LAST week I found myself participating in a literary function held in honour of a senior fiction writer who hitherto has hardly attracted the attention of any critic, or any of those intellectuals who are generally seen engaged in heated discussions in respect of contemporary writing. And that has been in spite of the fact that this writer, Ikramullah, is a known fiction writer having to his credit a number of novels, novellas, and short stories. It is surely a rare moment when a literary group thinks of arranging a function in his honour, which was held at Bagh-i-Jinnah.

I can well understand the reason for this indifference of our literary world to this writer. Ikramullah stands aloof away from the literary crowd around him; he is seen happy in his seclusion, attending literary functions only on special occasions. And, on those occasions, he hardly cares to mix freely with the writers gathered there. He enjoys moving with perfect ease within the limited circle of his close friends. Controversies among writers, whether they are ideological or purely literary, hardly attract him. The literary world, too, pays him in the same coin.

We are indebted to the publishers, who have now brought out a collection of his two novellas under the title Regret (Pashemaani) in English. These two novellas have been translated by the late Raja Faruq Hassan and Professor Muhammad Umar Memon. It was a bolt from the blue. Our literary world felt thunderstruck. How did it happen that the fiction writer treated so indifferently in the Urdu circle attracted the attention of publishers such as Penguin?

In fact the two Pakistani writers, Memon and Faruq Hasan, settled in the US and Canada are responsible for the event — they deserve full credit for that. They were impressed by Ikramullah’s writings. They chose to translate his selected works in English and introduce him to a Western readership.

So one fine morning Ikramullah awoke early and found to his surprise that the goddess of fame has turned kind to him. A number of intellectuals and writers had gathered in the cosmopolitan club. They had come to celebrate the occasion and to pay compliments to the celebrated novelist.

Ikramullah is primarily a novelist. His short stories are a secondary addition to his novels. We first heard his name when his novel Gurg-i-Shab (Nocturnal Wolf) was banned by censorship authorities as it was judged by them as being obscene.

I think Ikramullah is at his best in his short novels. Two such fine works are at this moment before me. They bear the titles Kitna Pani and Pashemaani. They form parts of the collection of four novellas published under the title Sawa Neze Par Suraj. Kitna Pani: what a fine piece of fiction. The novella starts with the return of the young native to his city Lahore. How excited is Ramaish to return to his Lahore. Carrying with him a sense of nostalgia he is passing through the streets and roads of Lahore. How amazed he is to find that the streets, lanes, markets, street corners, trees and buildings are still in the same shape. The whole city comes alive to us, the readers. The description of the city is realistic even in the minutest of details.

Ikramullah is a realist. While describing things he never cares to be romantic. He excels in depicting things as they actually are. This exactness of description brings in its wake a romance of its own kind. This lively description carries us back to war-time India.

As the next novella Pashemaani starts we are slowly transported to the partition of India. But in contradiction to Partition literature soaked in sentimentality, Ikramullah, while depicting such situations, remains calm and sober never allowing himself to fall victim to cheap sentimentality. The very restraint on his part brings out the grimness of the situation in a more effective way. Such is the art of this novelist.