Tag: Ghalib

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Excerpt

The Courtesan, Her Lover and I 

Title: The Courtesan, Her Lover and I 

Author: Dr Tarana Husain Khan

Publisher: Hachette India

Dagh’s presence in Calcutta was magnetic. The city, resplendent and cosmopolitan, embraced him. This was Dagh’s second visit to the city. He had come with Nawab Kalb e Ali Khan in 1866; he found the city even more grand than on his earlier visit. Dagh’s arrival had been announced in poetic circles and the nobility. Invitations to mushairas started pouring in. His baithak became the hub for poets, nobles and admirers as people flocked to meet him and spend time with him. He found the people of Calcutta cultured and affable and made hundreds of friends. Among his visitors was Abdul Ghafur ‘Nassakh’, the deputy collector of Midnapur, who had questioned Dagh’s lineage in his tazkira, somewhat insultingly referring to him as the ‘son of Chhoti Begum’, implying that Dagh, who proudly wrote his name as ‘Nawab Dagh Dehlvi’, was the offspring of a junior begum of Nawab Shams of Jhirka and not entitled to use the grand suffix. Nassakh was your tutor and a regular at your kotha. You had expected Dagh to snub him, but he surprised you by extending a warm hand of friendship. Nassakh, charmed by Dagh’s magnanimity, became a regular at all of Dagh’s mushairas, and his son became Dagh’s shagird. Dagh continued to write to Nassakh for years and often asked him to intervene in your frequent quarrels with Dagh. Nassakh was a typical British official, officious and correct. You privately accused him of being servile to the British. Dagh said Nassakh was redeemed by his love for Urdu poetry and his sensitive kalaam. He found Nassakh a man of old values, a wazeydaar—a reading that proved to be true. Dagh gave a lot of importance to lineage and family as a determiner of behaviour and attitude. He formed enduring bonds and kept in touch with friends and acquaintances all his life by writing numerous letters every day.

Dagh, you realized, was an open-hearted person. He harboured no grudges, even befriending known enemies and critics, and used to say mulaqat ko to safai se—cleanse your heart when you meet someone. You, on the other hand, were more guarded and suspicious of people, often judging them for their actions or reported words. Your outward geniality towards your clients was perfected over the years, but your unforgiving heart would never open to anyone you had once rejected. There were no two sides to Dagh’s personality—he projected what he felt inside and was nearly always affable and generous to a fault. You were astounded at Dagh’s innocent trust in people even after suffering reverses, mistreatment and insults throughout his life. Strangers who got to know him would feel loved, accepted and find comfort. Unlike his cousin, the great poet Ghalib, Dagh was never arrogant. You had heard that Ghalib’s sojourn to Calcutta in 1828 for reinstatement of his pension was marked by tussles and conflicts with old friends and he made new enemies. Dagh only brought harmony and affection wherever he went.

He would often ask you, ‘Why do you love me so? Dark and old as I am.’

You would laugh and reply, ‘Yes, no one would like your face; it’s you I love. I have never met a person like you.’

Monsoon rains swept through Calcutta, and Dagh enjoyed the salubrious winds, often going for moonlit drives along the Hooghly with you. He loved to watch the moon chasing the clouds on the bridge. The windows to his upstairs room were thrown open to the moisture-laden winds and the light spray of rain. Your life would forever turn back to look upon those days and nights as a time of contented happiness. You often sat receiving guests in Dagh’s salon, introducing him to the grandees, very much the mistress by his side. Every poet and connoisseur clamoured for his appearance at their mushairas. Dagh was kind and didn’t refuse even the humblest invitations.

You loved his quick humour, which matched your impetuous repartee. He could lighten everything with a witty remark; only you had the power to crumple his heart with a serrated sharp word. Ah, give me your prolificity you sighed; just that, and I can give you my life, my words, my soul. I shall be forever your slave and write at your command, you promised.

