Kahani Page 2

  Although the anthology focuses largely on writings from the 1960s to the 1980s, the pieces by the two writers here who rose to prominence earlier – Mumtaz Shirin and Khadija Mastoor – effectively illustrate the two dominant tendencies, respectively the aesthetic-fabulist and the social realist, yet each displays traces of the antithetical tendency in her work. Mumtaz Shirin’s piece is an early monologue, written while she was still in her teens, which shows at once her modernist aesthetic and her understanding of women’s need for self-expression. Khadija Mastoor, as a feminist, focused with brilliance on the lives of dispossessed women, and her story here, Godfather, mirrors her preoccupations. Women of the underclasses are often her central characters and though her stories are in method ostensibly realistic, poetic diction and picaresque situations link her work to older narrative modes. This section also includes stories by the doyenne of Pakistani fiction, Hijab Imtiaz Ali.

  Mastoor and Shirin belonged to the generation of Ismat Chughtai, who chose to remain in India at partition, and Qurratulain Hyder, who migrated to Pakistan at partition but later returned to India. Hyder left an enormous gap in the world of Pakistani literature, but her influence is everywhere. Also from this generation of trail-blazing women writers are Jamila Hashmi and Altaf Fatima, who can be called the inheritors of Hyder’s mantle. Hashmi was in the forefront of women’s writing in the 1960s and insisted on giving equal space in her fiction to Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims, stressing a common cultural experience. Her radical feminism is often refracted through the perspectives of male narrators, through whom she incorporates in her stories a critique of patriarchal norms, thus raising burning questions about class and gender. Arguably – and perhaps, in the Pakistani context, unusually – a better novelist than she is a short-story writer, Hashmi is represented here by her famous story of rape and exile in the wake of partition, Exile. This is one of my favourite stories in any language and combines, in my opinion, the sociohistorical canvas and the sweep of her novels with the subjectivity of modernist short fiction and the lyrical intensity of a traditional ballad.

  Altaf Fatima, who belongs to the generation of Hashmi and Mastoor and is also a fine novelist, has in the last decade displayed an excellence in the short-story form that places her in the first rank of Pakistan’s writers. Her story here combines traditional narrative and postmodern polyphony with an overlay of political protest to tell the tale of a peasant woman’s seduction and betrayal by a Western anthropologist.

  The next generation of writers, who were born around the 1930s and 1940s, often disclaim ‘national’ or local influence and identify with Camus, Kafka, Marquez and Kundera. However, they have all inherited a passion for indigenous myth and parable and tend to present even their most political statements in a framework of fable and poetry. Since several of these writers are from the Punjab, they have introduced a strong local and rural flavour to the Urdu language, using it to depict a recognizably Pakistani landscape rather than the elegant, urbanized northern India so often evoked by the earlier generation. Partition also figures far less in their work; their metaphors and tropes usually represent current concerns such as military oppression, patriarchal and feudal norms, sexuality and gender discrimination.

  Included here are Farkhanda Lodhi, Umme Amara and Khalida Husain. The latter is often considered to be this generation’s finest exponent of the short story; she locates the perspective of urban women in a semi-fantastic but recognizably Pakistani landscape, and creates new legends that articulate the social and political preoccupations of a new age in a tone that simultaneously evokes ancient bards, epic poets, Kafka, Camus and Woolf. The title story has been chosen from her work. Lodhi can be seen as the natural successor to Mastoor; her fiction, however, reflects her Punjabi roots in its robust diction and folksy settings. Umme Amara’s study of the 1971 war for Bangladesh completes this section.

  In the range of their preoccupations and experimentation, writers born around partition and after equal much Anglophone writing from any continent, and are possibly closer in spirit to the writings of Assia Djebar or Hoda Barakat. To complete the collection we have two of these: the trail-blazing poet Fahmida Riaz, who has recently turned to writing fiction and is one of the country’s finest writers in any genre – her bold, highly political stories defy generic classifications; and Azra Abbas, who writes both poetry and prose. These writers effectively display the influence of their predecessors, both Eastern and Western; they maintain a careful balance between the continuation of a thriving literary tradition and the changes of strategy demanded by the state of continuous flux in which they live.

  Aamer Hussein

  London, November 1997

  AZRA ABBAS

  Voyages of Sleep

  1

  The feet walking on water were ours indeed.

  And you desired to touch the rustling clothes –

  Are your fingertips stained with our rosy colours?

  Do you know that butterflies are looking for the very same colours? But you mustn’t touch them – they will fly off with those colours and our feet, walking on water, will see them fly but won’t be able to stop.

  But will those feet be ours?

  Because then, sitting by our mothers’ sides, we would be stitching clothes and a spicy, dust-coloured odour would be emanating from kitchens.

  Is it true that in days to come, scorching on the other side of the sun, our bodies will account for their sins and birds will fly off with our eyes hidden in their feathers?

  Is this true?

  But now our hands are fragrant with words more powerful than love and we get up from our beds at night, for our bangles start jingling by themselves and the soft light from our arms flows afar as fragrance.

  So where do we wander to?

  O lights, following us in the dark!

