Basti, written in 1979, is set in 1971 when war clouds are gathering, 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 was to be his home, savouring 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.’ 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 leaches 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 begins to sap. The Sea Lies Ahead takes up the story from where Basti ended, but because all of Intizar sahab’s work is cyclical, there are no clearly defined beginnings and ends and even the middles have a great deal of overlap! We must revisit the past, he seems to be saying in story after story, in order to learn from it. And this revisiting does not happen in any particular order. Zakir is replaced by Jawad: burdened with memories of the past when he was Munnan and his closest friend and comrade was his cousin Maimuna – to whom he was betrothed in childhood. A short-lived marriage to a fellow-muhajir who dies all too soon, a son who has gone away to make a new life in America, a job as a bank manager that leaves him listless with ennui, Jawad’s life ‘here’ can never be the sum total of its parts because a vital part of his being will forever be ‘there’. No wonder, then, that he can never quite fit in.
Early on, in The Sea Lies Ahead, a character says, ‘All sorts of rogues and upstarts, thieves and robbers and terrorists have a field day; the respectable folk are at their wits’ end. Where have we ended up?’ And indeed the city they ended up in was unlike any other they had ever seen. For one thing, the sea itself was new and frightening for most of these muhajirs who had come from land-locked towns and hamlets. What is more, each muhajir brought with him his own Pandora’s box of memories, memories that made him name the new enclaves, gardens and housing societies after the ones he had left behind:
‘Ya Allah, so many cities had collected in this one city as though it was not a city but a sea. And every river, ever stream from across the subcontinent came noisome and rollicking and merged in it. But rivers are supposed to mix with the sea and lose themselves. Here every river was shouting and saying, “I am the sea”.’
Aqa Hasan, an effete gentleman from Lucknow, who is given to venting his ire about the ways of the new city (Karachi) and its people, also bemoans: ‘It is a reign of tyranny and dictatorship. Those who were low born roll in wealth and the shurfa go hungry for even one meal. And on top of it all, no one’s life or property is safe.’ And then addressing his question to Majju Bhai – a blithe spirit and by far the most colourful character in the entire list of dramatis personae in the novel as well as the one who dominates the entire novel by virtue of sheer cockiness – Aqa Hasan goes on to ask:
‘My dear sir, these are difficult times. Tell me, whom should we go to for justice? What do these people here know about the sorrows we have faced? With such grief we have pulled up our roots and dragged ourselves across these long hard miles? And here ... here we have seen new twists and turns. So, tell me, my dear sir ... that is what I am asking you: what lies ahead?’
To which Majju Bhai blithely replies, ‘The sea.’
Majju Bhai’s breezy answer refers to an urban legend from Pakistan’s hoary past when stabs at democracy and genuine people’s representation still seemed possible. In the run-up to the presidential elections to be held in January 1965, a motley group of political parties coming together as Combined Opposition Parties (COP) decide to field Fatima Jinnah, sister of the late M. A. Jinnah and popularly known as ‘Mother of the Nation’, against the incumbent General Ayub Khan. The COP comes up with an impressive nine-point agenda including restoration of direct elections, adult franchise, democratization of the 1962 Constitution and, among other things, greater representation to the Urdu-speaking muhajirs in Sindh. As a warning to the Urdu speakers not to vote for his opponent, Ayub is said to have famously declared ‘Aage samandar hai…’13 The implicit threat in the seemingly innocuous words was two-fold: one, the muhajirs had burnt their boats when they had crossed the border for, clearly, they could not go back; and two, having done so, with their backs to the sea and the combined force of the local ethnic peoples, that is the Sindhis, Punjabis, Pathans and Balochis who constituted the four provinces of Western Pakistan, this fifth entity (paanchvi qaumiyat), namely the muhajirs, really had no place to go. In other words, if they didn’t like it they could lump it!
Not everyone in Pakistan, however, shared Intizar Husain’s mournful longing for a syncretic past or yearned for its sights, sounds, smells and seasons. As he himself is perfectly aware, there were many among the Urdu-speaking muhajir who were aspirational, upwardly-mobile and keen to shed the baggage of the past. Tausif and Baji Akhtari who, as wagging tongues inform us, were low-caste Kamboh in the past but have successfully refashioned themselves as high-born Saiyads and remodelled their lives by taking part fully in the nation-building project such as it is, are exemplars of a new world order. Tausif – who might have been regarded as a never-do-well in the old world – joins the elite civil services (the coveted CSP) and becomes a card-carrying member of the new aristocracy and his sister, Baji Akhtari, crows over the fact that her baby brother will now ‘rule over a district’. It is in their home – at a kabab-paratha party followed by a mushaira held during a curfewed night in a neighbourhood that has not fully recovered from ethnic violence (an instance of playing the fiddle while Rome burnt) – that we first encounter the ominous figure of Ghazi sahib who will prove to be the cause of the city’s undoing.