Dagh was at his most prolific at that time, reciting and penning ghazals every day from the wellspring of his lived happiness. He made you sit in the room as he wrote. You were his inspiration, and you felt words emanating from your pen almost as effortlessly as his. A touch, a look, a shared thought would pull you towards each other in the middle of a sher. You would float into his ghazal and he into yours. His nights after the mushairas were yours, and you had stopped hosting soirées at the kotha during his stay. This time was for the flowering of your love, unfettered by fear from Nawab Haider and mean-minded remarks by Dagh’s friends. The anxiety of the clandestine dissipated, and you relaxed in his arms, opening your heart to him. You observed his habits closely—his love for Indian attar, which he so generously sprayed on himself, and his abhorrence of drinks—you were his only vice, he said. Yes, I and all the other tawaifs you have loved—you couldn’t resist the barb, even when it found its mark in the hurt of his eyes.

On one such pleasant evening, on the insistence of Nassakh, you organized a mushaira at your kotha. It was to be a grand event, with the members of Nawab Wajid Ali Shah’s family arriving from Metiaburj along with his noblemen. You had helped to make all the arrangements, hoping that the mushaira would finally win you an invitation to one of the Metiaburj soirées, where you would sing under the benign eye of the corpulent Nawab Wajid Ali Shah. Metiaburj was the epitome of culture in all of Hindustan, and if Nawab Wajid Ali Shah invited you for a recital, it meant you had made your mark in the world of poetry, you told Dagh. He laughed, saying, ‘Your heart is the only mark my poetry seeks.’

The mushaira was a great success, a convergence of all the renowned poets and grandees of Calcutta. Phaetons and carriages choked the road as guests were ushered in by liveried guards. Dagh was not well off, and Nassakh and you had financed the expensive soirée. Your presence there underlined your association with Dagh as his muse and lady love. When finally the lamp was kept before Dagh, signalling that he would be reciting his new ghazal, his words were for you and Calcutta.

Roknā dil ko ke shauq zulf e dilbar le chalā

Thāmnā mujh ko ke saudā merā sar le chalā

Ye ḥasīñ ye mehjabīñ ye shahar aisī lehar ba lehar

Dāgh kalkattey se lākhoñ Dāg̣h dil pe le chalā

My heart is swept away with the tresses of my beloved

This transaction of passion has numbed my reason

This town with its waves of luminescent beauties

Dagh leaves Kalkatta with his heart bearing numerous marks (dagh)

Nawab Kalb e Ali Khan’s letter summoning Dagh back to Rampur came like a death sentence. It had been a little more than two weeks since he arrived—how could there be such little time for you? Dagh requested for a two-month extension of leave, which was refused. You tried to persuade him to stay back. Whatever I have, is yours, stay with me here, you reiterated. He was so popular in Calcutta that there were many who would happily sponsor him; together, you could make a good living. But Dagh was a faithful servant of the Nawab, indebted by the latter’s many favours—Rampur riyasat had supported Dagh when he lost his father and again when his mother was expelled from the Mughal court. Besides, Dagh was a married man, and that was also an article of faith. Once again, he invited you to accompany him back to Rampur, but you couldn’t leave your obligations towards your family and sever all relations. These were familiar arguments, fuelled by the pain of impending separation and the inevitable stalemate between you. Within a few days, Dagh left, feeling, he said, like a corpse leaving the city. He had to reach Rampur before Ramzan.

Is this how it will end, you asked yourself. For how long can this continue? As Ramzan fasts and sehri sounds buzzed around you and him in different parts of Hindustan, you heard of him writing a masnavi, Faryād e Dāgh, a plea from his grieving heart. Would it be an obituary to your love?

About the Book

In the royal courts of nineteenth-century Rampur, courtesan–poet Munni Bai Hijab captivates the legendary Urdu poet Dagh Dehlvi, who immortalizes her in his verses while inadvertently eclipsing her voice. More than a century later, Rukmini, an aspiring writer, stumbles upon Dagh’s letters in the archives of the Rampur Raza Library and finds herself drawn to the fierce, flickering presence of Munni Bai Hijab.

