A flicker of the veil

Neither Night Nor Day: 13 Stories
By Women Writers From Pakistan
Edited by  Rakhshanda Jalil
HarperCollins
191 pages
Rs250

A new collection of stories celebrates the ordinariness of life as it is lived and experienced by Pakistani women, writes Vijay Nambisan

 Rakhshanda Jalil in her lucid Introduction to this selection makes a couple of telling points:

“While any selection of writing is, by its very nature, a subjective exercise, my criteria have been somewhat pedestrian. …I must confess I chose Ordinariness as my anthem, for I believe that by celebrating ordinariness we celebrate life as it is lived by scores of real people [should that be crores?]…. My concern in this book, therefore, has been to present as complete a picture of  everydayness of life as it is lived and experienced by Pakistani women.”

Certainly, when you attempt to celebrate the Ordinary in a volume where homogeneity is ruled out, you are in peril of including ordinary efforts, but that is a risk that has to be taken. Jalil’s other criterion is also common-sensible:

“I never cease to marvel why anthologies by women writers put together by women editors assume that the  subject matter of their selection must be of overpowering interest to women alone. …[S]uch assumptions [are] as bizarre as assuming that dalit writing is only for dalit readers, or black writing exclusively for a black audience.”

However, just as Dalit writers speak most powerfully of their sufferings as Dalits, women are bound to write most evocatively of what it means to be a woman — in this case, a Pakistani woman — and this selection proves the rule.

Nikhat Hasan’s “The Tongue”, a dystopic vision of a land where speech is forbidden in order to improve productivity, cannot compare with Soniah Kamal’s “The Breast”, a perhaps not-so-imaginary description of a dystopia where girl children are killed at birth unless a boy is born around the same time with whom she can later mate.

Most ironical to us in this age of amniocentesis in India is this lament: “I dream of a world in which there are wizards, magic and machines that can tell what sex the child will be born with. Who would then wait for nine months to hear of a girl?”

The best stories here are the understated ones, which do not tell the bitterness that surges long and slow beneath the speakers’ lives.

Bina Shah’s “The Wedding of Sundri” is about the marriage of a 12-year-old in Sindh, and its aftermath.

The sorrow and the unfairness do not have to be told, they are there all through: “In a daze, Sundri watched as her uncles entered the room where she was sitting with the other women. They asked her three times whether she agreed to the marriage, but of course she was not  expected to reply.”

That same injustice is very well sited in an urban milieu by Nayyara Rahman in “The Job Application”, where a single mother looks for work: “‘Look at that, sir! That’s the problem with mothers these days.

They don’t care enough about their children. What if they have given birth to children? They are somebody else’s problem, right? Your career comes before your child. Is that what you are saying? Farheena, your child needs you! Does this job mean more to you than your son?’”

Khaleda Hussain’s “Leaves”, about a grandmother’s chance meeting with childhood friends, is good too. Qaisra Shahraz’s “The Goonga” is about a boy’s repudiation of his simpleton father; it could have been better developed.

Muneeza Shamsie’s “That Heathen Air” takes us back eighty years to a princess’s parting with her Eton-bound son; it is somewhat heavy-handed.

Yes, Dalit writing is of interest to more than Dalits; but the best Dalit writing is about Dalits. The best stories in this book are about what Pakistani women, no matter how ordinary, face every day.

The others are flat. A so-called ghost story which brings in an old Karachi Hindu family as leaven, the inevitable Partition story, the horribly unsubtle Paki-in-London story which gives its title to this collection — all these do not move, because they are not about people who have had to move, who have been moved.

In mid-October PTI ran a report about a young Indian who runs a blog called “Pakistan Paindabad” (roughly, “Pakistan is here to stay”), which reports the quotidian in Pakistan.

He has even changed his name to Mayank Austen Soofi. Since the Indian cricket team’s tour across the border in 2004, we have all become more interested in our neighbours.

Not so much in their politics as in the things we of the subcontinent have always been interested in — their clothes, their quarrels, their cooking, their in-laws. At least half of Jalil’s collection leaves us better informed than we were.