Clad in a green robe, a constantly moving rosary between his fingers, Ghazi sahib is the epitome of a monolithic and inflexible Unitarian Islam with his stern gaze and unforgiving relentlessness towards those he considers not true to the tenets of the faith. Guarded by Kalashnikov-toting ‘volunteers’, he is busy dreaming of a nursery of martyrs, young men he will train to lay down their lives for a larger cause:
‘The passion for jihad has gone cold among Muslims. If you consider the total population of Pakistan, you will note that it is not a small country. The population of Muslims is in crores. Yet I have still not been able to find 313 Muslims. Look around you ... so many people, and all born in the faith but none are Muslims. My passion is calling out for 313 Muslims. But there aren’t 313 Muslims to be found on this planet Earth.’
Seamlessly and without the slightest crease or tension in his gently flowing narrative, Intizar sahab is not merely outlining the decay that set in and the apathy and disinterest of his fellow countrymen and women in stemming the rot, he also seems to be suggesting that perhaps decay and decline is inevitable, and that cities are settled simply in order to be laid waste. He gives the example of Dwarka, the city that Lord Krishan created, after leaving his beloved Mathura, knowing full well that this sparkling new city would be destroyed one day. In a manner characteristic of all his writings, Intizar sahab draws upon the stories and incidents in the Panchtantra, Jataka Katha, Katha Sarit Sagar, Mahabhar
ata and the Vedas as well as the equally ancient traditions in Alif-Laila and the dastaans. He seems to find a philosophical calm in the words of the Buddha who had said: ‘O monks, there is no peace in any birth and no settlement remains settled forever and every homes that is set up is set up to be abandoned.’ And what of Cordoba, Granada, Seville and the other great cities of Moorish Spain that have evoked such nostalgia in the collective consciousness of Muslims the world over? What of the pain of losing them, especially Cordoba that has been called the ‘bride of Andalusia’? This loss, like the loss of Dwarka, is explained thus:
‘…And among all the mosques was the Grand Mosque that was like an ornament on the forehead of Cordoba. The crowds who thronged it were unmatched compared to all other mosques around it. Further away, at the Madina Azahara, the drums would be beaten morning and evening. But when this fragrant city was about to be laid waste, nothing could save it – not the crowds or the drums, not the calls to the faithful to prayer nor the voices of the proclaimers of faith. Only Allah’s name remains. There is no Victor except Allah.’
And Maimuna and Munnan, what of them? Would it be fanciful to compare them to the pair of swans – forever meeting only to be separated, birth after birth, life after life – that flit in and out of Intizar sahab’s narrative14? The swan and its mate meet and separate, meet and separate again and again as though this epic of union and separation, this dastaan of eternity and successors15 is actually the story of the swan and his mate. Struck by this recurring motif, I wonder if this novel is also the story of Maimuna and Munnan, destined to be separated by a fate that is as cruel as it is incomprehensible. Like much else in The Sea Lies Ahead, there are no clear answers and Intizar sahab doesn’t make it easy for us.
Rakhshanda Jalil
September 2015
New Delhi
1 Asif Farrukhi has divided writers on partition under two categories: Beginners and Enders. The former see it as the emergence of a new nation-state, the latter ‘deplore and lament it as the end of secular South Asia. He also confesses to feeling ‘unsettled’ by the dichotomy of these two entrenched positions. He goes on to stress the need to have two different discourses on the partition: one being a socio-political analysis, and the other that studies it as a literary phenomenon. See Asif Farrukhi, ‘Once Upon a Time: Cultural Legacies, Fictional Worlds of the Partition and Beyond’ in Rakhshanda Jalil (ed.), Qurratulain Hyder and the River of Fire: The Meaning, Scope and Significance of Her Legacy (New Delhi: Aakar Books, 2011).
2 For details of the Halqa, see my PhD dissertation published as Rakhshanda Jalil, Liking Progress, Loving Change: A Literary History of the Progressive Writers’ Movement in Urdu, Oxford University Press, New Delhi.
3 See, for instance, ‘Azadi aur Shaoor’, ‘Pakistan ka Culture’, ‘Azadi-e-rai aur Pakistan ka Culture’, ‘Pakistan ka Tehzeebi Mustaqbil’, ‘Pakistani Adeebon ke Azm ka Jihad’, Pakistan ke Adeebon ka Fariza’ in Sheema Majeed (ed), Muqalat Muhammad Hasan Askari, Lahore: Ilm-o-Irfan Publishers, 2001.
4 In English, we have several instances of the writer of a Pakistani novel bringing his or her work to a triumphal closure. Varying degrees of introspection followed by an assertion of the ‘validity’ of the achievement of nationhood is seen in Mumtaz Shahnawaz’s The Heart Divided, Kamila Shamsie’s Salt and Saffron and even Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice Candy Man.
5 This is equally true of works in Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi and English thus exemplifying the notion that the sense of loss cut across community identity.
6 Spain has been a popular symbol of lost glory for Muslim writers. In the pre-partition generation, poets such as Iqbal invoked memories of Cordoba to sensitize the Muslims to what they once had and what they have now lost. After 1947, it became a symbol for a collective outpouring of loss, suffering and pain, which lies at the heart of the partition experience for many South Asian Muslims. We will see how the leitmotif of the vanished glory of Moorish Spain will recur throughout The Sea Lies Ahead.
