And Eliasuf had said, ‘I shall not fish on the day of the Sabbath.’ And Eliasuf who was a wise man had dug a pit at some distance from the sea and connected it to the sea by means of a channel and on the day of the Sabbath the fish came to the surface of the waters, swam through the channel and reached the safety of the pit. And on the day after the Sabbath, Eliasuf caught a lot of fish from the pit. And the man who used to stop people from fishing on the day of the Sabbath, saw this and said: ‘He who is deceitful with Allah, Allah will be deceitful with him. And without doubt Allah can be the most deceitful.’ And Eliasuf remembered this and became remorseful and anxious. Had he fallen prey to deceit? he wondered. At this instance, his entire life, his very existence, seemed to him nothing short of a deceit. And so he pleaded before Allah, ‘O You who have given me life, You have granted me the life that only the Giver of Life can. You created me in the finest mould and made me in Your own likeness. O You who have created me, will you play tricks on me and will you debase me to the order of the lowly monkey?’ And Eliasuf began to cry at the sad state of affairs. Cracks began to show up in the bulwark he had built for himself and the waters of the sea began to wash over the island.
Eliasuf cried over his lot and, turning his face away from the habitation of the monkeys, began to move in the direction of the forest, for these dwellings seemed more savage and fearful than the forests, and the house with walls and a roof had lost all meaning for him just as words had lost meaning. He spent the night hiding in the branches of a tree.
When he woke up in the morning, his entire body ached and his spine hurt. He looked at his deformed limbs that appeared more deformed than before. Filled with fear, he asked himself, ‘Am I still me?’ And in that instant the thought came to him: if only there were one living being in the entire habitation who could tell him who or what he was. And on the heels of that thought he asked himself the question: is it necessary to stay with humans if one wishes to remain a human? And he gave the answer himself: for certain, man is incomplete on his own and one man is tied to another and he shall be raised from among his own lot. And with this thought his soul was filled with anxiety. And he called out, ‘O Daughter of Khizr, where are you? For, I am incomplete without you.’ In that instant, Eliasuf was besieged with thoughts of those tremulous young breasts of the deer, that mound of grain with the round bowl of sandalwood beside it. The waters of the sea were swamping the island. And Eliasuf cried out in pain, ‘O Daughter of Khizr, O you for whom my heart longs, I shall search for you in the four-poster bed in the room with the high ceiling, and in the dense branches of tall trees and amid the lofty towers. In the name of the milky-white mares who run swiftly, in the name of the pigeons that fly in the high skies, in the name of the night when it gets drenched, in the name of the darkness of the night as it descends into the body, in the name of darkness and of sleep and in the name of eyelashes that become heavy with sleep, come to me for my heart longs for you.’ And when he made his plaintive call, many of his words jostled with each other like chains that get entangled, like words that get erased, as though his voice was changing. And Eliasuf paused to consider his changing voice and he was reminded of Ibn-e Zablun and Eliab whose voices had become distorted. Eliasuf was scared at the prospect of his changing voice and he thought, ‘O Lord, have I changed?’ And at that moment the novel idea struck him that if only there was something in which he could see his face. But the thought seemed to be an extremely strange one to him. In pain, he cried out: ‘O Lord, how shall I know that I have not changed?’
At first, Eliasuf thought of returning to his habitation. But he became instantly fearful. The very thought of those empty and desolate houses filled him with dread. The tall trees of the forest beckoned him. Dreading the thought of going back to his habitation, he walked far into the forest. When he had walked far, he spotted a lake with placid waters. He sat beside the lake and drank its water and felt relieved. And as he gazed at the pearly water, he was startled. ‘Is it me?’ He could see his face in the water. He screamed. And Eliasuf’s scream terrified him and he fled.
Eliasuf’s scream had so terrified him that he began running uncontrollably. He ran as though the lake were following him. As he ran and ran, the soles of his feet began to hurt and seemed to become flat. His back too began to ache. But he kept running. The pain in his back kept increasing till it seemed as though his spine would bend double. Suddenly, he bent and almost unconsciously pressed his palms to the ground. He then shot off on all fours, sniffing the ground for the daughter of Ala Khizr.