Torn between worlds—a Hindu woman in a Muslim household, a cosmopolitan spirit in a conservative town—Rukmini begins to trace the forgotten threads of Hijab’s story, even as her own life starts to unravel. Her husband chases yet another doomed business idea. Her daughter walks away from medical school. And when her friendship with Daniyal, the stoic guardian of Rampur’s past, deepens into desire, Rukmini must confront her greatest fear: becoming her mother, the woman who once walked away from their family. The Courtesan, Her Lover and I is a haunting novel of longing, ambition and women who dare to write themselves into history.

About the Author

Dr Tarana Husain Khan is a writer and food historian based in Rampur. She is the author of a bestselling historical fiction, The Begum and the Dastan (Hachette India), and Degh to Dastarkhwan: Qissas and Recipes from Rampur (Penguin Random House India). She has co-edited and contributed to the anthology of food writings, Forgotten Foods: Memories and Recipes from Muslim South Asia (Pan Macmillan India). Her writings on food, culture and gender have been published in Global Food History Journal, Gastronomica Journal and prominent media outlets. She was granted a Research Fellowship at the University of Sheffield for an AHRC-funded project. This is her fourth book. She lives between Rampur and Nainital with her husband.

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Review

The History Teacher of Lahore by Tahira Naqvi

Book Review by Somdatta Mandal

Title: The History Teacher of Lahore: A Novel

Author: Tahira Naqvi

Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books

Tahira Naqvi, the Pakistani American writer, has extensively translated the works of Saadat Hasan Manto, Khadija Mastur, Hajra Masroor, and the majority of works by Ismat Chughtai from Urdu into English. As a teacher/professor of Urdu language and literature at New York University, she has regaled us with several short stories that speak of cross-cultural encounters of immigrant Pakistanis in America, especially about how women experience acculturation in the New World. The History Teacher of Lahore is her first novel where she recollects the sights, sounds, and ambience of growing up in Lahore in intimate details. The setting of this novel is the nineteen eighties, which was particularly a time of unrest in Lahore. In this debut political novel, Naqvi eloquently portrays the struggle between a besieged democracy and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism on the one hand, and the thriving cultural traditions of Urdu poetry on the other.

The story begins with the young protagonist Arif Ali who moves from his hometown of Sialkot to Lahore with a dream of being a history teacher and a poet. A ‘tall, slight man in his late twenties,’ we find him relaxing on a bench in Jinnah Park — a place that has become haven for him to spend his time reading, far away from the ferocity of traffic and street crowds. In the days that followed, Arif realised that in the Government Model School for Boys where he taught, he was forced to teach the boys another kind of history for his sake as much as theirs. But that required deep thought, time, and enthusiasm. He befriended Salman Shah, another teacher in his school, and his rapport with him grew stronger by the day. But once again, Arif found the atmosphere in the school was becoming increasingly confining. He would often engage in animated chatter with the high school Islamiyat teacher Samiullah Sheikh, whom he found disagreeable. Not only dressed in Shariyah compliant clothes, but this man was also waiting for his opportunity to teach at a madrassah[1]. This was the period when bans were being imposed on popular music of the kind Nazia Hasan and her brother sang for the younger generation, and even though ‘Disco Deewane’ and ‘Dreamer Deewane’ were sung loud, fear had become an elixir for rebellion. Arif was forced to resign from the school and along with his friend Salman. he ultimately got another position as a history teacher in another private school, Lahore Grammar Institute, where there was more freedom to teach than in the earlier one. The free socializing among the sexes here was new and noteworthy for Arif.

As Arif’s impotent rage towards the increasing religious intolerance grew, he joined his friend’s uncle Kamal and his partner Nadira to secretly help them rescue underprivileged children in clandestine ways. In the meantime, his poetic creations found great impetus when he found a secret admirer in Roohi, Salman’s sister, and started sending her his poems regularly. Though they never met, Roohi would write letters to him every week, and gradually, the more letters Arif received from her, the more his feelings for her grew. The secrecy of their epistolary courtship continued for quite some time till things were disclosed and after a lot of twists and turns in the story, they were finally engaged to get married.

