BECAUSE of his wide ranging and intimate knowledge of national life in its diversity of locale and language, Hasan Manzar may be considered a Pakistani writer in the truest sense. His embrace of national life in its multiplicity of forms, however, is more the result of an uncommonly inquisitive mind, a vibrant personality, and a vastly affectionate heart, than of a conscious choice to single out for consideration one segment of humanity on the basis of one’s national and religious affiliations with it. In what follows I propose to discuss a few of the stories that form part of the total of 16 recently published by Oxford University Press (Karachi) from his enormous corpus.

The dark underside of religion, its fascination for the masses, and the effects of piety-run-amok on the individual are explored with rare sensitivity and power in ‘Bipta ki Raat’ (The Night of Torment). The story unfolds in post-revolutionary Iran where the religious establishment feels duty-bound to regulate public morals. A prostitute, mother of four, without protection or support of any kind, and her “visitor” are whisked away from her cramped two-room apartment in the red-light area by the piety-patrol, the “cloak-and-rosary men” as they are called, while her children spend the whole of that day and the following night in anxious waiting, trembling now from fear, now from hunger. When she does return the next morning, she is so roughed-up she can barely walk. She staggers in and collapses. She has been flogged, bearing deep lash marks on her back, her shirt clinging to her body now etched by the jagged geography of pain. The rest of the story is a numbing recollection of the events at the unforgiving religious tribunal the day before as they impinge on the woman’s consciousness, now lucid, now drifting from exhaustion.

As the scene of her humiliating interrogation unfolds through her faltering recollection, one is struck by the aura of dignity and moral strength emanating from her person, and by her uncommon courage in the face of a brutal ordeal. All of which make the crass insensitivity of her interrogators — the executors of the divine will — look shockingly appalling and gross, indeed grotesque.

Whether one deserves to be punished for selling one’s body is a complex question predicated on whether society has ensured all its members access to what it considers ‘honorable’ professions, and further ensured that those who lack the required skills will be provided those skills. In other words, the question hinges on volition and necessity. The story’s protagonist was not a sex-crazed woman looking for pleasure. She was forced into her ignoble profession by her circumstances, which makes her punishment (40 lashes) all the crueler. Even more cruel is the humiliation, derision, and vulgarity heaped upon her during the draconian interrogation. She is asked questions whose answers are already apparent, so that some perverse pleasure may be had hearing them spill out from her mouth. But in each instance, she comports herself with affecting dignity, not even a hint of which can be perceived in her interrogators. Not only are she and her “visitor” kept hungry for the entire time, her pleas for her children’s safety fall on deaf ears. She is asked instead, “Who is their father?” — or rather, to add insult to injury, “Who are their fathers?” She could easily have identified these men and dragged them through the ordeal as well, especially since none of them was man enough to care for the child he helped bring into this world. “But I did not want anyone else to suffer the agony I was going through.” She knows she can’t expect even a modicum of consideration from her male interrogators. But what wounds her to her very core is the total apathy of the woman who was appointed to carry out her punishment:

“I looked her in the eye and asked, ‘So, it’s you who’ll …?’

‘Yes,’ she answered.

I wanted to talk to her, to ask her if she had any children, but by that time my hands and feet had been tied and secured to the legs of the bench. The woman, devoid of human feelings, a cog in that huge religious machine, was standing over me, to my left, with the whip at the ready.”

She is finally allowed to leave, but not without the exhortation to lead a “chaste” and “pious” life. The concluding paragraphs are worth reproducing:

“‘Did you realise the nature of your crime?’

‘No,’ I said.

Annoyed and angry, the cloak-and-rosary man said: ‘The proper punishment for the likes of you is death. You have lost all sense of guilt or shame.’

I said, ‘My lord, a lot more besides the sense of guilt died in me today. But if you really want to know, I never did have any sense of guilt.’

He raised his hand to slap me, but I addressed him with courage — the kind of courage that wells up in those who are at the threshold of extinction. I said, ‘I feel sorry for you.’

He held back his raised hand and asked: ‘For me? Why?’

‘For what you are doing,’ I told him.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that just as men have changed the course of my life, never allowing me to become what I could have, or what any woman could have, in the same way you have brutalised this other woman as well. She should have been rocking a cradle and singing lullabies, but just as you purchased me, you have purchased her too, and put a whip in her hand.’”

