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ShareDo You Suppose It's The East Wind? Stories From Pakistan
Edited and Translated by Muhammad Umar
Memon
Penguin
296 pages
Rs299
The translator, a professor of Urdu, Persian and Islamic Studies at the University of Wisconsin, has been variously involved in translating from and into Urdu.
Much of his commitment to the language and its literary culture comes through in his short but cogent introduction to the anthology, and the stories included illustrate his basic argument. Regret and nostalgia mingle with wit, satire, pathos and gender injustice, but overriding these is a humanism that offers alternative perspectives to what Memon describes as the "essentialising tendency" in the portrayal of "Pakistanis... in the media, especially since the tragic events of 11 September 2001 and many other similar episodes occurring within India."
The thirteen writers represented span several decades. While the ghost of Partition has a tangible presence in the older writers, others use more recent themes, like Bhutto's execution or the 1990s turmoil in Afghanistan, making for a larger fictional canvas. Not surprisingly, exile and return (or dreams of it) form a running thread through much of the writing.
Abdullah Hussein's 'Sunlight', the first story in the collection, sets the tone with its multiple will-o'-the-wisp strands of thought as a father and son get entangled in discussions on the "circular" nature of history and its similarities with the "rut of habit" that constrains humans. "'True brilliance,' the father concluded, 'is to somehow break free of this rut.'" The maze of thought runs alongside their journey home, a place the father had left many years earlier.
In Jameela Hashmi's 'Banished', years of marriage and motherhood have not erased the brutal memory of Bibi's abduction and separation from her family during the stormy Partition era. Juxtaposed with Bibi's trauma is the man who forcibly carted her off, now her "husband", who can matter-of-factly wonder at her inability to "forget that incident...
That was another time." Bibi's becomes the archetypal story of women in war time, and the Sita myth is wrapped around her own perception of her tragedy even though the brooding, unrelenting images of her past and present contain dimensions Sita never knew.
But the saga of female endurance requires no war to sustain it.
The title story of the collection reiterates this, the female persona looking back on a childhood association irretrievably lost when the subcontinent was divided: "It was like somebody had violently thrashed the grain in a winnowing fan. One flew and landed here, another somewhere else... Well, Robby Dutt, it's like this: I ended up here. You must be still there, grown into an honourable man, responsible and wise." In another vein, 'The Lure Of Music' by Ghulam Abbas progresses inexorably to a point where a man's obsession with music blinds him to how his weakness could be manipulated to victimise his young daughters.
'Pink Pigeons: Was It They Who Won?' by Fahmida Riaz brings out the complexity of the Islamic issue, highlighting the many different regions, loyalties and ideologies that mould different Muslims as it moves through Kazakhstan to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and even Bombay (a geographical trail that brings back uncanny memories of Tagore's "Kabuliwallah").
Bhutto's arrest, the Communist invasion of Afghanistan, and the absurdity of finding a hardline Mulla's wife -- "a wife he had kept behind seven impenetrable veils" -- in a beauty parlour form an intriguing melange in this short story.
An anthology of this kind has been long overdue and is a hugely rewarding literary experience. Elegantly introduced and translated, the multiple sights, sounds and smells in this collection of stories are sure to haunt the reader long after it has been read and put away.
Vrinda Nabar is former head, department of English, Bombay University