In the meantime, his friend Salman got engaged to a colleague Zehra Raza, and despite the Shia-Sunni clashes that prevailed in society all around, they were unaffected by such ideology. The three of them developed a close camaraderie among themselves, but soon after, the General’s death brought in a lot of political turmoil in the city. The mentality of the public also changed, people went en-masse to watch public flogging, and trouble loomed ahead when Sunni Shia, Ahmadi non-Ahmadi, Punjabi Urdu-speaking, Protestant-Catholic, divisions and sub-divisions, inter-faith, inter-class and inter-religion issues became more and more marked in all spheres of society. The warp and weft of faith produced such tangled intricacies as could only be imagined in nightmares.

As the nation was caught in the vortex of religious extremism, Arif’s position also underwent a great change in the school when he wanted to teach ‘true’ history to his students. He was caught in a dilemma when he found he was forced to teach false historical information in the doctored textbook that Aurangzeb with his hatred of other religions was adored whereas Akbar with more religious tolerance was totally sidelined. He tried to rectify the errors by providing supplementary notes to his students, but that landed him in more trouble. Apart from differences of opinion with the other teachers in school, Arif’s was gripped with a kind of fear and frustration when some unidentified goons threatened him to stay away from issues that did not concern him. Things got worse when a Christian student in his class was falsely accused of blasphemy and Arif decided to save him from being arrested. He embarked on a dangerous mission to resolve this Christian-Muslim conflict that landed him in the middle of sectarian clashes and without giving out all the details, one just mentions that the novel ends at a tragic moment.

In the acknowledgement section Naqvi states that she is grateful to her father for many things but especially for his Urdu poetry which she has used freely in translation. These poems, ghazals and nazms, help to explain the different moods of the protagonist and his mental situation very clearly. One interesting aspect of the novel is that each of the twenty-two chapters is prefaced by a small quote that in a way summarizes the mood and content of that chapter. Most of these quotes are from Jean-Paul Sartre, while others are from Spinoza, Ghalib, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, H.W. Longfellow, Jacques Derrida, Tertullian, Thomas Mann, and four entries particularly from The Lahore Observer dated 15 September 1990, December 1990, January 1997, and January 1998 respectively. These wide-ranging quotes not only increase the story-telling impact, but also endorse the erudition of the novelist herself.

To conclude we can say that Bapsi Sidhwa’s The Ice-Candy Man gave us the sights, sounds and details of Lahore during the Partition in 1947, and the same city becomes wonderfully alive again through the pen of another woman writer from Pakistan who had spent her growing years there, and who gives us details about it from the 1980’s onwards when  the political situation of the country was once again very murky. The novel wonderfully portrays the radical Islamisation of the country that included murder, mayhem, and public flogging and more that was visible in Lahore, as this process resulted in terrible uncertainty in the lives of the city’s residents from all walks of life. Strongly recommended for all readers, we eagerly wait for more novels by Tahira Naqvi in the future. The insider-outsider’s point of view offered by her is remarkable and this debut novel can be counted as a collector’s item.

[1] Muslim religious school

Somdatta Mandal, critic and translator, is a former Professor of English from Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, India.

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Essay

Pandemic and Poetry: How Writers in Pakistan react to COVID-19

By Dr Aftab Husain

There is a proverb in Persian and Urdu that could be roughly translated thus — ‘A collective death has an air of festivity’. The great Urdu poet, Ghalib, however, would have not subscribed to this notion as was made evident from an episode in his personal life. Once afflicted by his financial and existential miseries, he had foretold his own death the following year. There broke out in the given year an epidemic that claimed many lives in the city, but luckily our poet survived. When asked later about his prognostication, Ghalib replied with a tinge of humour that his forecast had been accurate, but it would have degraded him to die a common death, therefore, he held himself back.

