My trip to Lahore in November 2015 for the Faiz Peace Festival gave me the opportunity to meet several younger Urdu writers and poets. I brought their books back with me and have spent many hours of enjoyable, thoughtful reading.

Among this pile is a slim but eye-catching turquoise-coloured book titled Qaim Deen. It is a collection of short stories by Ali Akbar Natiq published by Oxford University Press in 2012. The title doesn’t reveal much at first, but after you read the eponymous story, the illustration on the book’s cover begins to captivate. It is a painting of an old man with a flowing white beard that tails off in the shape of a snake. The man is chained to a tree, secured with a heavy lock; waves of water appear to be rising up the flowing beard. The painting looks like an illustration from a dastan. The blurb at the back tells us that the writer is an exponent of realism in Urdu fiction.

After reading his stories I understood that Natiq’s realism is very different from that of the Progressive Writers’ fictional realism, which dominated Urdu literature in the late 1930s and ’40s. I am sure that readers of this column are aware of the great names of Progressive fiction, but I will name them here nonetheless to refresh in readers’ minds the approach to realism taken by the Progressives: Krishan Chander, Ismat Chughtai, Rajinder Singh Bedi and Saadat Hasan Manto are the big names associated not only with Progressivism but also with Urdu fiction itself. The ideology-driven, Marxist-Progressive writing wore out and gave way to more creative ways of describing experiences and telling stories. Symbolism in varying degrees was used to mediate reality; the mythic style of storytelling was invoked to great effect. Some writers produced a narrative so artfully plain that it touched readers to the core.

Ali Akbar Natiq’s writings are his attempt to portray life as it is lived, with all its injustice, cruelty, unfriendliness, pretence, and dishonesty

Natiq’s fiction struck me as an impressive conflation of the mythic with the present reality. The narrator’s voice is like a storyteller’s. It is matter-of-fact and unhurried. The narrator sets the pace to keep the listener/reader eager to know what happens next. Natiq’s stories have a wide range — from rural Punjab to the burning sands of Saudi Arabia, from Partition to present times. He stays close to experiential reality, although for those of us unfamiliar with the culture of rural Punjab or the lives of blue-collar workers in Saudi Arabia, some of the stories evoke a folk tale aura.

I will begin with a summary of the title story, ‘Qaim Deen’, since I have already touched upon its illustration on the book’s cover. Qaim, known as Qimma to his friends, is a daredevil dealer in cattle stolen from across the border. He crosses the frothing Sutlej River, makes his way through dense jungles infested with pythons and other deadly animals, steals cattle and herds them across the river. He is generous with his earnings, distributing to all and sundry without a care of what the future may hold. During the great flood, he risks his life repeatedly to rescue drowning villagers. He is bold and courageous. Rangers on both sides of the border want to curb this illegal trade as it becomes embroiled with state politics. Undaunted, Qimma continues to cross the river and is caught during a raid. In police custody he is brutally tortured but does not give up the names of fellow raiders. Eventually, he is set free but loses his mind. Qimma has become violent and attacks people at random. His son keeps him chained to a cot. The chain gets heavier as Qimma gets more aggressive. Ultimately he is tied to a jujube tree in their front yard with a chain heavy enough to restrain a mad elephant. The son is away when flash floods strike the village. As the Sutlej water rises, Qimma struggles to free himself from the heavy chain. He clutches the tree trunk making desperate attempts to climb the tree but the chain pulls him down. The water keeps rising and Qimma drowns, even as his son frantically tries to get back home.