P.S.
The Life and Oeuvre of Intizar Husain
The Life and Oeuvre of Intizar Husain
Shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize for 2013, Intizar Husain (b. 1923) has chronicled the changes that unspooled from the Partition of 1947 possibly like no other writer from the Indian subcontinent. Starting his literary career close on the heels of Saadat Hasan Manto (1912–1955), he too has viewed the events of 1947 as an immense human tragedy; however, unlike Manto and the other writers associated with the powerful literary grouping known as the Progressive Writers’ Movement, Intizar Husain has shown no predilection for depicting the communal violence that spiralled out of Independence. If Manto probed the horrors of Partition with all the delicacy of a camp surgeon, laying bare a sick, ailing society like ‘a patient etherized upon a table’, Intizar sahib has chosen to view Partition as hijrat or migration; the greatest cross-border migration in recent history, which he repeatedly likens to a recurrent historical partition, is for him brimful with the possibility of exploring the past while unravelling the present. And so, instead of a compulsive scraping of wounds, a cataloguing of unimaginable horrors and a depiction of a sick, momentarily depraved society that his contemporaries found fit to do as a way of exorcizing the evil within, Intizar sahib has chosen, in story after story, to imaginatively revisit a syncretic, tolerant pluralistic past in a search for meaning, to find out why the tide turned so irreversibly, and why a revisit in real terms often becomes so difficult.
It is only now – close to over thirty years since his first novel Basti appeared in 1979 – that the literary world in India is taking stock of his immense contribution not merely to Urdu prose but to a subaltern history. What is more, the Booker shortlist has at long last brought attention to the one overriding concern articulated by Intizar Husain throughout his literary career: namely, the persistent refusal among human beings to learn from past mistakes. For, if there is one overarching theme that strings together Intizar sahib’s career as a novelist, short story writer and journalist, it is not merely the haunting sense of loss for a way of life that is irrevocably gone but also a lingering regret. He seems to rue the possibilities that Partition presented but were lost or frittered away. He talks of how, suddenly, almost by accident, Partition allowed writers like him to ‘regain’ a great experience namely hijrat that has a unique place in the history of Muslims. He even finds a religious sanction for the choice some are forced to make when they leave their homes in search of newer, safer havens. In the story ‘Dream and Reality’ (‘Khwaab aur Haqeeqat’), one of the characters says, ‘Friends, remember the hadith of the Prophet: When your city becomes narrow and small for you, you must leave it and go away.’ Yet, this unique opportunity too is squandered and the loss makes him sad. As he once said in an interview: ‘And the great expectation we had of making something out of it at a creative level and of exploiting it to develop a new consciousness and sensibility – that bright expectation has now faded and gone.’1
His epochal novel, Basti, is set in 1971 when war clouds are gathering over the subcontinent, the new country of Pakistan is no longer fresh and pure and hopeful but soiled and weary and entirely without hope, and news from distant East Pakistan is ominous. Its protagonist, Zakir, has already faced one tumult, that of 1947, when he left India and migrated to the Land of the Pure. After the first ‘luminous’ day spent walking the streets of the new city (Lahore) that is to be his home, sav
ouring the delight of walking about freely without the fear that someone will slip a knife into his ribs, soaking in the new sights, sounds and smells, Zakir stays awake all night, weeping and remembering the city, streets, sounds and people he has left behind. ‘That day seemed very pure to him, with its night, with the tears of its night.’2 But those days of innocence and goodness and large-heartedness of the new people in the new land united not so much by one religion but by a common loss and the feeling of homelessness slip away. ‘After that, the days gradually grew soiled and dirty. Perhaps it’s always like this.’ Gradually the goodness and sincerity leach out and in its place there is greed, corruption and intolerance. Looking back, Zakir reflects, ‘Those were good days, good and sincere. I ought to remember those days, or in fact I ought to write them down, for fear I should forget them again. And the days afterward? Them too, so I can know how the goodness and sincerity gradually died out from the days, how the days came to be filled with misfortune and nights with ill omen.’
