ONE of Penguin's most prestigious publishing divisions, Hamish Hamilton, has brought out this collection of interesting short stories by Ali Akbar Natiq, ably translated from Urdu to English by Ali Madeeh Hashmi. In his brief, but useful, translator's note to the text, Hashmi provides a brief biography of the writer, and emphasises that a responsible translator's job is to avoid making a 'transcreation' whereby the original work gets tampered with due to an over-zealous translator's misplaced desire to embellish and recreate. It was wise of Hashmi to adopt such a cautious approach towards Natiq's work, because the sparseness and simplicity of the original stories is what makes them particularly powerful.
The dozen tales touch upon various themes, including (though not limited to): violence, passion, barbarism, despair, hatred, sorrow, loneliness and cruelty.
There is an occasional glimmer of humour and gentleness to them, but by and large, they depict the harshness of rural life, and its poignant trials and tribulations. Several of the stories are set in Punjab, and 'The Share' is especially notable in depicting a Sikh and Muslim community, and the land-grabbing issues that arose there following Partition. A number of the tales have rather depressing conclusions, but Natiq's fine command over irony saves them from the danger of dreary sobriety.
Moreover, Natiq is shrewd enough to ascertain that a good storyteller often needs to keep enticing his or her readers towards a dramatic conclusion. Thus, several of the tales, most notably 'Jodhpur's End', 'The Share' and 'Qaim Deen', have electrifying conclusions, making Natiq come across as a master of the unexpected twist to a tale.
To return to the issue of humour, it would be a fair assessment to claim that while even the comic elements of the tale are dark in nature and substance, Natiq exerts considerable control over the linkages between structure and themes in his work.
In 'Shahabu's Premonition' for example, a pir's hunting dogs are made such a fuss over that most humans of that community seem trivialised by comparison; thus the animals` demise can only make most readers grimace with satisfaction. 'Achoo the Acrobat' one of the least harrowing of the stories depicts schoolboy dynamics with a touching simplicity, while 'The Maulvi's Miracle' contains a disturbing, yet oddly absurd, physical altercation between a dog and a cleric. Indeed, unlike many modern writers, Natiq successfully captures the complexity underlying relations and interactions between humans and animals in obscure villages situated deep in the forbidding wilderness.
Stories such as 'Qaim Deen' and 'A Mason's Hand' (the latter translated by Mohammed Hanif) dwell on difficult issues such as insanity. 'A Mason's Hand' contains the type of ugly fatalistic plot by which ancient Greek dramatists were so enamoured, and which finds a contemporary parallel in works such as Rohinton Mistry's brilliant but world-weary novel, A Fine Balance. Although many will find Natiq's narrative voice objective to the point of being mundane, it is precisely this detachment that makes sentences such as the following so chilling: "After the call for morning prayers, when they brought him out of the lock-up to chop off his hand, Asghar had forgotten that he was an expert mason."
There are a few notable female characters in the tales most notably a hard-working prostitute, and a couple of attractive village women who are functionally indispensable to the plots. Credit must be given to the author for faithful thumbnail sketches of his characters that bestow them with both life and clarity. For instance, in 'Jodhpur's End' his succinct description of the main female character reads as follows: "[Kareeman] had matured into a breathtaking beauty."Her hair was woven with garlands of tiny white blossoms, her wrists wrapped in rainbow-coloured bangles, and her nose ring gleamed like the full moon. She was a maiden but walked and talked like a married woman."
Within Natiq's relentless fictional universe, however, fate and destiny roll with such inexorable force over life in general, and humanity in particular, that one rarely gets the sense that women suffer much more extensively than men.
It is in stories such as 'The Male Child' about a socially-shunned and friendless barber that Natiq's incipient genius is fully evident as he recounts the despair of the human condition as seen through the lens of a single wretched character. A couple of the tales situated at the end of the collection, most notably 'The Guardian', demonstrate the author's subversive (but undeniable) dissatisfaction with aspects of organised religion. Perhaps this is an inevitable consequence of some of the plots, given that Natiq's overarching agendum appears to encompass universal humanistic concerns and deeply primal emotions. At around 200 pages, the book is a rapid and engaging read, well worth the time and patience it requires to listen closely to the narrator. In a moving passage in Middlemarch, George Eliot claimed that if we could hear the grass growing, a squirrel's heartbeat, and other sounds of nature we would "die of the roar that lies on the other side of silence". It is necessary for a committed reader to summon up the courage to listen to the roar behind Natiq's creative endeavours; doing so helps provide a definite and important purpose to the act of reading them.
