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  KAHANI

  SHORT STORIES BY PAKISTANI WOMEN

  Edited by

  Aamer Hussein

  SAQI

  Contents

  Foreword

  Preface

  Azra Abbas, Voyages of Sleep

  Altaf Fatima, When the Walls Weep

  Khadija Mastoor, Godfather

  Hijab Imtiaz Ali, Tempest in Autumn

  Hijab Imtiaz Ali, Two Stories

  Mumtaz Shirin, The Awakening

  Mumtaz Shirin, Descent

  Amtul Rahman Khatun, Grandma’s Tale

  Fahmida Riaz, Some Misaddressed Letters

  Jamila Hashmi, Exile

  Farkhanda Lodhi, Parbati

  Umme Umara, The Sin of Innocence

  Khalida Husain, Hoops of Fire

  Glossary

  Biographical Notes

  Foreword

  Two events before the March 1999 publication of the first edition of this anthology made me wish I’d had time to add at least two more stories.

  To begin with, just before the start of the year, I’d finally come across, in my local library, a collection of all the short fiction A.R. Khatun had written. It was a book mostly of wonder tales, aimed at children, but of great interest to readers of any age, as the author herself remarks. I’d always wanted to include Khatun, whose work I hugely enjoy, in my book – not least because her very name makes some Urdu litterateurs go up in righteous smoke – but her novels were nearly impossible to extract and the one story I’d come across was unrepresentative. Among the fairy tales in the collection I now had were three moral tales set in modern times. Two of those chronicled partition; both were perfect for inclusion. I was also aware that the book would be appearing on the eve of the centenary of Khatun’s birth.

  Then, on that day in March ’99 when the first copies of the anthology were made available to the public, a Pakistani critic told me: another Pakistani writer I hugely enjoyed reading, Hijab Imtiaz Ali, had died in her 91st (some said 96th) year. I did have a story by her in the book, but wasn’t satisfied with it; I’d rather have translated one myself.

  Now, nearly eight years after that first collection, comes this revised edition with fresh translations of stories by these two writers whose work deserves to be known by an audience unfamiliar with Urdu. These were done by Sabeeha Ahmed Husain, who read both writers as a young girl and whose effortless bilingualism makes her an able interpreter of their (at times) difficult idiom.

  Both writers – Khatun in particular – raise questions about inclusion in canons. Khatun has been seen as a writer of escapist romances and a purveyor of conventional morality. However, her fairy tales and children’s fiction gained her great praise in her lifetime, and it is from these that I’ve chosen one example.

  Of her modern novels, one younger contemporary, Altaf Fatima, remarked that they were a reworking of older, lusher styles – the dastaan or traditional romance, yes, but also the reformist qissas of the redoubtable Maulvi Nazir Ahmad, who set out to educate his daughters with edifying stories in the 1860s (which Khatun would have read as a child); he was the first popular Urdu novelist in colonial times. Another younger contemporary, Farkhanda Lodhi, after damning her senior with very faint praise, proceeded to point out that not only was Khatum mining the same terrain – i.e home and hearth, partition – as the hugely acclaimed Khadija Mastur in her novel Aangan (translated as The Inner Courtyard by Neelam Husain in 2000); she was moving ahead of her more radical colleagues who had portrayed partition’s devastations by showing us the refugee incomers settling among the natives and interacting with them while making new lives for themselves. To all this I’d add that Khatun’s best novels engage quite fearlessly with the histories of her time, from WWI and the freedom movement through to decolonisation and life in post-independence, post-national Pakistan. And all this with a light touch, in crisp, spare prose, and with a dash of social satire. The story I’ve chosen here, stylistically poised between her adult mode of telling and the achieved simplicity of her fairytales, illustrates many of her characteristic themes while doing a number of interesting things. Firstly, it employs a tripartite narrative structure – one first-person narration encloses another within an omniscient narration. Secondly, it revels in its own fictionality – the narrator of the enclosed tale remarks upon her use of symbolic names (including the name of the heroine, who recounts the tale, or oral history, within the tale); she spins homilies as she goes along. On one level, then, it is a fable of strife, struggle and upward mobility, a modern fairytale of a brave, exceptional but absolutely common and ordinary woman’s economic self-actualisation. On the other, it seems to indicate its status as lightly fictionalised essay: it begins with a history lesson, and the events narrated are staged in the blinding glare of historical awareness (ethnic and religious warfare, migration, resettlement) and social realism.