Slowly the vim and vigour of building a new nation begin to sap. Gradually, the cities on both sides of the new border get filled with new people: ‘People have come from all kinds of places. Like kites with their strings cut, that go flying and come down on a roof somewhere.’ So these people, each with their own stories, alight on strange roofs. And speaking through them, in the course of everyday inconsequential conversations, Intizar Husain slips in statements of great import and consequence, and says many things that his own oblique style of storytelling does not allow. For instance, in answer to a question that haunts an entire weary generation of post-1947 Pakistanis: ‘Was it good that Pakistan was created?’, Intizar Husain makes a wise old Maulvi sahib in Basti reply: ‘In the hands of the wrong people, even right becomes wrong.’ And elsewhere in the novel, there are many seemingly random comments that stay for a long time in the readers’ memory: ‘When the masters are cruel and the sons rebellious, any disaster at all can befall the Lord’s creatures.’ Or ‘When shoelaces speak, those who can speak stay silent.’ Or ‘In times such as this, throats become strong and minds weak.’ Or, ‘Tomorrow might be even worse than today.’
Intizar Husain’s stories are cyclical, often stories within stories, replete with anecdotes from the rich oral tradition of storytelling in the Asian subcontinent, scattered with symbols and images that speak more than words. The smell of haarsingaar blossoms, the coming of clouds to a land almost entirely dependent on the monsoon for its yearly supply of water, the strands of flowers covering a groom’s face – these are potent images for readers in this part of the world; readily evocative and brimful with meanings, they speak to us across the barriers of language.
‘Circle’ is, in many ways, typical of his oeuvre. With this story, Intizar Husain has come full circle as a writer too. ‘Circle’ begins with a reference to a story he wrote fifty years ago, or rather the one he did not quite write the way it ought to have been written: the story that got away! The allusion here is to Intizar Husain’s very first story, ‘Qayyuma ki Dukan’ (Qayyuma’s Shop). And now, so many years later, he is compelled to write the story that got away because he has, in his dreams, been scouring his town – the town he left fifty years ago – in search of a person who once used to sit at Qayyuma’s shop. Till he has done this, till he has found that person, he is doomed to ‘circle round and round forever in a spiral’.
The motif of the circle recurs throughout the story: in a paper kite with its cut string, drifting in a lazy loop of air, in a slowly turning Persian wheel, in a group of children standing in a circle around a snake-charmer and, above all, in a map of Guisetown that begins and ends with Karbala. It is there, also, in the continuing sense of sameness: ‘Once again, I have reached there. Once again, I am surprised.’
A dream-like quality pervades much of Intizar Husain’s writings. Sometimes it serves not just as a leitmotif, but also as a tool to tell the story in its fullness and rich detail. As he says in ‘Circle’, ‘I do believe that things only reveal their true nature in dreams. Walls and niches, streets and alleys, plants and trees, the earth and the sky – it’s only after we stop seeing them with our eyes that we begin to truly see them when they start appearing in our dreams and calling out to us.’ Having seen them so often in his dreams, he can now recount every turn in the path that led to the Karbala in his town: the blood-red tamarind tree that grew beside the elephant’s grave, the keening of a kite that scratched the air on a hot afternoon more than fifty years ago. The ‘scenes’ are frozen in time because he sees them so often in his dreams.
Written in a seamlessly flowing narrative style, ‘Circle’ dips between ‘then’ and ‘now’, between ‘that’ place seen from ‘this’ distance, between the joys of home and the anguished yearning for home in this transplanted homeland, between sleep and wakefulness. The town of his childhood, which appears in his dreams in myriad guises, is appropriately enough called Guisetown (Roopnagar) in ‘Circle’. Occupying a space between the real and the imagined, the town is evoked sometimes with a childlike wonder and sometimes with a near-desperate desire to recount every small detail lest it slip between the crevices of memory and is lost forever. The child of fifty years ago trapped inside him is easily awed: ‘What a large, deep pond that was, with steps all around it…’; ‘How tall and grand it looks…’ and ‘Such a crowd of buyers that God save you…’ But there is another voice too: ‘…even though I am one of those who left, all the others have made new homes in new lands. I was the only one who never found peace and tranquillity. Sometimes, I am seized by doubt. Have I left that place or not? …I am neither here nor there. Like a restless spirit.’