This could be seen as a hyper-individualistic thought process of a genius poet which was ultimately reflected in his poetry. But common human beings think differently. The line of wisdom that the proverb at the starting of this essay conveys does not in any way celebrate death, but our collective, gregarious nature. It is a strange fact of human existence that a catastrophe unites people more than a festivity.

World literature, as many of us know, is replete with the examples of writing inspired by or dealing with different catastrophes; draught, floods, different types of epidemic: plague, cholera, influenza etc. The Plague by Albert Camus (French), Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez (Spanish) and Blindness by José Saramago (Portuguese) – incidentally all three written by Nobel laureates – immediately come to mind.  

Rabindranath Tagore’s long, descriptive poem: ‘Puratan Bhritya’ (Old servant) – ‘Keshta, old manservant of mine’, stemmed from smallpox.  In a few short stories by Premchand, the founding father of Urdu and Hindi fiction there appears pestilence – albeit as subtext. In ‘Idgah’ (mosque), the child protagonist lost his father to cholera. Similarly, in ‘Doodh Ka Daam’ (price of milk), one character dies of plague. Famous Urdu and English fiction writer Ahmad Ali who is known to the Urdu world as one of the contributors to Angaaree (The Burning Coals) an anthology of mainly short stories that had stirred the somewhat stagnant waters of the then Urdu literature, ventured into this area with his maiden novel in English. Ahmad Ali’s novel, Twilight in Delhi, offers a bleak and pathetic picture of the city in the wake of an epidemic. ‘How deadly this fever is. Everyone is dying of it. The hospitals are gay and bright. But sorry is men’s plight’.

‘Rebati’, a well-known short story by Fakir Mohan Senapati, one of the pioneers of modern Odia literature depicts a village hit by a cholera epidemic. The list is endless, but so far Urdu literature is concerned, ‘Quarantine’, a poignant short story by Rajinder Singh Bedi presents a detailed and exclusive description of the life affected by plague and also of quarantine as the title of the story also indicates.

Human beings in the long span of their history have been going through many different epidemics, but the present one is unique in that it has not only affected different strata of society, it has also had a global outreach. With bated breath, we watch the movement of this pandemic that has paralysed social life. Nevertheless, health-care workers, scientists, politicians, policy makers, psychiatrists, media persons and many other groups are actively working to finding a solution to the problem or at least curb its growth.

People from art and literature too are responding to the disease in different ways. Pakistani writers, especially poets, have profusely responded to the situation.

One interesting fact that one notices is in the word ‘corona’, that is, we know, a noun but when spelt out in Urdu-Hindi it makes a full-fledged meaningful phrase: ‘Don’t do.’ Resultantly, one observes a lot of versifications exploiting this pun – albeit major and established poets have shunned this facile jugglery. Barring this word play, poets who have chosen to write in a lighter vein seemingly have set their comic spirit to work as a defence mechanism to make the grave situation a little less intimidating. For example, a poem entitled as ‘Thanks’ by a senior poet Tahir Sherazi argues that this compulsory restriction that confines us to our home places might provide us an opportunity to repair our broken relationships with our family members. The poems ends on a jubilant note on acquiring the newly-gained leisure in this way: ‘My wife will make a cup of tea for me and I will write poems on roses, lamps, on the earth and the heaven’. Well, the male poet is scheming of enjoying this free time at his will while his spouse will be doomed to carry on with her routine domestic chores. This aspect does make this otherwise light poem somewhat pathetic.

Poets with a religious sensibility see this development as sort divine wrath and put forward their sentiments either in direct prayers or by employing religious terminology. ‘A Dialogue with God in the Days of Epidemic’ by Najma Mansoor, and ‘In the Days of Epidemic’ by Safia Hayat, are both of this vein. But, in major and significant poets you find no direct recourse to divine powers or holy personages, but only a thin, veiled religious consciousness.

