IT is rare for people to opt out of the spotlight once they have earned public recognition for having touched great heights in any field. On the flip side, it is routine for people to cling to their five minutes of fame and do their best to stretch it for as long they can. The rare soul that she was in her writings and in her life at large, Hajra Masroor opted for the former.

For someone who rubbed shoulders with the likes of Qurratulain Hyder and who, together with her sister Khadija Mastoor, was considered part of the next wave of literary heavyweights after Rashid Jahan and Ismat Chughtai, it could not have been easy for Masroor to bid farewell to the spotlight when it was getting ready to focus just about exclusively on her. It does shed light on her strong character, but it was a loss to the world of Urdu fiction that was deprived of a majestic voice that articulated things that a creative and attentive eye saw around her.

The book in hand, Sab Afsanay Mairay, is a collection of Masroor’s short stories and brings together her entire career as a writer of enviable energy. Though the short stories are actually short — some of them very short — characterisation is one of the key strengths indicating the writer’s keen observation of life in all its colours, shades and hues.

Human relationships — of all the three possible varieties; man-woman, woman-woman and man-man — come across as one element that never stopped fascinating Masroor. From Tazeen (‘Khaak’) to Dorothy (‘Teesri Manzil’), from Gullu Mian (‘Moul Toul’) to Aapa (‘Raakh’), from Qudsia (‘Aurat’) to Nannay Mian (‘Nannay Mian’), and from Khan (‘Karobar’) to Zohra (‘Kuttay’), every single character comes alive when treated with Masroor’s pen.

And she does so with an amazingly minimalist approach. Sometimes the narrative doesn’t even mention the character for the better part of the story and yet when it crops up in the tale, readers would feel as if they have known him or her all their life. Mahpara Jaan (‘Aaqbat’) and Lali (‘Chand ki Doosri Taraf’) are wonderful examples of such an approach. This almost silent characterisation is a remarkable trait and explains why Masroor earned the literary spotlight and critical acclaim the way she did. Then there are characters who have no names as the stories have been moulded in a first-person singular narrative. There is absolutely nothing autobiographical about such characters for the technique has been used in a variety of situations and is not even gender-specific. Masroor’s stories are reflective of creativity in its simplest, unadulterated form. And yet they are never abstract or outlandish. That is the beauty of them.

The collection has a total of 61 short stories that initially comprised six independent collections when they were first published. They have now been put together along with six other write-ups on Masroor, including one by the legendary Patras Bukhari.

The collection — quite a tome it is — brings to fore the art and craft of Masroor which is bound to captivate even the most impassive reader, but what it has done beyond that is equally significant, if not more. One can see the growth of Masroor as a writer over a quarter of a century.

The sequence in which the collection carries the stories is not quite an efficient help in this regard as the stories have been published in reverse order; from the latest to the earliest. Such an order does have its merits as one gets to taste the most mature writings first rather than the slapdash efforts of youth. But read it the other way round and one sees the writer evolving and traversing the path much like it happened in real time. This can also be seen through the prism of a chapter at the end of the book which carries a critique of most of Masroor’s work by the noted and respected Mumtaz Shirin. The writer and the critic were poles apart as they belonged to schools of thought that, to say the least, were divergent. Yet, in the words of Masroor, she thought it fit enough to include the chapter “because Shirin was one critic in love with fiction to the extent that she crossed the ideological barrier” whenever she saw merit on display.

Shirin sees the journey divided into three stages. In the first stage, Masroor seems bent upon exposing the bitter realities of life. In the second stage the stories get overly reflective of her leaning towards the Progressive Writers Movement. In the final phase, says Shireen, Masroor comes across as having shed the Progressive tag and treats life in a balanced manner much as she was doing in the first phase, albeit with a bit more maturity and finesse.

This is an assessment that discernible readers can themselves make if they start off with the last story and move to the first. That experience alone is testimony to the fact that Masroor’s literary journey was a linear one, moving forward and upward. It never went round in circles. It never got repetitive either in terms of subjects or treatment. This only amplifies the loss of Urdu fiction when Masroor moved away from the scene as there is nothing in her latter-day stories to suggest that she was through with her creative output.

The maturity that comes with age is reflected in terms of the storylines, but what remained unaffected was her signature treatment of the subjects she chose to deal with in any of her three phases. There is a touch of Maupassant about her stories for the narrative does have a twist in the tale more often than not. One can go on treating oneself to a fascinating climax in story after story in the collection; 61 times in all.

Box

A charm of her own

OTHER than the storyline, the characterisation and the narrative, Hajra Masroor’s short stories have an additional charm: expression that captures inherent irony. Masroor’s metaphors and similes are all her very own and communicate with the readers as only they can. Here is a random sampling:

The writer is a Dawn staff member.

Sab Afsanay Mairay

(SHORT STORIES)

By Hajra Masroor

Sang-e-Meel, Lahore

ISBN 978-9693528466

584pp.