Book Review: Regret -- by Ikramullah

Published in Scroll: With ‘Regret’, Urdu fiction in translation reveals a writer of courage and beauty.

The two novellas in this volume are defined by Partition without being ‘about’ it.

In his Introduction, co-translator Muhammad Umar Memon writes that when Penguin asked for an author photograph and an endorsement for the back cover of the book, he realised there was barely anything written on Ikramullah in English. Ikramullah’s own response was wonderful: “Dear Mr Memon, I am not in favour of printing an author's photograph on the book. No comments of famous writers are presently available. I do not preserve such writings.” An image and a quote were eventually found. But no wonder that I had never heard of Ikramullah before this book.

A great year for Urdu in translation

The last year in Indian publishing has been particularly good for new English translations from Urdu: in 2014, we got The Sun That Rose From the Earth, Shamsur Rahman Faruqi's own translation of his story collection Savaar aur Doosre Afsaane, published in Urdu in 2001 by Aaj Ki Kitabein, a Karachi publishing house.

Also in 2014, HarperCollins brought out Rakhshanda Jalil's translation of the legendary Intizar Husain's stories, entitled The Death of Sheherzad. This year, there has already been a buzz around Ali Akbar Natiq, whose short stories were published by Penguin in Ali Madeeh Hashmi's translation as What Will You Give For This Beauty? and Yoda Books’s Rococo and Other Worlds: The Poems of Afzal Ahmed Syed, translated by Musharraf Ali Farooqi.

Many of the Urdu writers getting translated now have reached a venerable old age: Intizar Husain, who lives in Lahore, was born in UP in 1925 and migrated to Pakistan in 1947; Faruqi, who lives in Allahabad, was born in 1935; Syed was born in Ghazipur in 1946 and has lived in Karachi since 1976. Natiq – born in 1976, “in village 32/2-L near Okara” – is the youthful exception, and also the only one of these recently-translated Pakistani writers who was born in Pakistan.

Intizar Husain, Afzal Ahmed Syed and Ikramullah himself were born on this side of the border, in a pre-Partition subcontinent. At 76, Ikramullah is just a little younger than S.R. Faruqi. He was born in 1939 in Jandiala village, near Jalandhar, and finished school in Amritsar before moving with his family to Multan.

It’s always the Partition, as it must be

This biographical detail sparked my interest because both the novellas in this volume – Regret, originally Pashemaani, published in Sawa Neze Par Suraj in 1998, and Out of Sight, originallyAankh Ojhal, published in Bar-e Digar – are haunted by the Partition. And if you're thinking, “Oh, not another Partition narrative”, let me say two things.

First, that we need many more, not just because the Partition is the most harrowing thing to have happened on this subcontinent, but because we are still far from having come to terms with its effects. The more stories we tell, the more films we make, the more memories we muster, the better. Without them, we are fooling ourselves to think we can move on.

And second, the effectiveness of this book lies in the fact that it is not “about” the Partition in any way you might imagine. In fact, you could say that neither of the novellas here is particularly invested in plot. The Partition is not picked out as grand historical tragedy – and yet the protagonists are more changed by their experience of it than by anything that happens to them since.

Regret is an affecting first-person account of a boyhood friendship. Ikramullah conjures up his world in a single summer afternoon, which begins when the narrator invites his friend Ehsaan to eat “qulcha and spicy curried grams”. (The translators' choices here are inexplicable: “qulcha”, “aamla” and “bhang-bathu” are retained without explanation, but kofta becomes “meatball” and chhole/chane, “curried grams”.) Ehsaan “had absolutely no interest in stories”, but he inhabits the newspapers with all his imagination: a fan of Kemal Pasha and General Rommel, he is a tracker of trains, and so struck by images of the Bengal Famine that he feels like “taking off” for Bengal.

Ikramullah writes without flourish, and is a master of the telling detail: the exhausted qulfi seller dozing off in the heat, the Lala who reads the newspaper while his workers make puris, the Cold Well with crystal glasses for Hindus and Sikhs and a tin cup for Muslims, the coal-gathering Lali and Toti who have no Begum or Khanam in their names. Rioting, departures for Pakistan and negotiations for evacuee property all feature later, but the register in which Regret remains unequalled is as a discovery of class, social and political difference through children's eyes.

Out of Sight, in contrast, takes the threat of an anti-Ahmadi riot in a Pakistani town as the trigger for an outpouring of deeply adult guilt. It is narrated in the voice of Ismail, who as a young man managed to get away to safety in Amritsar while his family and townsmen were killed in Partition violence.

This novella is a quietly persuasive account of how groups of people are incited to violence, and how the consciousness of power can incite a majority to behave with a minority. Yes, it does not have the evocative power of Regret. But this slim volume reveals a writer of courage and beauty. One hopes more of Ikramullah will come our way in English before too long.

Regret, Ikramullah, translated by Faruq Hassan and Muhammad Umar Memon, Penguin Books India, 2015.

Book review: Of pirs and Peter engines

A book review, published in BLink on Saturday.

The everyday is both enchanted and stark in these crackling tales from Pakistan.

