Book review: Dozakhnama

Dozakhnama (trans. Arunava Sinha)
Penguin/ Viking
544 pages
Rs399

A journalist chances upon a manuscript while on a visit to Lucknow. It’s written in Urdu, a language the journalist can’t read but whose lyricism he can appreciate if it’s read out to him. The man who gives it to him is considered a raving lunatic, rendered insane by the stories that haunt him. He tells the journalist it’s a novel, written by Saadat Hasan Manto. It’s the only novel that Manto wrote.

The journalist comes home to Calcutta and, with the help of a translator, begins reading the manuscript. It is an imagined conversation between two writers in their graves, Manto and Mirza Ghalib. If you believe it, this was written on the day Manto died.

But realism isn’t the point of Dozakhnama. It’s about the magic of storytelling and the graceful pirouettes by a feverish imagination that looks to cover the  real world in a shroud of fiction. Don’t look for plot and forget about logic. Instead,  delight in the images of Bengali novelist Rabisankar Bal’s words, which haven’t lost their magic in this translation. 

The Urdu word ‘dastan’ means ‘story’ and is a meandering, poetic thing. Dozakhnama is everything a dastan should be. The tales of Manto and Ghalib flit easily from the time when Delhi was known as Shahjahanabad, to dateless legends, to cinema-struck Bombay. Bal’s novel reads like a fantastic dream. Some times it’s perplexing. It’s frequently beautiful. And when it ends, you’ll be reluctant to wake up.