Elsewhere, the dreamlike quality serves to muffle the sense of time and space, making Intizar Husain’s stories at once topical and universal – free from their moorings in time, place and circumstance. His characters become Everyman, his context Anywhere where there is strife and turmoil. This is especially true in ‘Sleep’ and ‘Captive’. Sometimes the clue to a story is found in a small, seemingly trivial comment; for example, in ‘Captive’: ‘It’s the new definition of captivity’, the ‘it’ referring to friends holding you hostage with their questions, questions which you would rather not answer. To escape that inexorable captivity, Javed, the man who was ‘there’, who has ‘seen it all’ asks the most inane and crass questions. For he would rather talk of anything – the newest fashion trends of bellbottoms vs flappers, colourful shalwar suits for men, goggles, lascivious film posters, the delights of Lahore’s famed Food Street – anything at all except what he saw ‘there’. In the end, there is nothing but confusion confounded. Here – that is, in their own land – there is no sensible answer to be found for the anarchy and bloodshed. ‘A man is killed by a bullet, and nothing happens. That’s strange, isn’t it?’ There is no meaning in the loss of innocent lives in a civil society and this indifference to such deaths is what is truly terrifying. That is the difference between ‘there’ and ‘here’: ‘But at least we knew why it was happening to us … at least we understood what was happening.’
The sense of helplessness, the frustrating inability to find answers to what is happening ‘here’, as distinct from what happened ‘there’ recurs in ‘Sleep’: ‘Back and forth, the arguments raged – did people from the other side exploit them or did our own people betray us’. The ‘there’ in these two instances is Pakistan’s deep dark shame: Bangladesh, spawned from the bloodiest internecine war among those who were once brothers. Intizar Husain is among the handful of Pakistani writers who is willing to talk of that national shame, couched in allusions though it is – the ‘there’ is never mentioned by name. Yet there is no mistaking his deep sense of ownership of that national shame and guilt.
In story after story, there is a deep anguished search for meaning, to hunt for any reason at all to have ‘to suffer like this without reason, without cause’. The haunting sense of dislocation, of ‘being’ yet not ‘being’ and the unbearable loss of self recurs in most of these stories, m
ost poignantly in ‘Those Who Are Lost’. As in Waiting for Godot, in this story, too, there is a sense of a search for something indefinable, a lack of something vital that causes the characters to be in a constant state of suspension. As in much of his oeuvre, indeed in his very sense of self, this story is remarkable for the overwhelming sense of loss, of an acute yet indescribable consciousness of the sense of that which has been lost, or left behind.
Another existentialist nightmare is told in ‘The Wall’. Interestingly, however, the story – at once timeless and universal – contains a reference to one of the many stories narrated in the Quran, that of Yajoob and Majoob. To my mind, a quintessentially Intizar Husain story, it contains all the concerns that limn his worldview: waiting for something that lies just beyond one’s reach, trying to reach the other side knowing full well its futility, the fusing of then and now, here and there.
‘Reserved Seat’ is a rambling tale about an old woman prone to narrating her dreams in which she sees dead people. It sets itself a slow leisurely pace and catches the reader completely off-guard with its brutal denouement. It carries the vintage Intizar Husain stamp of understatement: a telling comment on the madness that has gripped his homeland, a country where Kalashnikov-wielding Muslims can strike down fellow Muslims praying in a mosque. Through the story of an old woman dreaming strange dreams of long-dead ancestors and living only to see the sehra tied on her strapping young grandson’s forehead, Intizar Husain makes a powerful comment on the mindless violence of the times he lives in.
‘Clouds’ and ‘Needlessly’ stand out from the other tales in this collection for their disarming childlike simplicity. In stories such as these, there is no subtext; they are simple, straightforward and shorn of any literary embellishments whatsoever. Yet they paint charming pictures of wonderment in the simple joys of life.
The Death of Sheherzad Page 13