MUSHTAQ Ahmed Yous­ufi’s outstanding book Aab-e-Gum is now also available in English translation. Translated by Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmad, it has been published by Random House, India, under the title Mirages of the Mind.

The very fact that this book has been translated in another language should come to us as a surprise as it is among those literary works which appear to be untranslatable. Seen from the point of view of a translator, the book should come as a great challenge. Generally speaking, translating a piece of humourous writing is a risky job. There is always a chance that in the process of translation, many of the linguistic subtleties and fine nuances will be lost. This risk is much more in the case of Yousufi’s writings. The reason is that Yousufi’s prose is enriched with many tones and subtle linguistic twists which impart a delicacy and depth to his humour. Even from a translator well-versed in his job, we can expect only a certain extent of these qualities in the translation.

However, the present book has the advantage of not relying, for its meaningfulness, on humour alone. More than that, it carries with it the experience of Partition in a novel way, which has imparted to it a unique meaningfulness. In fact, this book should first be read as a novel in which two uprooted souls are seen undergoing the painful experience of migration. Of these two souls, one carries the name Qibla; the other is Basharat. The tragedy of these two souls lies in their failure to make adjustments with the changed geo-social environment in which they were fated to live after their migration.

How ironic that I am calling the story of these two souls a tragedy when they both appear in the book as comic characters, provoking the readers to laugh heartily at every step taken by them; also, the book is famous for being a masterpiece of humourous writing in Urdu.

Nikolai Gogol comes to my rescue at this point. I am reminded of his unique novel Dead Souls, a hilarious book. But as Gogol read it aloud to Pushkin, he grew more and more gloomy and at last cried out “God, what a sad country Russia is.” And Gogol was seen saying, “Everything I laughed at became sad.” While reading the chapter ‘Havaili’ we laugh at Qibla’s every gesture. But at the end we become silent and grow sad.

Here we see the tragic fall of a man possessed with a domineering personality. He is acutely conscious of the fact that times have changed. But he refuses to change — come what may, he must keep his head high. And when he feels that he has lost the grace he possessed, he withdraws into himself and eventually bids goodbye to this damned world.

The other soul Basharat, who happens to be his son-in-law, manages to reconcile with changed times. But after the sudden death of his wife “he experienced a sharp pang of nostalgia and began to miss his original city Kanpur.” Now he is living exclusively in the past, remembering things forgotten.

But his return to his own city has a great shock in store for him. Thirty-five years of nostalgia collapses and everything looks desolate and rundown. We find him saying, “When I saw my house I was shocked, ‘My God, that is what we lived in, and more than that, we loved it.’”

And now we find the poor soul oscillating in his imagination between Kanpur and Karachi. We get a graphic depiction of the two cities as seen and experienced by him, a journey in his past vis-à-vis his life in Karachi.

However, he finds some consolation in the company of his old friend, Mullah Aasi. And now we have an introduction to the third character of this novel. Mullah Aasi had chosen at the time of Partition not to leave his own soil. What happened to him during the post-Partition years, how did he say goodbye to his own religion and become a Buddhist, and in the end, why was he left alone with his pigeons?

But Mullah Aasi does not live long to provide company to Basharat. He has a heart attack and dies, leaving behind a will that “all my assets should be sold at auction so that a trust can be established for my pigeons. Care should be taken that no trustee eats meat. Also, please don’t bury me in Kanpur. Lay me next to my mother in Lahore.” The novel comes to an end at this point. The chapter that follows is a fine piece of humour but does not qualify to form a part of the novel. From this I gather that Mushtaq Yousufi was not conscious to the last that he was writing a novel. Otherwise he would have himself deleted this chapter from the book.

Seen in the background of Partition literature, Aab-e-Gum stand aloof from the novels, short stories and reportages written with reference to Partition because of the unique way Yousufi employs in writing about it. How dexterously the tragic and the comic have been intertwined. How imperceptibly the laughter fades in a deep sadness.