A word about letters
By Kazy Javed
Remembering a teacher
The publication of a new book under the title Khushboo Teri Yadain reminds one that a good teacher is always respected by his pupils and is not forgotten. The book has been published by the University of Education, Lahore and is compiled by Asima Asghar who is a Ph.D scholar at the university.

Neither night nor day: 13 stories by women writers from Pakistan

Edited by Rakshanda Jalil

Publisher: HarperCollins, India

Pages: 191

Price: INR 250

Much of Asian creative writing in English is today produced with an eye on Western publishers and readers, but here is a collection that focuses solely on showcasing the diversity that marks contemporary Pakistani women's writings. For those wondering if there is a Pakistani feminine "stereotype", these stories provide the answer -- that women's lives and perspectives reflect the social pluralism of the subcontinent, ranging from cutting-edge feminism to lives dominated by deeply entrenched traditions.

Is there a unique Pakistani perspective that sets it apart from its Indian counterpart? Are women's lives different from women's lives on this side of the border? If so, in what way? Are there vestiges of our shared past, in terms of socio-cultural traditions and thought processes? I read these stories with such questions constantly at the back of my mind. And I had some interesting answers by the time I finished the book.

The atlas shows where one country ends and the other begins, the geo-political borders are clear, but the socio-cultural continuum defies all such demarcations. The people, family traditions, social patterns and culturally entrenched prejudices, are all the same, whether it is Lahore or Lucknow, Karachi or Kanpur. Women's concerns and preoccupations, as women, have a universality that transgresses even continental divides, but here are stories that could as well be by Indian women writers -- even some of the names (Bina Shah, author of the story The wedding of Sundri, or Amir Shah, a character in another story, for example) defy borders. Nothing in all these six decades of political debates has underlined this abiding commonality between the two countries, as the themes in this collection of short stories. And the women's perspectives in particular, drive this point forcefully home.

There are no known names among the authors included (no Bapsi Sidhwa or Kamila Shamsie, names that Indian readers are already familiar with) because, as the editor explains, the focus is on offering a variety of perspectives reflecting the "dailiness" of women's lives, which is what makes it so much more interesting for Indian readers.

The opening story, Plans in pink by Nikhat Hasan, has nothing Pakistani about it, and is nonetheless an amusing tale.(Do women have to write only about sexist oppression?) Others have serious themes and are anything but amusing. Five Queen's Street by Sorayya Khan, is about a little Muslim girl who witnesses the abduction of a Hindu woman in the aftermath of the Partition. I was a little girl in Delhi during the bloody days that followed Partition, and remember hearing the wild cries of rampaging and hysterical mobs and seeing shops being set ablaze in Connaught Place. This story brought back memories of that stark period in our shared history, as no scholarly sociological study had, about the trauma of partition. This is what women, young and old, rich and poor, Hindu as well as Muslim, suffered, within living memory, in terms of abductions, rape and worse. Some stories are a lament for a shared past (when Muslims and Hindus lived peacefully together in Karachi and Lahore) while others are light-hearted cameos. That's what women's lives encompass, worldwide -- some lament, some laughter, and lots in-between.

The breast by Soniah Kamal, is about a fantasy scenario where girl babies are required to be killed at birth according to a tribunal's decree, and the protagonist, who is awaiting her punishment (having her breast cut off for suckling a newborn daughter) wonders if some machine in future could reduce a woman's pain by letting her know in advance the sex of the unborn child so that she does not carry the fetus for nine months, only to see it smothered at birth for being the "wrong sex". Well, here we are today, with ultrasound offering such a sophisticated facility. Is it any better, for the women, who are forced by husbands or in-laws, to abort female foetuses because society sees daughters as a burden? Has outlawing the practice of sex determination, made any difference to our socio-cultural perceptions in India? Can we, on either side of the border, learn from the sentiments expressed in this story, of what it feels like, for a woman to conceive and give birth and be punished for not producing sons?