  Why, in the desire to walk on open waters, are we always given to the immobility of our abodes? Where, far away from us, are our dreams rejoicing? Why has the bright evening form estranged us?

  2

  Pillows lie on empty beds like forlorn girls. Music, bustling with the wind, sinking into the flesh, the sky looking for water, people returning home – far, faraway heads droop with heavy dreams – a cold water stream runs through our bosoms and white birds fly about with water in their beaks, pairs of pigeons chase each other, ships anchor on shores and someone lightly touches the shoulder.

  Virgin blood! You’ll return from those shores as sunshine has spread over half the oceans and flowing footsteps have taken up cramped journeys – give away the eyes panting around loneliness and the miseries of the journey to the senseless path.

  Far away, among dense, white-flowered trees, sounds of footsteps do not look back for opulent oceans – here, journeys are soundless and dream-forms, like pounded cotton, pass away unendowed.

  Sufferings of the night increase in diminishing light and desires can be heard like the hooves of horses on flat, even roads – we have no clue of days to come – countless staring eyes, like black rocks climbing down dark trees, move toward the oceans and bodies are half-burnt in the half-spread light of the sun – outside the whirl of trees, shadows of winds, sounds and moments go on extending, and skies, unable to bear this are closing in.

  Prayers, escaping from the palms, are now part of the imperceptible air.

  3

  Picking shells from raw earthen walls, staying awake with the night, inscribing their impressions upon dark, stormy, fate-chasing winds, lips loaded with prayers – and in the quietness of burning afternoons, like the sweetness of a love-laden name, our maidenhood.

  And O God!

  This forest, accompanying us like an invisible shadow, leaves its naked songs in our bodies and resembles people who quench their thirst from snake-filled ponds.

  Eyes of a frightened sparrow, broken wings, with innumerable flightless fears and the first utterance of a homeless, newborn babe, like heavenly rains, create words that permeate the lips with the fragrance of chaste prayers.<
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  Before dusk, the desire for a journey that impairs the joints, heels submitting to travel and weightless moments burdening the body persist within us, but night demands accountability for its loneliness and breaking away from the unseen sky, to endure the suffering of hapless days, we free ourselves.

  Where is the wakeful eye grieving the half-moon and where is the vision not bound by dreams?

  Where is it all that’s in the darkness?

  O light of time – sifting through songs of moments, just a sip’s thirst!

  Where is it all?

  That’s in the darkness?

  Translated by Yasmin Hameed

  ALTAF FATIMA

  When the Walls Weep

  Horse-drawn carriages are gradually being eased off the streets of Lahore (newspaper headline).

  Wild animals are a national resource: it is our duty to protect them (poster on a wall).

  And the wall says: I am not that wall the builder made with the help of a mixture of mud, cement and concrete. I am that wall made by the sun and the moon which human beings call the beautiful hills of Margalla. And I wish I could show the poster to the owner of the black Mercedes that knocked down a child sitting behind his brother on a scooter very near a school, crushed him and drove away.

  And what of that other child, the one I must travel so far to find? Perhaps he is waiting for me.

  But he doesn’t even know that we’re going to get him. It doesn’t matter. His blue eyes, his jute-blonde hair … He must be very lonely there, and unhappy.

  The story that Gul Bibi told the villagers is the one I watched, scene by scene, for six months. But I swear by the dark night that I have not heard a word of it until today, though I have it all on tape within me, from start to finish, and in her own words.

  Who? What? When? Why?

  She herself will answer all your questions.

  You only have to bear in mind that she’s a woman – a woman of the valley, at that. And all valley women – never mind which valley, Kashmir, Kaghan or Kalash – remind one of ripe apples hanging from boughs on the trees of their gardens.

  The characters of this story are all central: there are no extras. This is more or less the sequence in which they appear, according to the plot. A widow whose winsome daughter has just been wed. A blonde, blue-eyed foreign woman. And a blonde, blue-eyed tourist – or if you want to discard the cliché you could call him a research scholar, a student of anthropology – well, let’s continue, just listen to the tape.

  — Someone in the bazaar had told me that a job was available in the Rest House. A foreign lady had just arrived. She needed a servant. I was starving. I lived near the mosque by the corner of the bazaar in my shack made of sticks and thatch. After marrying off my Mahgul I lay among my baskets like a rotten apple. When Mahgul left her, uncle stopped sending me money for my expenses, and I was starving. I went along as soon as I heard about the job and started work straight away. But the woman seemed a bit mad to me. Eccentric. She’d write all night with her light on, then fall asleep, wake up suddenly and stalk around her room. She’d be putting paper in her typewriter before the first call to prayer and I’d hear her tapping away. Then she’d wake me up, calling, Gul Bibi, get me some coffee. I couldn’t stand this habit of hers. During the day she’d go off into the woods to collect herbs, roots, leaves. Once she asks me, Gul Bibi, she says, does any one practise white magic in your village? I’d been wondering about her for a while, anyway. These are devilish practices, I tell her clearly, we Muslims don’t play around with magic. If our own herbs and poultices don’t work, we go down to some holy man for an amulet. And we don’t even have a holy man in our village. After that, I started to watch her. At night she’d take off all her clothes and stare at her naked body in the mirror. She’d go on staring and then begin to weep. But without a sound. Strange. Mahgul’s youth had taken mine away and the sight of this woman’s was bringing it back. I thought her spells must be working on me. But I had to feed myself somehow, after all. She was a good woman, though, just kept on writing, tapping away, then one day she’d go off to town with a stack of those papers of hers. She wouldn’t come back for days.