  ‘Grandma’s Tale’ works, on a first reading, as a story in praise of free trade and entrepreneurship in which we observe a migrant making good by acquiescence to nationalist/capitalist norms and conventional morality. It ends with the heroine’s chilling admonition, of which Ayn Rand would approve: if you want respect, you’d better be as rich as me. However, the story’s dialogic structure allows the two narrators to debate the moral purport of new riches, corrupt migrants, and a social climate which encourages mendacity, moral ambivalence and shady dealings. And all this a mere fifteen years after the founder of the country’s death. Hard work is praised, but within the rigid boundaries of a liberal Muslim work ethic of honesty, charity and fair trade. No Ayn Rand in spite of the shared initials, Khatun, in her valedictory conclusion, far from endorsing its heroine’s economic policies, deconstructs the story’s ending with these comments on the brash, opportunistic new world of mid-century, post-colonial Pakistan.

  Finally, Khatun gives us a heroine who falls from from the shabby-genteel lower middle class to the lumpen world of domestic service and street trading, She leads her around the dark satanic mills with the gusto of those social realist women writers who dismissed her work as trivia. But unlike Mastur or Lodhi or Hashmi’s heroines, she makes her way out of the maze. Significantly, her heroine is destined to a nouveau riche paradise without any accompanying ironies: entirely self-made in a patriarchal world. Khatun, the heroines of whose most famous novels are not particularly concerned with educational or professional qualifications except as a prelude to married life, gives us here a widowed protagonist who, like the heroines of her fairytales, sets off to tackle adversity with only faith in God and raw courage as her weapons. Her position as a woman in a patriarchal society is never discussed; it’s the effect of the economic machinery of the world on women, not femininity per se, that interests Khatun. A quiet resurgence of interest in her work is growing among a group of contemporary feminists; many readers see her as a great storyteller who, by expressing the nascent concern with women’s rights within the religious-nationalist framework, pours new wine – or sherbet, rather – into the old bottle of the traditional or reformist Urdu romance. A translation of her novel Afshan is said to be underway.

  Hijab Imtiaz Ali, on the other hand, is primarily interested in gender, particularly in the period (the sixties) in which the story Sabeeha Husain has selected was published. It is an example, like Khatun’s, of the author’s late style. Always unconcerned with historical events in her work, Hijab, also dismissed by many as a haute bourgeouise fabulist with little interest in mundane matters, set her early work in a land out of time and only elliptically recognisable as a dark mirror image of her own ambience and period (the aristocratic milieux of the Hyderabad nobility, and later the slightly less opulent, but no less snobbish, Lahore avant garde). She is, in fact, a highly self-conscious novelist, a postmodernist avant la lettre, concern
ed with the self-reflexive narration of memory and desire and the slippages of language which involuntarily reveal repressions, evasions and lack. And all this in an exquisitely stylised, imagistic language which is, at times, as fanciful as the pineapple sandwiches her hedonistic protagonists eat between their games of tennis and their boating trips.

  Largely unconcerned with the world of the poor, Hijab, in her very first novella – the famous ‘My Unfinished Love’ (1932), in which the love between the teenaged narrator and her father’s much older secretary lends in the latter’s suicide – went for the jugular as she dissected the minute differences of class within the social structures of the aristocracy and the elite, showing the relative powerlessness of educated men without privilege or ancestral wealth forced to make their own way in the world. More particularly, Hijab is interested in passion, the great disruptor, which comes along to erase differences and fails, leading to madness, drunkenness and even suicide. For the men. The women survive, sadder but rarely wiser, to write (or relate) their stories.

