review
Stories about lingering sadness

A superb fictional interpretation of Bangladesh’s war of liberation that is highly recommended for Pakistani readers
By Moazzam Sheikh
This is the book I have waited for quite some time. Having read this collection of 12 very well-written short stories under the title “Killing the Water” by the Bangladeshi American writer Mahmud Rahman, I can safely say the wait has been worthwhile.
There is not a single story in this collection that fails to leave a mark, some a bitter taste, a few a lingering sadness. Rahman has deployed a variety of strategies to flesh out his themes which deal with oppression, deterioration of environment, revenge, desire, attraction, racism, anger, maternal love, anger towards parents, jealousy, push and pull of history, you name it.


16 isn’t just a number
The novel gives us an opportunity to watch the teen-age world from a close distance — a carefree world of youthful energy, vigour and dynamism
By Arif Waqar
“…I walk straight into the tunnel looking for the exit; but as I move, the tunnel gets longer and darker. I start running. I’ve got a class in ten minutes…have to reach my school. Suddenly I see light and…finally I exit the tunnel but enter into an entirely different world. Is this a market? I see people selling fruit, vegetables, pots, goats. Goats? I try to find my way through this ancient crowd…tripping my foot and falling into a well. My body thrashes with water and I try to scream but instead allow water to enter my lungs. I keep on sinking as water fills me up. I see a blurred image of faces popping at the opening of the well and shouting my name: “Javariya” !

What Manto actually wrote
With this volume Shamsul Haque Usmani has taken upon himself a difficult task to edit Manto and bring out the authentic text
By Sarwat Ali
The hundred years of Saadat Hasan Manto has seen an appreciable rise in the interest taken by both scholars and readers in one of the already popular fiction writers of Urdu. Due to his popularity he has also been translated into English and is also known to the English reading public.
But naturally, with more publications and a desire to know what exactly did Manto write, the next logical step was to certify the authenticity of the text. In the past Manto has been published many times, his complete works compiled repeatedly but is found that there are discrepancies in those texts. And some of them so varied, that it changed the entire meaning of what the writer intended to say.

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

review
Stories about lingering sadness

A superb fictional interpretation of Bangladesh’s war of liberation that is highly recommended for Pakistani readers
By Moazzam Sheikh

This is the book I have waited for quite some time. Having read this collection of 12 very well-written short stories under the title “Killing the Water” by the Bangladeshi American writer Mahmud Rahman, I can safely say the wait has been worthwhile.

There is not a single story in this collection that fails to leave a mark, some a bitter taste, a few a lingering sadness. Rahman has deployed a variety of strategies to flesh out his themes which deal with oppression, deterioration of environment, revenge, desire, attraction, racism, anger, maternal love, anger towards parents, jealousy, push and pull of history, you name it.

Rahman’s canvas is broad and the choice of characters is rich. He uses first person narrative as effectively as he handles stories told from the third person’s point of view, and never stretches the plot beyond plausibility even when he makes the reader witness his character’s most callous acts amicably demonstrated like in the story Kerosene. In the midst of 1971 war of liberation, the protagonist is caught up in a situation where a group of women and children are to be locked up, for being on the side of the rulers, and burnt alive. It is not an easy story to write, to show that inhuman situations which sustained oppression and wars can turn decent human beings into brutes in the name of revenge or personal safety.

The twelve stories are roughly divided into those that take place in colonial India, East Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and the rest in the US. Most stories, regardless of where they take place, are shadowed by the experience of war of liberation, the colossal loss of life of Bengali people at the hands of the Pakistani Army.

In the hands of a lesser author, the consistent reminder of human tragedy would have bogged down the reader. Rahman’s restraint with words saves the day. This restraint with words whether coming from the author’s pen or the narrator’s mouth allows Rahman to experiment with another aspect of story-telling. His narrators often allow minor characters to hijack the narrative, which some refer to a story within a story device. This allows Rahman to create a layered text accommodating several points of view.

Although it is hard to pick out a favourite in the collection, the story Interrogation impressed me for several reasons. Told in the first person, not only does he allow the reader to enter the protagonist’s mind but also to witness the interrogator’s ambivalence towards work ethics and torture, and heightened consciousness about class issues. Rahman bestows upon him a tone that is precise yet lyrical at times, hinting at a clash of duty and desire. While his duty is dictated by the force of economic survival, his desire (to be a writer) obliges him to prod the young Reza — the interrogated — to tell his side of the story, placing his narrative at the heart of the story and in conflict with the one that a state promulgates.

The author, too, acts as a stand-in for an interrogator, who wishes to understand, in this case, why the newly liberated state in turn has turned into an oppressor, hunting down her own citizens since the story takes place after liberation.

In an interesting twist of plot, a series of incidents from his younger life tug at Reza’s conscience, who belongs to the ruling class, leaving him to believe that the only way to change the system is through armed resistance.