  The tape breaks off at this point.

  This is when he appears, in his blue jeans and checked shirt under his Peshawari fur jacket, his Swati hat and his backpack and his camera. And settles in the Rest House. (Wait … I’ve sorted out the sequence of the tapes again. Just let me adjust the sound a bit …)

  — He settled in so comfortably that I just assumed he was her man. I hardly needed to ask her about that. She’d spend whole days in the woods, gathering her sticks. And he, perched for hours on the white rocks by the Naran, would bait the trout hiding in its waters. He’d trap about a seer of trout a day … (Stop. When my boys tried to catch some trout in the Naran they were stopped by a guard. Who created a great fuss. And we thought, well, if we can’t have trout, we’ll have some corn on the cob instead. It’s so sweet, so succulent here. Grains of corn, fields of maize … thoughts, like a top, spinning here and there, at the gates of schools, around hours of play, horses, silence, seed-pearls … And a child with eyes as light and clear as the waters of the Naran and hair as bright as sheaves of corn waiting, waiting … For whom? For me, perhaps …) Cut! The button of the tape recorder’s been switched on again. Automatically – or by demonic interference? The voice: a man in the bazaar.

  — After the foreign lady left, the man that Gul Bibi had taken for her lover stayed on for another week. And then one day with his pack and his camera on his shoulder, he strolled up to the Rest House’s cook on his long legs and told him to give Gul Bibi her mistress’s keys when she got back.

  — I saw him go off on the Kaghan bus. Gul Bibi was ill that day. She lay on her bed in her shack all day, with her scarf over her face. When I gave her the key the next day she couldn’t believe it. She went on repeating to the mullah, the gentleman shouldn’t have done that, he shouldn’t have left the lady’s keys with Gul Khan. Who knows what he’s walked off with …

  — She didn’t even know his name. Twenty days went by since he’d left, then thirty. The lady hadn’t come back yet. Gul Bibi hadn’t been properly paid, and since she wasn’t working, how could she claim a salary? These foreigners ask you to account for every penny you claim. Then one day no one saw Gul Bibi all day. The door of her house, too, was locked. When even the last bus to Kaghan had gone, a ten-year-old boy called Sultan brought a message to Gul Bibi’s daughter: Your mother has married Shakoor. She’s left with him on the last bus for Batrasi. Shakoor has found work in the forest there. This key belongs to the foreign lady. Give it back to her when she returns.

  — The message amazed everyone. There was no man by that name in our village. Another thirty days went by; someone said they’d seen the foreign lady at the bus terminal with her luggage. I thought of telling her where she could find her key, but she went straight from the bus to Gul Bibi’s daughter’s house to get it. That, too, amazed us.

  The next voice, soft, tiny. Maria’s.

  — I met her at the Balakot lorry depot. She had henna on her hands and her wrists were full of bangles. She was dressed in flowered chintz and the ribbon of her braid was decorated with little bells. She looked pregnant to me. Her eyes lit up when I teased her about it. Then she told me herself that she’d left my key with her daughter. I’ll have to look for another woman to help me out now: I’m meant to stay on for another two months. (The voice begins to fade. A long sigh.) I wouldn’t have expected this of you … John?

  Cut.

  The voice of the man from the bazaar again.

  — It all lasted exactly five months. I’ve counted on my fingers. Autumn has begun. The mountain wind is pregnant with snow. That’s how it was then, the weather, when she got off at the lorry depot one day. She was dressed in black, her wrists were bare, her face desolate, her hair dishevelled and her belly like a barrel. She floated along like a bubble to the house of her daughter, who was standing at the
door with a dish of flour in her hands. She fell into her arms and began to weep and wail. We all had to point out to her that she should have some concern for her daughter’s condition. We tore her away, with difficulty. When we asked her what the trouble was, she said that Shakoor had done battle with jinns in the jungle and the conflict had killed him. The jinns didn’t even spare his corpse; they spirited it away.

  — What will be, will be, we said; in all events you have to thank the Creator …

  The tape suddenly winds to its end and snaps off. Because I had fallen asleep. I always feel sleepy when I’m worried. When I went to the office earlier today the newspapers had arrived and quite by mistake I picked them up. Boom. Boom. On every side the stench of burning flesh. The smell of dust risen from fallen houses and buildings. Tanks. The reek of rotting corpses. God, how these newspapermen exaggerate. Here in a place like Naran you can’t even believe what you read. Lord, you made the earth so beautiful and people’s hearts so … where do I go now, so full of fury? I’m not going back. I’ll lose myself here, in this beauty. The boys tremble: but school opens soon, they say. You can’t spend your life grieving over everyone’s sorrows. And I haven’t even reached the place where the child with blue eyes and hair like corn …