  Fluent in several languages, like the English-educated author, her frequent alter-ego, the ubiquitous Roohi, flies her own plane (also like Hijab, who took her licence in Lahore in the mid-thirties); she travels all over, often in the company of male friends, writes stories and seems free to follow her desires – except when it comes to marriage. Her friends, precursors of the women of the fifties and sixties, are almost anachronistically ‘liberated’ when she first calls them into being. In their turn, they mirror her emotional crises. She tells their stories. In the ’40s novel, Cruel Love, Jaswati falls for her cousin and fiance’s foster brother; knowing their relationship is impossible because of family loyalty (a euphemism for paternalistic feudalism), her beloved succumbs to illness (a frequent metaphor in Hijab’s world). In the ’50s, in the psychoanalysis-inspired Dark Dreaming, Sophie, obsessed with her drunk father’s memory, virtually sabotages the approved match she’s expected to make by falling in love with another drunk.

  ‘Tempest in Autumn’ reworks elements – alcohol, women’s masochistic obsession, art and life – of that earlier novel, replacing the lush, cinematic exteriors of her youthful fictions with one sparely-evoked interior and the offstage sounds of sea, wind, birds and falling leaves, either because Hijab expects us, in the fourth decade of her career, to be utterly familiar with Roohi and her ways (i.e, that she’s in search of material and will be writing up her findings), or because by now she’s so much in command of her material that she expects the minimalist trappings to suffice. Poet and critic Alev Adil sees the setting as cinematic in the mode of Douglas Sirk’s melodramas; I am reminded more of radio, since the story is a two-hander played out almost entirely in dialogue and, consequently, its effects are largely aural.

  In her psychonalytic probings, Hijab dismantles one pre-conception about Eastern women – she sees them as dominated by reason, not emotion. She challenges another, seeing the much-vaunted Muslim woman’s virtue of patience as a handicap and advocating swift action instead. Alev Adil, in fact, interprets ‘Tempest in Autumn’ as a fantasy directed by Roohi, who is both auteur and voyeur, with Zulfie now passively, now obediently feeding the older woman’s fantasy. In this film of recovered memory she projects, Roohi as writer-director, while she watches the hysterical performance that she herself instigates, also takes a sort of revenge on Zulfie for daring to love, as she has herself often done in her youth..

  The ambivalent conclusion (is it in Roohi’s imagination?) bears out this reading. Is Zulfie really hiding her innermost feelings, or is she merely the innocent dupe of an amoral drunk? Hijab’s open ending leaves room for more than one interpretation.

  Hijab carefully constructed her own persona as the romantic artist who spent hours flying her plane, playing her organ, tending her many cats, writing her diary in candlelight while bombs fell on Lahore. It was a performance to which many visiting writers were treated, and, by the end, the persona that was, in fact, designed to erase differences between author and narrator was to overshadow her literary reputation. Hijab became a legend in her lifetime; at least one contemporary critic, Samina Choonara, called her Pakistan’s Barbara Cartland. Adil, as a non-Pakistani, is incensed by this comparison, placing her dream-narratives as precursors of the nouveau roman and her surrealistic style as similar to the enigmatic English modernist Anna Kavan, described as ‘Kafka’s Sister’ by Brian Aldiss. Hijab’s was indeed a hybrid art: among early influences were the Arabian Nights, translations from Turkish and the Orientalist writings of French decadents Pierre Loti and Pierre Louys, but her first fictions were equally entrenched in – feminised rewritings of, one might say – the Urdu and Persian tradition of verse romances to which she frequently refers. Her late style, however, appears to dispense with all influences except that of Freud. The setting, too, has changed: the seaside city may or may not be Karachi, but the milieu can be recognised as mid-century Pakistan, with its alcohol-fuelled soirees, the appropriation by wealthy dilettantes of traditional music and art, and its avant garde poised uneasily between social acceptance and opprobrium.

  Hijab’s and Khatun’s are two very different examples of mid-twentieth century fictional practice: one reluctantly endorses sanity while exalting the ecstasy and madness of love and art in a prose that borrows from dream and the discourse of the unconscious; the other casts her stories in the clear light of reason and pragmatism. On the margins of the mainstream of contemporary Pakistani women’s literary preoccupations, they are nevertheless similar in their concerns to other writers in this anthology: compare Hijab’s dreamworld, for example, with Azra Abbas’ reverie or Khalida Husain’s fable, or read Khatun in tandem with Hashmi and Fatima. The results will be, at the very least, interesting.