7 Akmal Aleemi, ‘A Partitioned Man’, The Friday Times, Lahore, May 13-19, 2011.
8 M. U. Memon, ‘Partition Literature: A Study of Intizar Husain’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3 (1980), p. 381.
9 Quoted by Mumtaz Shirin in ‘Pakistani Adab ke Char Saal’, Mayar (Lahore: Naya Idara, 1963), p. 171.
10 M. U. Memon, op. cit., p. 386.
11 Several lesser-known writers scored above the better-known ones in writing stories that stood out from the rest. Among these, Hayatullah Ansari’s ‘Shukr-guzar Aankhein’ and Jamila Hashmi’s ‘Jaage Paak Parwardigar’ are worth mentioning.
12 Interview, Shabkhun, Vol. 8, No. 96, p. 19.
13 Intizar Husain himself told me in the course of an interview that the novel takes its title from General Ayub’s alleged remark.
14 We have encountered Munnan and Maimuna before – as Zakir and Sabirah – in Basti. There, too, Zakir lacked the will (or the courage?) to call Sabirah over and their love remained unspoken and incomplete.
15 In Aage Samandar Hai, the original has the word ‘abdali’ referring to the concept of ‘abdaal’ or ‘the substitutes or lieutenants’ or certain righteous persons of whom the world is never destitute, and by whom God rules the earth: The substitutes and successors of the prophets shall always remain. Intizar Husain uses the iconic image of the hans-hansni, the swan and his mate, which have been popular in folklore as well as the qissa-kahani tradition, to reinforce the idea of an eternal presence of goodness and happiness, which may be threatened by ‘storms’ and may be separated, but it is destined to be reunited.
‘Actually, this is about the time when the date palm planted by Abd ar-Rahman I1 had grown to be a hundred-and-twenty-five years old and many more trees had come up all around it. This beauty from the sands of Arabia had taken root and flourished in Andalusia. The courtyards of Cordoba, Seville, Granada, Toledo were like its own backyard. And the palm tree beside the well in the unpaved courtyard of the elderly Sheikh Abul Hajjaj Yousuf
Al-Shabrboli of Seville had grown so tall that the devout who came to draw water for ablutions …’
‘Yaar Jawad,’ Majju Bhai looked hard at me and my sentence was left dangling in mid air. ‘You are a strange fellow!’
‘Why? What happened?’
‘Look how far you have come from where we started! You are a master at the art of turning things into circles!’
Where had we started from? I found myself in a dilemma. The fact is that once I get started on the subject of trees, all other subjects get left behind. So, in my opinion, we had started from the trees. But, surely, there must have been some talk before the talk of trees which must have led to the topic of trees? On the other hand, if you look at it like this, no one can ever tell how any talk on any subject began in the first place. Because there is always some talk on some subject before the present subject. So let us say that the talk started with the subject of trees. Isn’t it strange where we start and where we end our talk? But does it ever end? That is the problem, though. If only it ended somewhere. So, let us say the talk began with trees. The twist came later, just as one topic emerges from another. And it was much later that it became an issue for me. The biggest issue on this earth is the issue of trees. They may appear as dry twigs and bushes and there might seem nothing extraordinary about them. They might appear to be just standing about, but there is no knowing when a tree might become an issue.
Tarawali, the one with the big hips and long, supple thighs, was walking along with her husband when suddenly a storm came upon them. And then what happened was that when the storm abated somewhat, Tarawali saw that her husband was nowhere to be seen and she was all alone in the middle of the forest. ‘Where are you, O Master?’ she called out again and again. She wept and wailed and wandered far into the forest. But she could not find any trace of her husband. As she wandered hither and thither, she saw a tree and stood stock-still. It was laden with fragrant flowers and bees buzzed about its blossoms. She was entranced by the flowers. And then
it so happened that the tree’s fragrance swept over her and she too turned into a bee. And buzzing with the other bees, she went and sat upon a flower. Though she had turned into a bee, she could not forget her husband. And as she sat on the flower, she remembered her husband and wept. The tear that dropped from her eye drenched the flower. And in that instant, she saw that her husband was sitting under the shade of that very tree and resting. Like a flower that opens its petals as it blooms, she was so elated that from a bee she turned back into Tarawali. The husband and wife were united and resumed their journey. Then what happened was that a fruit emerged from the flower that had been drenched by Tarawali’s tear. And it so happened that just when a jogi was passing by the tree, the fruit ripened and fell to the ground and burst open. A beautiful maiden emerged from the fruit: she had full hips, a bud-like bosom, hair as dark as rain clouds, rosy pink cheeks, juicy plump lips, and doe-like eyes. With folded hands, she greeted the jogi and touched his feet. The jogi was greatly surprised but, in an instant, he recognized her because of his great knowledge and wisdom. ‘O maiden, you are the daughter of Tarawali.’
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