REGRETTABLY, as with Hasan Manzar, but perhaps to a greater degree, the conspicuous absence of Ikramullah from contemporary Urdu critical discourse is both striking and baffling. And yet he is a major writer in Pakistan today, with a substantial body of writing: two collections of short stories, Jangal (Forest) and Badalte Qaalib (Shifting Shapes); a collection of three short stories and three novellas, Baar-e Digar (A Second Time); a collection of four novellas, Sawa Neze par Suraj (Under the Scorching Sun); a novella, Gurg-e Shab (Nocturnal Wolf); and, more recently, a novel, Saa’e ki Aavaaz (The Shadow Speaks).

This may seem meager capital to show for over half a century of literary engagement, but Ikramullah, though not unsociable, is nonetheless an exceptionally private person who seems to be rarely affected by the desire to conform to, or even to marginally satisfy, what the world might expect of him. He writes for himself and, as Jorge Luis Borges once remarked, “perhaps for a few personal friends.” When Borges’ first book, A Universal History of Infamy, sold only 37 copies, he wanted to find those buyers to apologise for the book and thank them. He would have been content had only 17, why, had even only seven copies been sold. At least those people were real. They each had a face and lived on a particular street. But the millions across the world who would read him in umpteen languages were “too vast ... for the imagination to grasp.” Now Borges may be exaggerating or joking (he had a great sense of humour and loved a dash of spicy jokes even in the midst of serious conversations), but there is plenty of substance in his remark, though it may puzzle our mundane sensibilities.

I mention Borges to underscore a capacity to blot out the world and concentrate on writing — a capacity found in many good writers, pre-eminently in William Faulkner, who wrote The Sound and the Fury five separate times but felt the book “was still not complete … I couldn’t leave it alone, and I never could tell it right, though I tried hard and would like to try again, though I’d probably fail again.”

Ikramullah may or may not work as hard as re-writing a piece four or five times over, or be as timid as Borges, but he does share with many true writers the ability not to involve himself too much with the way business gets done in the publishing world, or care for the opinion of his reader or critic. He prefers to keep his eyes totally focused on the work, exuding a stout sense of autonomy, a gritty self-sufficiency.

Penguin will be publishing translations of two of his novellas, Regret (Pashemaani) and Out of Sight (Aankh Ojhal), in a single volume in January 2015. When the editor asked me for a photo of the author and an endorsement to go before the blurb on the back cover, to conform to the format of Penguin Modern Classics, I found myself in a fix. I couldn’t find anything on Ikramullah in English except a few paragraphs by Salim-ur-Rahman on the Badalte Qaalib collection and a few comments of Salim Akhtar and Muhammad Khalid Akhtar in Urdu, which appeared as blurbs for the author’s first collection of short stories, Jangal, and the novella Gurg-e Shab. But shouldn’t I perhaps write to him for these? I was hesitant — because although he knew that Faruq Hassan and I had been translating his stories since the mid-1990s, he never evinced interest in our enterprise or asked about its progress — a sort of be-niyaazi he shares, in my experience, with at least one other Urdu writer, Naiyer Masud.

Anyway, I overcame my diffidence and contacted him by e-mail through a friend of his. Some time later I received the following: “Dear Mr. Memon, I am not in favour of printing an author’s photograph on the book. No comments of famous writers are presently available. I do not preserve such writings.” So that was that! I felt like an intruder, but his detachment was hardly a reason to take umbrage. That I later did find a photo and an endorsement was thanks to Salim-ur-Rahman. Which, of course, does not change the fact that very little has been written about Ikramullah’s work and he is the type of person who doesn’t go after visibility or publicity.

Regret and Out of Sight do “skilfully evoke the long shadow cast by the violence of Partition”; however, Partition, here, exists only as a vague if pervasive presence. They evoke much more than just its effects, horrible though they were and continue to be so to this day in unexpected transmutations. Ikramullah, who needs an expansive canvas to give full rein to his tremendous narrative skills, has the rare ability to bring to life a whole period, a manner of living, by his microscopic attention to the minutest, fleeting detail. He captures the slightest vibrations of feeling and unarticulated thought with remarkable precision, while keeping himself at an emotional distance from the events. It is not just Partition, or any specific event, that may be identified as the terminal intent of either work, but rather time itself and the process by which lives unfold and individual histories are written through life’s meandering course before being erased from memory as the main actors exit the scene.

