There are many female literary giants in Urdu fiction: Ismat Chughtai, Qurratulain Hyder, Hijab Imtiaz Ali, Khadija Mastoor, Hajra Masroor, Khalida Husain and Jeelani Bano, to name a few. However, there are very few women in the recent crop of fiction writers. It is therefore remarkable that Saima Iram has published her first collection of short stories Shah Moosh aur Doosri Kahaniyan (Karachi: Aj Publications 2016) and drawn our attention to her work. I am singling her out as a woman writer not because she is unique in a space dominated by men, but because she strikes me as having a voice which stands out; she speaks for both men and women.

The collection comprises of six stories. Each explores a different subject, but there is a common theme running through them: empathy with those who suffer, even if the suffering is a result of their own weaknesses. The narrative is compelling and the reader is drawn into the flow of words, skimming page after page, devouring details that the narrator carefully piles on — artfully heading towards a crescendo.

Although I enjoyed all the stories my favorite were ‘Daghdar’ and ‘Choti Pahalwan’, so I will examine them first. ‘Daghdar’ is about a single working woman, moderately successful, who lives alone in a house in a middle-class neighborhood. She has a car, which she drives and sometimes cleans, to the consternation of her neighbors; women are never seen washing cars. There is gossip about how she manages to rent the house, her quotidian activities are perceived as scandalous, and even her trash is scrutinised; found empty cigarette packs are giveaways that she smokes. All of this can perhaps be expected in a story about a single woman. However, the events which unfold as the story gains momentum are uncanny. The story’s title ‘Daghdar’ (scarred) is understood in an unusual twist — a mark of Iram’s talent as a writer who gets under the skin of her characters.

A new female voice in Urdu writing, Saima Iram holds her own with stories that are hard-hitting and reflective of contemporary social realities

In ‘Choti Pahalwan’, Iram asks the reader to consider notions of masculinity and its associations with violence. We are first introduced to Qasim, a young low-caste boy, whose success in school encourages his father to send him away from the village for further studies. He rents a room above Baba Gujjar’s milk and ghee shop, which for some unexplained reason is called Choti Pahalwan’s shop. The Baba, kind but distant, is an enigma to Qasim. Qasim stays on at Baba’s much longer than other tenants because he wants to finish his degree and get a job. People cast aspersions on his character, insinuating that he is in a homosexual relationship with Baba. A bewildered Qasim is consoled by Baba, who soothes him by saying that the slur is directed at him.

The two become close after this incident. Qasim is emboldened to ask Baba about Choti Pahalwan: who was he? We are told that Choti was born after many prayers, and was pledged to the Sufi saint by whose grace he was conceived. As a child he stayed close to his mother’s side. His mother dressed him in girlish clothing; she even braided his long hair. He grew up to be a gentle soul with, ostensibly, more feminine than masculine traits. He did not participate in the rough teenage games associated with puberty. He was regarded as ‘queer’. In the month of Muharram, when processions were carried out and religious tensions were running high, the local juloos (mourning procession) was viciously attacked by a certain gang. No one dared to rescue them, but Choti Pahalwan wielding a heavy stick came to the defense of the juloos participants. He ripped his clothes off and faced the attackers. The attackers dispersed. Choti Pahalwan threw away the baton and was never seen again.

The stick or baton was now in the possession of Baba Gujjar. I was captivated by the character of Choti Pahalwan, but confused about the connection between Baba Gujjar and Choti. When I discussed this particular story with Iram she said, “gruesome acts of violence and brutality committed in the name of religion are also a manifestation of innate human weaknesses. Choti Pahalwan and Baba Gujjar were not homosexuals but were perceived as ‘queer’ because they were gentle, peace-loving souls. I found the story to have mystical undertones. The disappearance of Choti Pahalwan and the passing of the baton to Baba Gujjar point in that direction.”

Iram’s prose style follows a trend of mixed vocabulary which has trickled into the literary languages of the subcontinent (although I can only vouch for those I know), which is interesting from the standpoint of the literary culture of these languages. Her Urdu is not the chaste literary Urdu which bears the stamp of a reified Persianate cultural vocabulary.

Iram’s prose style follows a trend of mixed vocabulary which has trickled into the literary languages of the subcontinent (although I can only vouch for those I know), which is interesting from the standpoint of the literary culture of these languages. Her Urdu is not the chaste literary Urdu which bears the stamp of a reified Persianate cultural vocabulary. Her language is earthy — liberally sprinkled with Punjabi dialect and slang words. Iram’s Urdu adopts Punjabi unreservedly. I admit that it brings flavour to her prose, but it is flavour at the cost of felicity. She takes recourse to Punjabi slang when faced with writing about something sexually explicit. Languages are culture specific; culture is organically implicated in the language. Urdu has a syntactical structure that is for hearing pleasure. The baroque, or a high literary register, enhances Urdu’s aural reception.

Languages and the literatures are no longer cultural islands. There has been plenty of cross-cultural fertilisation in recent years. The effect of English has been the most intrusive. It is convenient to insert a common English word, instead of searching for an Urdu equivalent. Literary practices, too, have become muddled with all sorts of writing that one is surrounded with — notably blogs and other web-based publications. The digital has smoothed the edges of writing and publishing to the extent that only the very sharp stands out. Urdu literature is not isolated from the effects of language crossing. Why should it be treated as a bastion of purity, when Urdu itself is a syncretic language? I think the question goes beyond linguistic purity. The difference between spoken and written language narrows when dialogue enters the narrative. Iram’s narrative style wavers between the common and the literary language. Good writing revels in elegance, a quality lacking in her prose. Although she has been writing poetry for some years, she has taken to fiction only recently. Her first story was published by Aj in 2013. The unevenness of her prose can be remedied with careful editing.

Realism in fiction has been traversed through myriad paths: magical, literary, allegorical and so on. Iram’s approach is vested in the psyche of her characters. The title story ‘Shah Moosh’ plays on the nervous breakdown of the protagonist, who begins to see rats in the most unlikely places. In ‘Sirf ek Cigarette’, the main character’s cravings lead him to see arms and legs morph into cigarettes. These stories are gripping because their complicated trajectories carry the reader along to the end — the end, however, is unsatisfactory. Both stories struck me as familiar in terms of the theme or idea. ‘Sirf ek Cigarette’ reminds one of eminent modernist fiction writer Balraj Manra’s short story ‘Maachis’ (matchbox). In ‘Maachis’, the protagonist is searching for a matchbox to light a cigarette at 2am; wandering the neighbourhood to look for a match, he gets into trouble with the police. He ends up without a matchbox. Manra’s story, written more than 40 years ago, was groundbreaking in its unconventional subject matter and hard-hitting brevity. Iram’s story incorporates many incidents which reflect contemporary social realities, such as workplace tensions, marital discord and so on. Her story becomes unwieldy.

To get back to the point I raised at the beginning: empathy with Iram’s characters. Empathy is to connect, to feel for another as one would for one’s own. Iram’s protagonists are not exactly likeable. They are flawed. They live in a corrupt world and are not impervious to the corruption around them. But they are vulnerable; that is what opens them up to the reader and engenders empathy. Iram’s fiction brings us together to think about ourselves as a whole.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, June 5th, 2016