Rahman is at the peak of his art when he takes a serious risk by not letting the Interrogated speak in first person. A lesser choice would have been to allow Reza direct audience with the reader for maximum effect. Instead, Rahman shifts from the Interrogator’s first person narrative to the third person account by the author. Then, again, he switches back to the first person: I felt for this boy sitting in front of me. I could see he was a sensitive soul. I suspect that both of us at young ages were gifted with keenness of observation, me about the good and evil inherent in the human personality and him about the inequities embedded in our society. I could turn my knowledge into stories, but this poor boy…?

The dissonance created by this continues to hover in the reader’s mind. This story brought to mind a wonderful Iranian film The Hidden Half by Tehmina Milani. On the president’s order, a judicial officer is sent to hear a condemned woman, a political prisoner’s final appeal before she is sent to the gallows. His wife, whose leftist past from her student days is hidden from him, hides her diary in his suitcase. As he opens his suitcase in the hotel, he begins to read her diary. This changes his attitude toward the prisoner, and as the woman is finally brought into the room to be interrogated, he asks her to narrate her story in the last shot of the film. Rahman’s Interrogator instead wants to strike a deal with the boy’s family, return the boy in exchange for a small but comfy job where he can write his stories, even when the boy insists that he’d run away again.

This is not to suggest that Rahman’s stories get stuck on the issues of “evil inherent” in humans and “inequities imbedded” in capitalist and feudal societies. He is also interested in exploring cultural forces that shape human beings as he tries to explore those issues in one of my other favourite stories Blue Mondays at the Gearshift Lounge. Can a person of Bengali origin truly dig Jazz and Blues? Can Carlotta, the singer of the band at the bar where Ali visits to drown himself in liquor and befriends her, ever understand his pain? Can Ali feel the pain of slavery and racism in these lyrics:

I am passing through, new to your city

Sing me a tune or two, even if it’s out of pity

The book is highly recommended for Pakistani readers as we need to read fictional interpretations of the conflict as experienced in the imagination of those whom we betrayed.

Moazzam Sheikh’s collection of stories Cafe Le Whore and Other Stories is due this year.

Killing the water

Author: Mahmud Rahman

Publisher: Penguin India

Pages: 200

Price: INR 250

 

 

 

 

 

16 isn’t just a number
The novel gives us an opportunity to watch the teen-age world from a close distance — a carefree world of youthful energy, vigour and dynamism
By Arif Waqar

“…I walk straight into the tunnel looking for the exit; but as I move, the tunnel gets longer and darker. I start running. I’ve got a class in ten minutes…have to reach my school. Suddenly I see light and…finally I exit the tunnel but enter into an entirely different world. Is this a market? I see people selling fruit, vegetables, pots, goats. Goats? I try to find my way through this ancient crowd…tripping my foot and falling into a well. My body thrashes with water and I try to scream but instead allow water to enter my lungs. I keep on sinking as water fills me up. I see a blurred image of faces popping at the opening of the well and shouting my name: “Javariya” !

This is the young protagonist of the novel: half awake, half asleep, now sitting as a tangible entity in the real world of her class room, home, friends, pizza, cell phone, sms, …and now sunk into the world of fantasy like an ethereal being.

Javariya will soon turn sixteen and the whole novel is in fact a run-up to her all-important sixteenth birthday:

“ I felt unfortunate. The most important time of my life was approaching and there was no one whom I could go to and express how happy I felt. They would laugh and joke about it. According to them, a sixteenth birthday is as normal as other birthdays…I didn’t have a sister, and my best friends hated me. How perfect! “

Despite these handicaps, Javariya has set her heart on celebrating the upcoming event with full pomp and show, because 16 isn’t just a number for her, it’s a gateway to adulthood, a passport to freedom, a symbol of maturity and independence and as she explains it to one of her teachers, “…This is my life’s most important moment. When the clock strikes 12 and I’m not in the perfect situation at that time, I’ll be upset for my whole life. it’s like an omen.”

To see how Javariya had been preparing herself for the occasion, you just have to look at a page in her journal: “I turned to a fresh page and wrote down the heading: The Perfect Sixteen, under which I began listing the things I had to do before my sweet sixteen:

Lose weight

Grow my hair till it reaches my waist

Get a personality makeover

Become politer

Start cooking

Help around the house

Help Dad solve his problems

It’s a common practice in fiction to take help from personal letters or diaries, to give a direct account of a character’s viewpoint, feelings or inner thoughts, and though Tanzila Khan’s narrative is already in first-person, yet she seeks help from these devices, and consequently, Javariya’s journal gets a pivotal place in the story. A better arrangement could have been to keep the general narrative in third-person, and use the first person devices only where essential. But the author seems more interested in “I, me and mine”:

“…It had to be around midnight now. I got myself ready for Mission T.S.O.F (My own invention—-it stood for “Teens Sneaking Out for the sake of Freedom) I stuffed a five hundred rupee note into my purse, along with a flashlight. and put on my jacket…A quick shimmy down the drainpipe and my feet hit the ground”

The story is full of such juvenile adventures and the fact that it’s written by a young person whose school experience is still fresh, gives us a unique opportunity to watch the teen-age world from a close distance…A carefree world of youthful energy, vigour and dynamism, a world of parties, shopping trips and joyrides.