What Will You Give For This Beauty?
Ali Akbar Natiq
Translated by Ali Madeeh Hashmi
Hamish Hamilton 
Penguin
₹399

The eloquent title of this book appears to stem from the first sentence of Ali Akbar Natiq's ‘Qaim Deen’, Story No. 3 in this translated collection. “So tell me, what will you give for this beauty? Listen, I know it’s stolen, so be careful how you price it,” says one Noor Deen, as he strokes a buffalo’s back.

But Qaim Deen answers, “Look here, Nooray, I’ll take five thousand. Not a penny less,” making it clear that Noor Deen is the potential buyer and Qaim Deen the seller, the eponymous cross-border thief at the centre of this dramatic, eventually chilling tale. So what Noor Deen ought to have asked was: “So tell me, what will you take for this beauty?”

I must confess that I was terribly disconcerted to find that the beautifully crafted phrase, picked out to serve as introduction to Natiq’s fictional world, might not actually exist within it. I haven’t read Natiq in the original, but it didn’t seem possible that he could have made such an elementary error of everyday speech, using one word when he meant its opposite. So was it the translator who should be held responsible: whether for a mistake, or worse, for an intentional moment of glibness, of letting the rhetorical fluency of English ride roughshod over the actual Urdu?

Was I making a mountain out of a molehill? Or rather, as it would be in the idiom Natiq and I share, rai ka pahaad — a mountain from a mustard seed? But then translation is a fine art, and its finesse depends on every grain being accounted for.

It seemed a pity to have to start this way, because Ali Madeeh Hashmi’s fluid translation unfurls a world not often visible in English. The only comparable work I can think of in English is Daniyal Mueenuddin's, also set in the Pakistan countryside. Mueenuddin has described his book as “stories about the farm and the old feudal ways, the dissolving feudal order and the new way coming, the sleek businessmen from the cities.” But where Mueenuddin’s tales have a slow, stately, often elegiac quality, Natiq’s storytelling is brisk, economical and crackling with energy. And rarely, if ever, does Natiq’s world show signs of transformation, of a ‘new way coming’. Justice, in the ordinary sense of the word, is not frequently achieved. Terrible things happen, and they don’t often happen to terrible people. The rural and small town Punjab of these stories is a place where power triumphs over both truth and beauty.

Natiq cannot have set out to write an ethnographic account, but this collection brims with details of geography, rituals and all sorts of work. Natiq himself has worked as a mason, building domes and minarets for many years, and in his stories, masons, barbers and farmers jostle with wrestlers and storytellers. The book also offers a succinct commentary on the vagaries of history and religion in Pakistani Punjab. Here are Sikhs who must leave their homes during Partition, and a Sikh man who stays on by converting to Islam (‘The Share’). Here are Shias made so insecure by the dominant Sunni majority that they dare not shelter their own co-religionists (‘The Guardian’). Here are stories in which caste has such a matter-of-fact power that no simplistic claim of its having been erased from Muslim sociality can ever again be made (the dramatic ‘Despair’ and the resigned ‘Achoo the Acrobat’).

Most ubiquitous of all are pirs and maulvis, all of them more concerned with wielding power than holiness. Whether they are rich landlords — like Pir Mast in the vividly told ‘Shahabu’s Premonition’, who “had vast lands and thousands of followers spread across the province of Punjab”, or practically paupers — like the memorable protagonist of ‘The Maulvi’s Miracle’, who cannot complain about Rana Farooq’s dog “since Rana Sahib paid for all of the maulvi’s household expenses”, it is terrifying mere mortals that makes them believable as men of God. They are renowned not for acts of grace towards the devout, but for striking dread into the hearts of doubters.

Natiq’s is a world of efficacious curses rather than effective duas. And the unsparingness of religious belief can turn the very landscape into something stark and brutal. In the superb ‘Jeera’s Departure’, the Beas starts to dry up because Pir Jatti Shah loses his temper at the boatmen, while Pir Moday Shah’s sacrificial injunction to the villagers feeds off their pre-existing notions of the river’s wrath. Yet the enchanted quality of this world coexists with the prosaic, the words of pirs and elders competing with matter-of-fact statements about irrigation canals, Peter engines and subcontinental realpolitik. In one story, a flood takes place because “India had released the water of the Sutlej”, and in ‘Jeera’s Departure’, “[m]any times news came that Hindustan had stopped the water but the elders contradicted it harshly, asking how it was possible for anyone to dam the river”.

Like the world in which they are set, Natiq’s stories can often have denouements that feel harsh. Hierarchies here are too entrenched to be reversed. But what human beings are powerless to achieve can sometimes be achieved by lesser creatures. It is both comic and tragic that Natiq hands two of his rare victories against the powerful to a rabbit and a dog.

Just before this review went to press, I discovered that Natiq has a ghazal from which dastango and actor Danish Husain translates one sher as follows: “What would you give for this beauty? I’ve slashed the sky and let this sun ablaze on you. What more would you want this heart to do?” The grain has been accounted for, and I am glad of a less harsh denouement.