IN ancient times astrologers had learnt to recognise auspicious moments when various planets appeared to be in configuration with each other. These rare occasions were thought to exert all kinds of influences on the tide of human affairs. Such an auspicious time seems to have occurred in the history of Urdu short story writing in the closing years of the 1930s and the early years of the 1940s when a constellation of bright stars appeared on the literary horizon. These were Krishan Chander, Saadat Hassan Manto, Ismat Chughtai and Rajinder Singh Bedi who now joins his luminous contemporaries in the club of centuries. Somewhat senior were Upendranath Ashk and Ghulam Abbas, followed closely by Balwant Singh.

A trendsetter in the real sense, Chander shot to heights of unprecedented fame, but was on a downward slope by the time Manto was at his peak. Turned into a film icon now, the real Manto is even bigger than movies can make him out to be. That his centenary was a big literary event would have offended his off-beat, anti-establishment persona. At one point in time, Manto’s name was evoked with that of Chughtai as if she was his feminine alter-ego, but Chughtai’s centenary was a lacklustre affair, at least in Pakistan. And now we come to Bedi’s centenary.

Bedi was the last of these larger-than-life figures to emerge but he was recognised as a genius from his earliest work. In a later-day interview he recounted that one of his earliest short stories was proclaimed as among the year’s best by Salahuddin Ahmed, the legendary editor of Adabi Duniya, but the young author did not even consider reprinting it while putting together his maiden collection. Dano- o-Daam, his first collection of short stories, was published from Lahore in 1940 and was well received by critics and readers alike. Born into a lower middle-class family and working as a clerk in the post office, Bedi created a niche for himself. His second collection appeared in 1942 when he was a young man, and it included ‘Girhan’, one of the most powerful short stories ever, the stark realism of a wronged woman reaching mythical dimensions. Critics like Mumtaz Shirin said that Bedi was to the Urdu short story what Chekhov was to European fiction. Today, the comparison seems unnecessary but it was apparent that Bedi was a major figure, full of empathy, who honed his craft with the milk of human kindness.

Bedi became known soon as a perfectionist and this was how he was compared with Manto when critics began pitching writers against each other. Manto was known never to miss paying back a caustic remark, even if it was an imagined one. So there is a story of how he told Bedi that you keep thinking before you put pen to paper to write a story, keep thinking while you are writing a story and go on thinking after having completed it. Bedi shot back to Manto that you never think before writing a story, don’t think while you are writing it and never think after having written it. This must have left Manto taken aback! Their paths did cross but nevertheless they followed entirely different trajectories.

Nobody could guess at that time that Manto had barely a few more years to survive and Bedi was to reach a ripe old age but his output would be reduced in volume even though he would go on to touch new heights. Partition provided Bedi with the subject of ‘Lajwanti’, one of his most poignant stories, but after Partition he moved to Bombay to become associated with the film world. The film world became the source of his livelihood but also took a heavy toll on his literary creativity. The few stories from his last period include the poignant ‘Mithun’ and ‘Aik Baap Bikao Hai’ among others. Even more remarkable, Bedi took time out to write Ek Chadar Maili Si, his only completed novel and a masterpiece in its own right.

The disc of the evening sun turning blood-red is the stark image with which the novel opens and slowly we are introduced to the disturbing realities of murder, abduction, rape and revenge in a seemingly simple Punjabi village. The tonga-wallah, who aided the rape of a young girl travelling to visit a holy site, is murdered by the girl’s brother in a chilling act of revenge. It is his wife Rano who has to bear the burden of his death and she has to face the ordeal of being married to her young brother-in-law by seeking his protection according to convention. From this gripping crisis, the tale moves on to forgiveness and redemption when the raped girl’s brother — the murderer — seeks the hand of Rano’s daughter, the girl whose father he had killed. A fable of ‘honour killing’ like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, it also shows the way out of the labyrinth of murder and revenge fed by poverty and deprivation.

In addition to his fiction, Bedi also authored a few highly unusual essays. In ‘Ainay ke Samnay’ he enters into dialogue not with his mirror image but his writing self. He reflects upon the creative process, the craft of fiction and the circumstances of his life. He penned powerful sketches of his son and writer friends like Ashk with delightful candour and wit. After his death, the script of his movie Dastak was edited by Shamsul Haq Usmani, the scholar who authored one of the best critical analyses to be written about a modern author in Bedi Nama. Bedi was well served by this scholar as he went on to compile unpublished writings in Baqiyat-e-Bedi, a volume no less remarkable for displaying the range of the distinguished writer’s vision but also his unfulfilled potential.

It now seems strange that some critics unfavourably compared Bedi’s style with that of his contemporaries. True that he did not have the poetic flights of fancy that Chander delighted in or the detached precision and exactitude of Manto, but his expression perfectly matched his choice of themes as well as his point of view. He remained free of the cloying sentimentality which mars many of Chander’s stories, or the fly-by-the-post hurriedness of Manto’s last writings. A superb craftsman, he was capable of being sensitive and humane in a unique way he had made truly his own.

Never a prolific writer, Bedi maintained a very high standard for his work and some of his stories remain unsurpassed. In one of his earliest written stories, Bhola, a young boy, is overly fond of listening to stories until one day his grandfather warns him that listening to stories during the daytime will make travellers lose their way. The nuanced story reaches its delicate end with the young boy standing with a lantern on the village road to help travellers find their way, lest they suffer because of his fondness of listening to stories. Bedi, too, is a storyteller who holds a lantern in his hand, his stories a patch of light in the face of darkness.