  Aamer Hussein

  London, March 2005

  Preface

  In the period following the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, Urdu literature in Pakistan has developed a dynamic identity of its own. It retains, on the one hand, sociolinguistic links with Urdu literature in India, and reflects, on the other, the demands and vagaries of a new chapter of history that is in the process of being transcribed. It raises interesting questions of autonomous cultural identity and the ever-evolving relationship of art with politics. Contemporary Pakistani literature also reveals fascinating parallels with the literature of other nascent post-colonial societies and engages fearlessly with the genres and modes produced in the ‘developed’ countries of the West, redefining and reconstructing them to its own purposes.

  Urdu literature has yet, however, to be accorded its rightful place in the annals of world literature. The South Asian writers who have recently gained renown in the West are all Anglophone and are usually subsumed under the Indo-Anglian label. With a handful of honourable exceptions, those writers who have been translated from national/regional languages have been relegated to the confined space of academic journals. For all the lip-service paid to their achievements, the space given to women writers is negligible, particularly when one considers the major contribution they have made to experiments in form and subject over the last half-century, equalling and often surpassing their male contemporaries.

  It was not my original intention to produce an anthology devoted exclusively to women, but my publishers rightly pointed out the gap and my own readings in Urdu fiction served to confirm the decision: too much writing by women has suffered neglect over the past half-century. We Sinful Women, Rukhsana Ahmad’s pioneering anthology of contemporary feminist poets in translation, introduced Pakistan’s women poets to an Anglophone audience; in the present book, an anthology of short fiction translated from the Urdu, I make an attempt to redress the balance by presenting a number of prominent and lesser-known women writers of short fiction. Their stories are accessible and yet often challenging in form; in content, they are at once universal and deeply rooted in the particular experience of a nation and its psyche.

  A theme emerges, perhaps: that of the effect of the first forty ye
ars of the country’s history-from partition until and after the death of Bhutto-on the imagination of its women. Though purely subjective experience is also in evidence here, those writers who traffic less in political and more in personal experience have nevertheless been liberated into writing by the politically conscious writings of the first wave of literary women. Their dream worlds are illuminated and darkened by the vagaries and vicissitudes of the society that shapes them. Fahmida Riaz’s Amina, exiled in India, sees her alienation in sociohistorical terms: she writes ‘a number of passionate poems, exposing the gaping flaws in a democratic system that still allowed for horrifying poverty’. Khalida Husain’s nameless narrator in the title story moves in a metaphysical darkness: ‘And am I not answerable to that world, beyond the Third World, that lives within me?’ Yet their wistful loneliness is identical.

  Several stories, translated especially for this selection, appear here for the first time in English; others have previously been available only in Pakistan. I hope they serve to urge other editors and translators to make their much-needed contribution to the field of translating contemporary Pakistani fiction. This is particularly relevant, as Pakistan is now nearly three decades old. Its fictions are the literary mirror of a turbulent history and the partition of a language; its women writers, always an equal force in this culture, have not only been vital contributors to the art of fiction, but have often renovated and even subverted its prevalent discourses.

  The major Urdu writers, and indeed its emerging young writers who have as yet to secure their reputation, contribute much to an international debate that seeks to decentralize Eurocentric aesthetic theories and notions. Several of the authors included in the anthology are also novelists, but the short story has a place in South Asian literature second only to poetry, and Urdu writers have almost without exception showed great mastery of the shorter forms: the story, the tale and the novella. Handling with equal ease the romantic and unrealistic modes inherited from past tradition, European realism, Marxist-inspired protest writing and the postmodernist strategies characteristic of our century, they have demonstrated that the development of fictional techniques is, in spite of ongoing ideological debate, not so much a question of conflict or opposition between realism and fantasy, tradition and modernity or art and politics, but an often contradictory juxtaposition of opposites in an imaginative and linguistic crucible. Modern Urdu literature, widely held to be descended from the edicts of the socially orientated Progressive Writers Movement, has nevertheless retained its links with indigenous pre-novelistic modes, and it is this coexistence of apparently irreconcilable elements that modern writers have creatively exploited.