Raw passion itself however is not literature. It requires a lot of taming and discipline, and unfortunately that is what this teenage venture could make use of. A tighter editing of the text could also have helped the narrative.

The Perfect Situation: Sweet Sixteen

Author: Tanzila Khan

Publisher: ILQA

Publications, Lahore, 2013

Pages: 286

Price: PKR 395

 

 

 

 

What Manto actually wrote
With this volume Shamsul Haque Usmani has taken upon himself a difficult task to edit Manto and bring out the authentic text
By Sarwat Ali

The hundred years of Saadat Hasan Manto has seen an appreciable rise in the interest taken by both scholars and readers in one of the already popular fiction writers of Urdu. Due to his popularity he has also been translated into English and is also known to the English reading public.

But naturally, with more publications and a desire to know what exactly did Manto write, the next logical step was to certify the authenticity of the text. In the past Manto has been published many times, his complete works compiled repeatedly but is found that there are discrepancies in those texts. And some of them so varied, that it changed the entire meaning of what the writer intended to say.

In the absence of strict implementation of the copyright act the field had been left wide open for the publishers to pirate and market the works, which in their view would sell well in the black market. This was generally the case with all sorts of writings, but in the case of Manto, it became more acute because his writings were thrown into a disputed arena and so aroused the curiosity of many to read what he wrote.

Many read the alleged “obscenity” and “pornography” bits with salacious delight and this led to Manto being printed many times and by all kinds and marketed freely. What Manto was writing was not pointedly pornography. He was aware of the great significance of the sexual powers in both men and women, and the lack of proper manifestation of these in the society.

The social face of sex did not exist, but it did inevitably find ways and means, which led to both a feeling of guilt and a sense of exploitation. For Manto sex was some kind of a primal force, which needed to be recognised and treated as such but for his more dogmatic progressive colleagues sex was to be dealt only in the form of exploitation of the weak by the strong. This was one of the many reasons for Manto falling out with his progressive friends.

Shamsul Haq Usmani had taken this difficult task upon himself to edit Manto and bring out the authentic text. He is eminently qualified to do so because he has been associated with Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi as professor of Urdu and has also been the head of the department. He has been particularly interested in textual criticism and has focused on Urdu fiction. His two books on Rajinder Singh Bedi, one on Krishen Chandar and the compilation ‘Nazeer Nama’ have been applauded for maintaining the rigorous standards of scholarship.

The entire scope of the work is quite awesome and it is expected to cover about ten volumes. The recent volume was published a few years ago in India but has been published now in Pakistan. During Manto’s lifetime, thirty-seven works were published but the subsequent republication during his lifetime and later was so big that it almost became an industry.

Usmani recognised the enormity of the task “From Manto’s early literary career till he breathed his last, about 37 of his books had appeared. They included short stories, pen-sketches, radio plays, features, essays, film scripts, and a novel. After Manto’s death, Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi published a book consisting of Manto’s letters addressed to Qasmi. Also, a number of Manto’s writings appeared either in magazines or were included in some books. This still goes on.”

In this the collected works have been classified according to their date of publication and then care has been taken of the various forms in which Manto wrote. As said earlier, despite being recognised as an afsananigar he also made sketches, wrote a novel, plays, film scripts and translated a lot.

The first point of reference for Usmani was the text that has been published during Manto’s lifetime, the inclusion in the collection has been according to the initial publication. It has happened that many stories were subsequently published under different selections of short stories. It has also transpired that Manto himself made changes in the text, so the first and the last publications during his lifetime have been taken and the differences identified between the two texts. All the publications have been taken into account.

Manuscripts whether in book form or in the various magazines that printed such stories including the publications categorised as unreliable publications, apparently pirated versions. Even in some the names and titles of the afasanas have been changed. Also the words, which were clear but did not fit within the context, were earmarked as well as those words, which were not recognisable or could not be verified. Similarly, there were words or sentences that happened to be mere repetitions.

Particularly in writing Urdu, the scribes usually made mistakes in the manuscripts for they did not understand the word and therefore could not figure it out by placing it with the context. Another vexing exercise was the correct use of punctuations. Similarly, the various disjointed paragraphs too were connected. In the end the explanatory notes, pointers and the books consulted too have been mentioned.

It is an exercise that has been very thoroughly conducted and hopefully what actually Manto wrote would now be within reach of the avid reader.  

Poora Manto

Volume 1

Edited by: Shamsul Haque Usmani

Publisher: Oxford

University Press, 2013

Pages: 392

Price: PKR 895

 

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