And all this in the name of religion! The parting admonition to lead a “chaste” and “pious” life mocks the very words themselves. She is far more chaste and pious than those who grandly sit in judgment over her. Like any good writer, Hasan Manzar forces us to question and rethink the meanings of words which have been devalued by time, practice, and sheer exploitative usage. ‘The Night of Torment’ does just that: it throws the two words back at the keepers of public morality like mirrors in which they themselves appear far less than “chaste” and “pious.”

This story is not an indictment of religion as such. Hasan Manzar is, as he himself has stated, a deeply religious man. He is not against religion, but rather against its exploitation, against fake spirituality, against the bogus purity that suffocates.

‘Zameen ka Nauha’ (A Requiem for the Earth), the opening story of the collection, is woven around a very serious subject: the destruction of the earth by man. Phantasmagoric and futuristic, the story underscores the gradual disappearance of females from the human species on our planet and, along with them, all beauty and poetry. As a result of man’s willful destruction of the world’s ecological balance — through too many nuclear tests and their radioactive fallout and through the use of lethal insecticides, food preservatives and additives — women in this imagined futuristic time have lost the ability to bear female babies. This has become painfully clear after a thorough scientific study of the female genetic make-up. By the third generation after the onset of the calamity, women have all but disappeared, except for a single woman, the wife of a schoolteacher, in a remote mountain area. But she is already ill, and is thus moving humanity toward its irrevocable end.

Intensive genetic research has finally succeeded in finding a cure expected to reverse the disorder. A global organisation called Save Mankind moves into high gear. Several helicopters are dispatched to the region where the last woman on earth is now counting her final days. Pleading with her husband as much as they might, he will, nevertheless, not allow the representatives of the Save Mankind organisation anywhere near his wife, who meanwhile dies. The husband comes out of his cave and starts digging a pit for her internment.

This chilling prophesy of the end of time and of human history as we know it, wrought by man’s incurable arrogance, undergirds Hasan Manzar’s larger interest in the fate of man at a global level.

Although not narrated on the same global scale as ‘A Requiem for the Earth,’ the story ‘Bhaari Safar’ (A Tough Journey) is nonetheless just as concerned with humanity’s destruction of itself — this time from within, at the level of ethics and corruption. It is the story of an upper-middle-class civil engineer and his peon, and the unlikely trip the two of them take to the village water reservoir whose construction the engineer has been overseeing. As with any large-scale engineering project, the construction of this reservoir involves large amounts of money, government agencies, private contractors, and an administrative bureaucracy that can be exploited for their own benefit by those who control it. And of course, it is the poor villagers who are exploited the most by the pervasive system of graft and kickbacks.

For the engineer, such corruption is the natural purview of the circles to which he belongs; it is simply the way business gets done. For the menial office peon, however, situated as he is outside such middle-class dealings, it is not the system of corruption that is immoral, but rather his exclusion from it. In a troubling yet deliciously ironic twist, the office menial seeks justice not in the elimination of corruption from society, but rather in the fair distribution of graft throughout society so that it can reach his low station, too, in an ‘equitable’ way. And the menial is not averse to his own variety of extortion in the service of this larger ‘justice.’ Piling on the irony, the engineer’s anger and frustration at his office worker’s extortionist tactics is really just confirmation that the pattewala has learned the lessons of corruption well. The tables are turned, and it is the boss who ultimately emerges helpless and exploited. True situational justice? Disgusting, totalising corruption? To its credit, Hasan Manzar’s narrative does not decide for us.

Among stories written along less somber and troubling questions are ‘Boonda-Baandi’ (The Drizzle) and ‘Saath’ (Togetherness), suggestive of a subtle transformation in their protagonists. ‘Togetherness’ narrates a kind of emotional dance between an aging widower and his widowed daughter-in-law. It is a story almost without any traditionally conceived plot, focusing instead on the tenderness and compassion of the two main characters as they come to terms with each other’s emotional wounds. The daughter-in-law has been orphaned at an early age and has grown up moving from one relative’s house to another, never experiencing any sense of a home she might call her own. Even when she marries the old man’s son, it is merely to replace the son’s first wife, who had ditched him. And her situation at her in-laws’ is made even more difficult when she and her husband are unable to conceive. In a deftly articulated narrative recounting, the reader witnesses the strained affection she shares with her mother-in-law, and although never explicitly mentioned, one cannot help but note the profound, almost existential sorrow that fills her psyche. Yet she is stoic, and comports herself with an endearing and deferential equanimity.