The wedding of Sundri by Bina Shah is another powerful example of how fiction can underscore social issues and cultural anomalies. What does it feel like to be married off at twelve, and be killed as kari because she was reported to have played with boys? Why do we continue to have reports about brutal honour killings, even today, not just in India and Pakistan but also among immigrant Asians in the West? Women have been prime ministers and presidents in the subcontinent; has that made any dent in our ingrained beliefs about women as receptacles to beget male heirs or sole custodians of family honour?

Not all the stories are about distressing social aberrations -- there is a ghost story (A sandstone past by Sehba Sarwar). The title of the collection comes from an evocative contemporary story about a confused young expatriate in England who hovers between two cultures, fitting into neither -- we call them ABCDs in India (American Born Confused Desis).

Do universities in India include such anthologies among the prescribed texts to create awareness about cross-border lifestyles? If not, why? Wouldn't that be one way of widening the peace discourse, which seems -- illogically, if you ponder over it -- to be left solely to the politicians on both sides? Shouldn't we be considering fiction and the arts as strands of an alternative mechanism for linking hands?

Sakuntala Narasimhan is an award winning Indian journalist and author of 11 books. She won the first prize in an all India short story competition organised by the Times of India group, in 1968.

Homer and Langley

By E.L Doctrow

Publisher: Random House

Pages: 224

Price: Rs 995

If Ginzberg's Howl starts with "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed," E.L Doctorow's Homer and Langley begins with Homer (after the Greek bard) going blind and Langley returning from World War I gassed and emotionally interrupted. Doctrow's choice of narrator falls on Homer's shoulders because the novelist identifies with him. Blindness is a necessary device for imagination. When Langley returns from war, the parents, who used to cruise to Europe every year, have already succumbed to the Spanish flu. As the novel is a selective recapping of major 20th century events in the life of the Big Apple, the two brothers are but a vague metaphor of an orphaned nation. Toying with the motherly or fatherly absence is a persistent theme in American literature.

In Langley's absence, Homer, now blind, becomes the man of the house with three women servants to serve him: "the Negro cook, Mrs. Robilleaux, who prepared what she wanted to prepare," -- Siobhan the Irish, single senior maid whom Homer knew "only by her voice, which, without thinking much about it, I had found unattractive," and the new, young Hungarian, Julia, who becomes his mistress. This reviewer believes this is an insightful set up. The young Hungarian "began to lord it over Siobhan as if in practice for the position of lady of the house." Risen from Homer's bed, she "had assumed an elevated status." Siobhan, who has been in service for a long time, feels slighted. Homer, finding himself in a tight spot (since the disturbed Langley has returned too and is not eating well), is unable to do anything about the "emotional disorder"; instead he makes a "mental distinction between anarchy and evolutionary change." Simply put: older structures crumble, new realities emerge.

Homer, who studied piano at the West End Conservatory of Music in New York, "had heard about Europeans that they didn't make much of a fuss about lovemaking as our women did, accepted it as another appetite, as natural hunger." Our narrator is not only attracted to her youth but her ambition for he admires "the immigrant verve of her." Julia is hardworking, creative and knows how to please, enriching the American experience and language. Julia is what America wants to keep itself young, and entertained. As a natural progression of time, Siobhan and Julia's roles are reversed. Then one evening Homer "taking hold of Julia's capable hand" finds his palm resting not on flesh but on stone only to realize to his horror "it was the heavy diamond ring of my mother's that had shot shards of sunlight into" the blind narrator's eyes. Julia tries to disengage but her transgression has been caught. The much needed and admired immigrant has crossed the line and punishment is coming.

This raises an important question: What is theft? The debate about immigrants in the US divides the country every two years. Do they enrich the economy or do they steal? To maintain her edge America needs immigrants, from cab drivers to doctors to scientists to world class academics, intellectuals. They are allowed to enter through different doors which can be shut via varied legislations: Indian reservations; ghettoes; Japanese internment camps; secret jails; deportation. The scene lays bare a moral weakness in Homer's character: he could live with a pretence of equality as long as someone is not eating into his wealth; he could tolerate minorities clashing with each others but not when she's trying to be like him. It is a small scene and its significance can be easily lost as this occurs within the first 30 pages.