‘God Smiles in Their Eyes’, a poem by Ali Muhammad Farshi, a senior poet, pays tribute to the life-saving endeavours of a nurse who had wrenched back a bride from the clutches of death. Quite pertinently, the poet invokes figures of Mary and Christ, the messiah, and despite having no apparent reference to corona the poem provides a penetrating presentation of the present state of affairs. ‘God, Epidemic and Human Beings’ by Jameelur Rahman is also a poem sprinkled with religious diction, but its overall philosophical tone saves the poem from becoming mere-lamentation of a pious soul caught in an unbearable suffering.

However, Maqsood Wafa altogether rejects the role of religion in such a dreadful disease as he puts it in the closing lines of his poem, ‘The Captive Days’: “I will listen to the Prime Minister’s speech/And I won’t be able to make the people of this holy land understand/that when a virus attacks a human being/It doesn’t ask the name of his god”.  Almost similar is the tone in Saqib Nadeem’s poem: “We Don’t Accept (The Poem of A Petty Sentimentality)” where the poet lashes at the shallow and hypocritical religious community. “After every prayer we embrace and congratulate each other on being alive and we trade in kisses, (but) we don’t hear screams of virus in our kisses”.  

Then, there is a group that believes that one can with the power of love conquer this monster. ‘An Innocent Poem’ by Parveen Tahir speaks about the wishes of its female protagonist – a lover – who kisses her lover and dines with him in the naive expectation that the disease will at least spare those who are in love. Seemab Zafar’s ‘One Erects Love with the Bricks of Affliction’ does not offer such optimism but presents a desolate scenario – within and without. ‘On Death Bed’ by Fatima Mehru juxtaposes among the triad of love, disease and death. It is soulful poem that vacillates between life affirming spirit of love and that of despair.  Some poems in this category remind you Márquez’s Love in the Times of Cholera – at least title of the novel which is quite a popular book. Khumar Meerzada’s two short and impressive poems ‘Love in the Days of Epidemic’ and ‘Love and Epidemic’ show how love act in front of such a fatal malady.  Iftekhar Bukhari’s ‘We Descends from One Father’ does not lose touch to the ground reality, yet it rises up to the lofty human bonds. “We will not shake hands/This is time that we united our heart….Without urgent needs we will not leave our house/In order that roads, fields and gardens are again full of life…./If needed, we will go and die in a silent corner/So that the earth might echo with songs, even after our departure.” A powerful poem, indeed!   

Arshad Latif took a different, cynial and somewhat callous stance towards the given grave situation. “We couldn’t control our inhuman impulses/And our negative thoughts took us far away from the life itself…We, you and some others proved a total failure…./Embrace death willingly so that souls of us, yours and some others could bequeath peace”. (‘The World Wants A Cure’).

Whereas Salmat Sarwat’s ‘Quarantine No 1’ portrays the ennui spawned by an ever-spreading leisure and the resultant disinclination to write further, Gulnaz Kausar’s ‘Precaution’ is composed in the poet’s typically soft and feminine style. Her diction and her treatment leave, despite the morbid subject of the poem, a soothing effect on the reader. 

At least two other poems: ‘Quarantine’ by Irfan Sadiq and ‘Seventh Day in the Quarantine’ by Omer Aziz, take not only the term of quarantine in their titles, but they revolve around this trope.  Aziz, a doctor by profession, has quite effectively captured the physical affliction and mental agony of a patient put in quarantine.

Alongside such poems, there is a wide circulation of individual ghazal couplets: the two liners that quite succinctly sum up the general mood about the epidemic. Most of these small pieces, for their overflowing sentimentality or sheer propaganda do not have much appeal. Yet, a few of them not only hit the bull’s eye, but they do not veer away from the aesthetic requirement of a piece of literature.

Afsaos, Ye Wabaa Ke DinoN  Ki MohabbateN

Ik Doosre Se Haath Milaane Se Bhi Gaye

(Sajjad Baloch)

Alas, these love affairs in the days of epidemic!