With the passing of his wife — and along with her the luxury of his prior aloofness — the old man finds himself untethered from the routine comfort his earlier domestic life had provided him. He realises his days are growing short and is beset with the anxiety of providing for his daughter-in-law after he, too, must eventually leave her. With a supremely light touch, the narrative portrays him as a man called upon to shed the accreted layers of his earlier disinvolvement and to begin, in his old age, to come to terms with new responsibilities and hitherto unacknowledged emotional priorities.

In a series of feints and misstarts, the two protagonists circle about each other’s most deep-seated and painful concerns, producing in one another a new domain of anguish before achieving the ease and equilibrium they so poignantly seek. The subject matter here is delicate and elusive — and, to the best of my knowledge, entirely unprecedented in modern Urdu prose fiction — yet Hasan Manzar’s narrative neither intrudes nor overstates. The reader is shown the transformations of the two characters as much by what is not said as by what is.

‘The Drizzle’ revisits the motif of inner transformation with great subtlety and power. Its narrative texture has the feel of austere elegance, at once eloquent and shy. A moment of discovery in which pretensions drop away from the self and one feels magically light and unencumbered, but nonetheless quite privileged and maybe even thankful.

Miss Kamariya, a devout young Malay Muslim woman from the village of Kedah, works as a maid in the household of a certain “Madame” who lives in the city. Bulan Puasa — i.e., Eid al-Fitr — is only days away and Miss Kamariya, who is fasting, has planned to celebrate it with her family in her village. Her earlier enthusiasm about the prospect of returning home has considerably dampened as she discovers to her disappointment that the gold necklace, which she had bought after much thrift and economy to show herself off a bit to her village friends, is missing. Although she has no proof, she nonetheless suspects the teenage Minachi, who comes a couple of times a week to do Madame’s laundry. Suspicion comes easily enough: “Minachi was a Ceylonese Tamil and, what is worse, a non-Muslim, and a Hindu to boot.”

To have her produce the necklace, Kamariya thinks up an eloquent ruse: she tells Minachi she has asked the bomoh — the Malay medicine man — back in her village to use a spell to flush out the thief, and to make doubly sure she has also asked her father to have Bachaan Yasin done to find the thief. But Minachi plays the innocent, which only convinces Kamariya that she is not only a thief but, indeed, a habitual thief.

Minachi had stolen the necklace all right. Eventually, though, she restores it to its rightful owner. She says she had a dream in which she was shown where the necklace lay, and leads Kamariya to it. Quite a ruse, but nonetheless one which results in some minimal measure of face-saving for the repentant. But the girl has clearly lost the trust of the family. She has plummeted so far down in their eyes that her presence keeps them on their guard, forever watchful and suspecting. Madame is even thinking of firing her. By contrast, Kamariya’s own reaction is pleasantly unexpected. What if Minachi did steal the necklace? The important thing was that the light of conscience hadn’t entirely died out in her. She could feel another person’s unhappiness and sense of loss, and was capable of reflection and transformation.

But eventually it is rather Kamariya’s transformation from a suspecting individual into one trusting and full of compassion that the writer — I’m strongly inclined to believe — wants to underscore. The palpable proof of this comes when Kamariya returns from her vacation, bringing gifts for her employer’s family. After she doles them out, she asks:

“‘Minachi come Madame?’

‘Yes,’ Madame replied, shaking her head. ‘But I am thinking of firing her. Now that you are back, do look for another washing girl.’

‘Why Madame?’ Kamariya asked, astonished. ‘I have brought a present for her, too.’ ‘Because she is a thief. She is not a good girl.’

‘No, Madame, Minachi no thief. She is good girl.’ Kamariya’s face was perfectly calm.”

Madame is nonplused. Kamariya is a strange girl, she concludes. Kamariya thinks quietly for a while and then says in a halting voice, “She did steal, but how can she become a bad girl by just one such act? She still has fear in her heart.”

What these stories demonstrate — and amply — is that we are dealing here with a writer who is ever vigilant to let his microscopic eye spot stories in the most mundane and commonplace. Eventually his deep human compassion turns the ordinary into an act of sublimity and grace.