top of the hill; or, to borrow from one of his own stories, the task of the tribes of Yajooj and Majooj, to lick at a wall all night, to pare it down with nothing but their tongues, leaving the remainder of the task for the next day only to see, when dawn breaks, the wall restored to its previous thickness.

Intizar HusainRakhshanda JalilThe death of Sheherzad