We encounter “nearly all the distinct facets of modern Urdu fiction in Ikramullah’s stories,” writes Salim-ur-Rahman, “menacing cityscapes, proliferating violence, postures of despair, instances of magic realism and examples of straightforward realistic narration.” But, as often, he also deals head-on with tabooed subjects: the plight of people who eke out a difficult life on the margins of society as they slosh through the confounding maze of their own confused impulses and ravaged psyches. In Out of Sight he writes about the Ahmadis, a subject that Urdu fiction has coyly bypassed, but the subtext tells a story of capitalist greed played out against the background of craftily calibrated sectarian machinations.

In an earlier novella, Gurg-e Shab, banned by the censor for “obscenity,” Ikramullah delves into the convoluted mindscape of an offspring of incest and the latter’s desperate attempts to shake off the devastating psychological effects of his illegitimate birth — rather like Blanca Williams in Abdullah Hussein’s debut short story ‘Naddi’ (The Brook), a child abandoned one cold morning by the side of the street — and his eventual failure. While Blanca finds peace in the cascading waters of Niagara Falls, Zafar goes through various frightening stages of madness. The author’s skilful management of shifts between third- and first-person narrators uncovers the inner workings of Zafar’s troubled mind with intensity as awesome as it is tragic. The consciousness of being a ‘bastard’ wrecks his life, so much so that his longing for female love is cruelly thwarted by his own inability to engage with women physically. While the centre stage is occupied by the protagonist’s cerebral trauma, the narrative is as much a story of his mother who exists only on the outer fringes of the work. In a deft treatment of the ancillary subject of how young women are too often married off to old men for money or other advantage, only to remain deprived of sexual gratification and tender love, the author posits a parallel between Zafar’s mother and his own lover, the stunningly beautiful Rehana.

The mother, dissatisfied with her husband, established sexual relations with her own step-son, (Zafar’s older step-brother who is actually his biological father). Likewise Rehana — the young wife yoked to the outrageously rich and atrociously revolting A.B. Shaikh — was only too willing to sleep with Zafar. When their two bodies come together, the raging conflicts in Zafar’s mind take over and affect his ability to slake Rehana’s thirst or his own. In a strange twist of logic — or poetic justice — the mother’s success in finding gratification apart from the marital bed dooms her own son who is unable to provide the same gratification to the woman he so desires.

In the novella Under the Scorching Sun, the author takes on another subject that has attracted scant attention in Urdu fiction: the realisation of the onset of love between two males. Homosexual or gay love seems almost too loud to describe the hesitant tender feeling of mutual attraction, vague but unmistakable, that exists between the delicate youthful Chooza and his friend Boom. Too diffident to articulate, both unerringly sense something different in their relationship. The reader can only imagine how it would have turned out had Chooza lived, but he died too soon. It is as if Ikramullah stopped short of contemplating the future course of this relationship, as if hesitant to sully with raw passion the pristine affection, the intangible bond between the two soulmates. For instance, just before Chooza’s death:

“‘Chooze!’ Boom said, repeating the time-worn phrase for the millionth time, as if he was the first man on the planet Earth to discover and divulge one of nature’s profound secrets.

‘Yes?’

‘Would you mind if I told you something?’

‘Go on.’

‘I don’t know why, I’m deeply in love with you, even though I didn’t wish it.’

‘I know. I know why. … There was this desolate desert, as desolate as deserts can be; there was this scorching sun, as scorching as the sun always is; there was this arduous journey into the interminable unknown, as arduous journeys into the interminable unknown always are; there was this crashing laughter, as the crash of jeering laughter always is; and two wayfarers in the bleak vastness of the desert — you and me. That’s all!’

‘That’s all?’

‘Yes … that’s all!’

As he uttered those words, Chooza raised his feverish, red-hot hand and touched it to Boom’s face. Boom held it and let it stay there, and then he kissed it ever so gently and put it on his breast. The two sat there for the longest time, immobile, silent, lost. The sensation of Boom’s throbbing heart travelled through Chooza’s hand and continued to be absorbed by his body, penetrating deep into his being.”

These, by no means, exhaust Ikramullah’s versatility. Short stories such as ‘Jungal’ and ‘Picnic’ speak of a writer who is not afraid to experiment with less traditional forms of narration. Though neither narrative has any discernible plot, the intensity of observation and remarkable focus on detail saves them from degenerating into the uninspiring tenor of much of our contemporary symbolic or abstract fiction.

Ikramullah, in Salim-ur-Rahman’s apt words, “does not believe in yielding to pressures applied either by the officialdom or the literary establishment.” And, if for no other reason, he should be read and discussed for “offending the effete sensibilities of the Pakistani bourgeoisie …”