Another story, which I liked a lot, is ‘Shahabu Khalifa ka Shak’ (Shahabu Khalifa’s hesitation). The local pir of Sialkot, known as Pir Mast, has two hunting dogs, Kale and Cheetal. The dogs are as swift as cheetahs with sleek, shiny coats. They are so special that they wear silver anklets and collars studded with gold spikes. Every once in a while Pir Mast sets out on a tour with his dogs. Wherever he stops crowds of followers and admirers gather. The story’s narrator describes the dogs’ agility in hunting prey, the beauty of their movements, the highs and lows of the chase and so on. On this trip, the dogs chase a huge hare that suddenly emerges from the bushes and proves to be impossible to catch. In the passion of the hunt, Kale leaps high and is impaled on a dried babool tree branch. Pir Mast is consumed with anger and grief. He declares that he will not rest until the hare is caught. After a week of intensive search, the hare is spotted again. Cheetal chases after it. The hare disappears into a thickly planted field of sugarcane with Cheetal in hot pursuit. Hours go by and there is no sign of Cheetal. He does not answer any calls. No one is willing to go into the sugarcane plot for fear of snakes. Pir Mast is beside himself with anxiety. Eventually it is decided to cut down the sugarcane. Midway into the process they come across a huge python in a ditch. The python’s stomach is distended. It must have swallowed a large prey — it had swallowed Cheetal. The python is shot dead but no trace of Cheetal is ever found. Pir Mast collapses in grief and dies of a broken heart. There are three graves side by side in the village: Pir Mast is buried next to Kale, the python with Cheetal is next to his grave.

Natiq’s portrayal of village life in Punjab is not romantic or sentimental. In the stories I have described above, satire is a strong point. Qimma, the brave soul who was not afraid of the river or the jungle, and who saved many fellow villagers from drowning, is drowned under the most heart-wrenching of circumstances. Qimma, who was a free spirit, is chained. In the story about Pir Mast, death is the ultimate leveller; the hunter, the hunted, the victim, the conqueror are all buried in the same ground. The Pir Mast story is like a parable. The character of Pir Mast affords a deeper examination of piety, ie virtue, goodness, faithfulness and holiness. Pirs are charismatic; they promise miracles, their followers have implicit faith in them. In the story, an animal, a hare, challenges the Pir’s authority. The hare is emblematic of a power greater than that which the Pir possessed.

I am not the first from the Anglophone world to be writing about Natiq. He has been featured in Granta, a leading, prestigious journal that presents new literary voices from across the world. Well-known writer, Muhammad Hanif, translated ‘Me’mar ke Haath’ (‘A Mason’s Hand’, 2011) into English for Granta. Ali Madeeh Hashmi has translated many of the stories from the collection Qaim Deen, published by Penguin India as What Will You Give for this Beauty? (2015). Natiq has also published two collections of poetry; Yaqut ke Warq and Be Yaqin Bastiyon Mein. His poems have been translated into English and German.

In his poetry, as in his fiction, Natiq comes across as a being unsettled, even unhappy, with the world we live in. The injustice, cruelty, unfriendliness, pretence, and dishonesty compel him to write about these experiences. He claims he is not producing art for art’s sake, but “trying to produce pictures of life as it is lived”.

“Apne afsanon ke bare mein sirf itna kehna chahta hun ke main ne kisi qism ke falsafe ya nazariye se qate nazar, faqat haqiqi zindagi ki chalti phirti tasveeren banane ki koshish ki hai.”

(I want to say this about my stories: I have tried to present pictures of life as it is lived and avoided subscribing to any kind of philosophy or ideology).

Although Natiq’s narratorial voice is distant and impersonal, and his prose devoid of ornamentation, realism is a nebulous, slippery slope — and life, even in vignettes, is very complex to be captured without any personal bias. His stories suffer from hyperrealism. The shorter stories are reduced to incidents or encounters with abrupt, unsatisfactory endings that could be real but lack conviction. He doesn’t allow the story to develop beyond itself. Perhaps he is uncertain about going too deep into unchartered territory. One wishes he would not be in such a hurry to finish but that he would explore the possibilities of stories within stories. The folk tale mood that is evident in the slightly longer stories is more effective.

To those who think that good creative writing from the subcontinent is primarily in English, I urge you to read Ali Akbar Natiq in Urdu.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, September 11th, 2016