Reading Naiyer Masud’s stories can make you look down upon the novel as a genre. Don’t get startled. The emphasis is on the verb can. It does not turn you against the most popular literary art form of the 20th century. The thing is that Masud is perhaps one of those rare short story writers of Urdu, if not the only one, who creates fiction with a sense of timelessness. Yes, he creates fiction, and there is nothing oxymoronic about it. Time in his stories exists on the textual plane, but remains nonexistent on the level of narration. He writes pure fiction, as if weaving dream after dream, shunning nightmare after nightmare (the order can be reversed depending on who is reading his fascinating tales). He does so using uncomplicated diction, and yet, the wheels-within-wheels ambience of his stories constantly keeps the reader on his toes, as it were.

Now imagine the difficulty if one were to try and translate Masud’s stories into another language. What is the difficulty? Answer: translating a Naiyer Masud piece of fiction is not just a scholarly attempt at transferring it from one language to another, but to create the existence of a character and the atmosphere of a certain place, the way he does in Urdu, requires a fair degree of creativity on the part of the translator.

Naiyer Masud: Collected Stories, edited and translated by Muhammad Umar Memon, is a bold undertaking. Bold, because Memon confesses in the introduction to the book that working closely with the writer’s fictional world, he is nowhere close to its meaning than he was more than 25 years back. He goes on to argue that meaning is to do with the domain of logic, discursive reason, praxis and ego, and infers that his short stories are preoccupied with being, to be, and not so much to mean. One couldn’t agree more. However, his inclusion of ‘ego’ in the same category while describing meaning is a bit strange, because the one thing that he and his co-translators do very well while translating Masud’s writings is that they never, perhaps subconsciously, lose sight of the writer’s ego. Here’s why.

“As soon as the old gentleman left, the atmosphere of the room changed and peals of laughter rang out again and again. While they were all talking, Aunt and I began to argue about what the date was that day. As we debated back and forth, the others looked on with keen interest. Aunt simply couldn’t be convinced. From where we sat, I could see the corner of a calendar that hung in a room next to the veranda. Long ago, a relative had drawn it up for us. With it, one could tell the date of any day in any year. But this took a long time and one had to do several lengthy calculations. Eager to prove our cases, we got up to examine this calendar. Both of us entered the room together. But as soon as we were behind the door we clung to each other convulsively and almost sank to the floor. Then, just as abruptly, we got up and went out. The little girl’s mother asked us if we had decided who was right, but just then there was some laughter, and then some more. Aunt was looking pale. Anyone coming in on us at that moment would undoubtedly have assumed that we had just come out of the room after spending quite a long time together. That day I successfully finished the task I had mishandled twice before and returned home even later than the previous night. Everybody was in bed, so I also went in and lay down. From the moment that Aunt had gotten up from the bed and come towards me to compare heights, to the time we had entered the room with the millennium calendar, I hadn’t given much thought to how she might be feeling.” — Excerpt from the book

In the realm of philosophy, ego mediates between the conscious and the unconscious. In the process, personal identity takes shape, whatever shape that may be. Masud’s protagonists and the situations they find themselves in function pretty much the same way. The aspect of being is constantly tested as characters oscillate between the conscious and the unconscious, taking the reader on a magic carpet which flies in the air as long as the reader wants it to. If the mind gets titillated along the way, consider it an added bonus.

The translators convey that sense with credibility.

This can be felt from the very first set of stories ‘Seemiya’ (The Occult). The book is divided into five parts, and rightly so. These are ‘Seemiya’, ‘Essence of Camphor’, ‘The Myna from Peacock Garden’, ‘Ganjefa’ and three miscellaneous pieces, and none is more challenging in terms of translation than the first part — for the same reason mentioned by Memon in his introduction.

Mind you, it all begins with a story, ‘Obscure Domains of Fear and Desire’, that more or less contains the recurrent inanimate characters in Masud’s stories — architectural space and obscurity of desire. (They act as living beings because the narrator, or whoever the protagonist in the story is, interacts with them as if they are flesh and blood, as if they have feelings and are prone to making mistakes.) This obscurity shrouds all of the writer’s work, and the book does its level best to keep it shrouded.

But then there are subtleties that Masud’s stories brim with — subtleties pertaining to interchangeability of characters. For example, children feature in a decent number of his stories. It signifies the role memory plays in our lives. The past that children tend to remember often haunts them in the form of nightmares, outweighing the happy remembrances with some distance. And this distance is something that Memon and his colleagues have captured very intelligently, especially in ‘The Colour of Nothingness’ and ‘The Occult’.

With reference to the syntactical structure, Aditya Behl’s effort deserves a special mention. His translation of ‘Sultan Muzaffar’s Chronicler of Events’ does justice to the form of Masud’s ambient set-up, because visualising the intriguing goings-on in it, the reader may liken it to a snippet from art-house cinema. The English version of the piece has kept the visual appeal of the events pretty much intact. The following example may vindicate the observation: “He tied the woman tightly by her shoulders and waist. I heard the low clink of jewellery, then I saw the ropes become taut, but then my gaze fell on the ramparts. The cloud of sand appeared to be resting on top of the rampart, the noise of arrows was louder than the noise of the wind, and the rising and falling bunches of feathers behind the cloud could not be seen clearly. I looked at the roof again. The Sultan was standing there alone.”

For all admirers of Naiyer Masud, the collection is recommended. And all those who have never read him, they have no idea what they are missing out on.

The reviewer is a Dawn staff member.

Naiyer Masud: Collected Stories
(SHORT STORIES)
Edited and translated by
Muhammad Umar Memon
Penguin Books, India
ISBN 978-0670088454
662pp.