The rest of the novel reveals various episodes of class struggle on the stage of New York. There is Mrs. Robileaux's nephew, a musician from New Orleans, who visits his grandma and the brothers are exposed to Jazz. Langley has developed a Theory of Replacement wherein people and events are only replacements of what's gone on before them. For that purpose, Langley believes, everyday news is irrelevant. He becomes obsessed with collecting newspapers and one day, with the help of various cuttings, he'll create The Newspaper that can be read everyday, anywhere. Homer plays piano for silent movies and for help hires a young music student named Mary; she'll be Homer's unrequited love and as Depression hits she'll be sent to a boarding school. Homer will almost ache for her, only to receive her letters some forty years later telling him she's in Africa, a nun, as part of missionary work; her letters will arrive from Central America too, and a local paper will bring the news of her rape and murder by army thugs with the CIA backing. The brothers throw swing and dance parties at their upscale, 5th Avenue mansion to antagonise the white neighbourhood.

They frequent bars and joints, mingle with the artists and low-lifes, briefly befriend a mobster, who sends them home in his private limo; then he sends them two hookers as a gift. Many years later, the gangster, having no memory of the two brothers, is brought to their house by his bodyguards after an assassination attempt on him. For a short time, Homer and Langley are held hostage in their own home. A middle-aged Japanese American couple, known as Nisei, find employment at the mansion. World War Two starts. Mrs. Robileaux's grandson joins an All Negro battalion, is killed, and the elderly cook resigns to go find her grandson's wife and child. The FBI comes knocking at their door to round up the Japanese couple. A Jewish person comes raising money to help Jews being slaughtered by Hitler. The atomic bomb is dropped. The war is won.

The Korean war is followed by the Vietnam war. The 60s arrive. The cultural revolution starts. The pill arrives. There is Rock and Roll, free concerts in the Central Park. The brothers one day join the young hippie crowd and the next thing that have new friends and are part of a movement. Suddenly young people are crashing at their haunt. Neighbours don't like this. Kennedy, Dr. King and Malcolm X have been murdered. There is resistance to American wars and Imperialism. A big section of America has risen against Capitalism: there are those who want to fight the system and there are the hippies, as Homer observes, who refuse to be part of the system. They don't believe in possessions. They can sleep with a friend because that's what friends do. Homer too finds some comfort. Then gradually the squatters are gone.

The brothers have grown old. Homer is beginning to lose his hearing as well. Playing music is going to be difficult. The brothers don't want to be part of the system either. Their electricity is cut off and then one day they don't have water. They have learnt they can survive without the corporate America. They have boarded up their windows. They rarely open their doors. They rarely venture out, that too only to buy food, newspapers and to fetch water. Their trust in the society, the government has nose-dived. Their paranoia has sky-rocketed. Langley has become addicted to collecting junk, whatever he can get his hands on. Towards the end of the novel there's barely any room in the mansion to walk freely. There are newspaper piles touching the ceiling. That's just the tip of the iceberg.

The novel is based on the true story of the Collyers Brothers. The remarkable feat that Doctorow has accomplished is that the story becomes a metaphor for how America's imperial ambition, her capitalist greed has destroyed the best minds of her generation and crippled the sensitive soul, blinded and interrupted. Homer and Langley are two sides of the same coin. Recollections, memoirs, novels based on historical events are fundamentally an act of selective memory just as a review is an exercise at omission. Doctorow stops with a hint of Langley's death and the reader knows Homer's days are numbered. The novel omits several important pieces, such as the role of Americans and their government in the suffering of Palestinians for it is a suffering that's directly manufactured and controlled by the power that resides in New York and in the US. There are other important blind spots for which a writer of Mr. Doctorow's courage and stature as a critic of the empire should've overcome. He fails there, so does the novel even if it is a very humanistic and insightful novel at times.