Even shaking hands with each other is rendered hard

*

Har Taraf Aisii Khamoshii Hay Ki Sar Ghoomta Hay

Log Pahre MeN HaiN Aur GalioN Men Dar Ghoomta Hay

(Seemab Zafar)

A terrible hush rules all over and makes you feel giddy

Human being caught in the custody

While a certain fearfulness prowls in the streets

*

Ajeeb Dard Hay Jis Kii Dawaa Hay Tanhaaii

Baqaa e Shahr Hay Ab Shahr Ke Ujadne MeN

(Mahmood Shaam)

What a weird malady is it whose cure lies in solitude!

Now the survival of the city is in its depopulation.

Thus, we see that an overwhelming response to the pandemic came from our poets. As for prose, though in general there are a plethora of pieces written on the subject, that is,  journalistic writing, but quite rarely one comes across relevant fiction, fictional narrative or imaginative prose. Justifying this comparative absence fiction writer M Hameed Shahid says: “Poetry might be composed in reaction to a happening, for fiction that is not enough. Fiction needs something more to build up its aesthetics,” he adds. Well, our writers writing on the communal riots in the wake of the Partition of India in 1947 did produce literature in reaction to these events, though such literature was, to be sure, not created while the riots were still taking place.  M. Hameed Shahid is therefore in favour of waiting and seeing and letting his experience take a mature form, so he stayed away from offering something half-backed in fiction. Nevertheless, he has come forward with a non-fictional narrative: ‘Epidemic Days, Closed Door & Deserted Street’ – a sort of chronicle-narrative and despite its excessive self‐referentiality, the write up is interesting in the sense that it, at least, introduces us to the disquiet and anxieties of a writer finding himself in the midst of a prison-like claustrophobic confinement.  

Meanwhile, another fiction writer who has given a clarion call to his colleagues and urged them use their pens in dispelling the gloomy atmosphere created by the disease is Amjad Tuhfail. He was, however, snubbed by a senior short story writer declaring that any such move was to yield nothing but slogan-mongering that jump on the bandwagon could bring out only ‘faction’ and in no way any genuine fiction. A Lahore based short story writer, Tufail, did not take this warning seriously and immediately posted a three-page short story in a social-media outlet. Jabir Ali Syed had once called Shamsur Rahman Faruqi known as the  “the impetuous critic”. The gentleman story writer might be no match for Faruqi, but he shares, at least, this quality with his senior contemporary.

As a saving grace to this discouraging deficiency in prose, comes an English write-up, “Something’s not right with the world”, from Farah Zia. The small item that the writer prefers to call “a mood piece” appears like a free stroke by some accomplished painter: laconic, telling and powerful. “It is like waking up every day into a dream: in a place where life imitates fiction” thus begins the write up. Written with profound concern, yet at the same time, with a cold objectivity, it makes a serene and soulful reading. No wonder, the piece was quickly rendered into Urdu and published, but one wonders if such a deeply-felt prose could be translated without losing much of its essential charm and pathos.

Closing the deliberations one can say that each piece that is being written in the name of literature cannot be, quite naturally, up to the literary mark – let alone to be remembered by posterity. Most of these writings fall into the category of pièce d’occasion. But such pieces, occasioned by certain events sometimes transcend the given situation and live on, beyond the time of their creation. Some of the given stuff has remarkable literary value and therefore it might survive longer; the other ones might not be fortune enough, but the fact remains that they too bear a witness to a momentous phenomenon in human history and have transcribed these times on the climate of our minds.

Aftab Husain (Pakistan/Austria) is an eminent name in modern Ghazal poetry from South Asia. In addition to Urdu, he writes in English both poems and literary essays and translates from German to Urdu and vice versa. He earned his doctorate in comparative literature from Vienna University where he teaches South Asian Literature and Culture. He has four collections of poetry and three of books of translations – from German into Urdu – to his credit. He was a fellow of Heinrich-Böll-Haus, Germany as well as the ‘Writer of Exile’ of Vienna City. His poems have been translated into many languages. He is a member of the Austrian PEN and co-edits a bilingual magazine – Words & Worlds –  for migrant literature.