The publication of a new book under the title Khushboo Teri Yadain reminds one that a good teacher is always respected by his pupils and is not forgotten. The book has been published by the University of Education, Lahore and is compiled by Asima Asghar who is a Ph.D scholar at the university.

The 128-page volume is a collection of twelve articles written in memory of Dr Sajjad Baqir Rizvi, brought out on his 81st birth anniversary in October 2009. Dr Rizvi died seventeen years ago and many of his students have turned out to be literary personalities. Those who have contributed articles to Khushboo Teri Yadain include, among others, Dr Tabassum Kashmiri, Ahmad Aqeel Rubi, Ahmad Javed, Muhammad Khalid, Dr Ali Muhammad Khan, Dr Abdul Karim Khalid and Dr Ziaul Hasan.

Dr Rizvi was my neighbour at the new campus of Punjab University during the 1980s. We spent many evenings together. I wrote memoirs of those evenings in an article published soon after his death in 1992. It is now included in my book Mandlee. Besides literature, he was also interested in philosophy and during the last years of his life had taken to post-Freudian theoretical psychology. We mostly used to talk about topics related to philosophical psychology.

Dr Rizvi taught Urdu literature at the Punjab University's Oriental College. He was a master conversationalist but cared less about writing. However, his book Tehzeeb-o-Takhleeq is an exceptionally fine addition to Urdu literature on theoretical criticism.

A new book on the life and poetry of Bulleh Shah was launched past week in Lahore under the aegis of the local chapter of the Pakistani Academy of Letters. The 106-page book titled Bulleh Shah: Shakhsiat aur Shaairi is authored by Dr Anis Nagi a noted poet, fictionist and literary critic. He has published about 70 books during the past four decades and is known for his modernist approach.

Nagi was associated with a small group of intellectuals working for the renewal of Punjabi literature in the early 1960s. He soon, however, veered towards Urdu and all his books have been written in Urdu. The book on Bulleh Shah is also written in Urdu but it does not fail to give the impression that the author still retains some sort of interest in Punjabi literature and intellectual heritage. His self-published book carries a brief appraisal of the life of the 18th century Sufi poet and a critical study of his ideas. A selection of his poetry has also been included in it.

The launching function was presided over by Dr Tabassum Kashmiri who was all praise for the book. He said that the book was very useful for those who were interested in getting introduced to Bulleh Shah and his poetry. Comparing Punjabi Sufi poetry to Urdu and Persian poetry, he observed that the classical Punjabi poetry has more spiritual depth.

Dr Abbas Najmi, Aqeel Rubi, Iqbal Qasier and Shahida Dilawar Shah were other speakers at the function, which was conducted by Dr Amjad Tufail. The launching ceremony provided me with the pleasant opportunity of meeting a number of friends after many weeks.

Jeem Fay Ghori has been living in the small Italian town of Fidenza for many years. I came across him while travelling from Milan to Rome last month. He was happy for getting the opportunity to live in a European country and thought that this opportunity had ensured a better future for his children. However, the separation from friends greatly saddens him.

Ghori started composing poetry in early 1980s when he lived in a village near Faisalabad and has continued the practice. He gave me a copy of his recently published collection of poetry titled Hath Per Diya Rukhna, published by the PCH Publications, Lahore. In addition to nazms and ghazals, the volume carries short comments of Nazir Qaiser, Israr Zaidi, Salma Hussain, Father Zikiriya Ghori and Sister Sabina Ghori on Jeem Fay Ghori's verse.

Ghori's ghazals with their traditional style and content did not attract me. His poems are, however, different. They talk of love, hope, global peace and the making of a new world free of injustice, exploitation, poverty and war. But the poet also reminds that a better world cannot be created unless the present system is totally changed.