Intizar Husain (1923-2016) was a towering figure in Pakistani letters, a master storyteller, who has left behind an astonishing body of fiction which transcends time and place and yet is firmly rooted in Pakistan and the era in which he lived. Story is a Vagabond is guest-edited by Alok Bhalla, Asif Farrukhi and Nishat Zaidi. It brings together a varied and thought-provoking selection of Husain’s work translated from Urdu into English, framed by Alok Bhalla’s illuminating Introduction and Afterword. Bhalla describes Partition as “the single most important event to disrupt his [Intizar Husain’s] life and shape his creative self”. He also provides many insights into the cultural plurality of Husain’s writing which incorporates Sufi legends, Vedic lore and Jataka tales.

The book is illustrated with black and white reproductions of Imran Qureshi’s miniature paintings. The many celebrated translators range from all three guest editors to M. Asaduddin, Muhammed Umar Memon, Frances Pritchett and Moazzam Sheikh. The collection includes stories such as ‘The Unwritten Epic’, ‘A Chronicle of the Peacocks’, ‘The Death of Scheherzad’ and ‘Leaves’, which famously gave their titles to different collections of Husain’s fiction, translated into English. All of them embody the richness and complexity of his work.

‘The Unwritten Epic’ begins with a poetic and powerful account of a torch-lit procession of Jats, accompanied by the sound of drumbeats and conch shells, as it descends upon the village of Qadirpur. The village is famous because of its wrestler, Pichwa. He is a man of such renowned courage and strength that he is said to have battled against and vanquished jinns. This timeless imagery gives way to a specific time frame: Partition. Pichwa cannot quite grasp the implications of this reality. He cannot understand why, when he had supported the idea of Pakistan, the territory of that newly independent country is far away and his home, Qadirpur, has remained in India. Pichwa and his gang succeed in defeating the Jats but not the forces of politics and history. At this point, Pichwa’s story becomes disjointed. His migration to Pakistan where he is neither known nor feared, and his desperate, unsuccessful search for employment, are recorded in the diary jottings of the narrator, a writer and a fellow migrant. He perceives Pichwa as a man of great dignity, worthy of an epic, but the writer does not know what to write. He is caught up in a political conundrum, trapped in writer’s block and unable to find a creative voice: while Qadirpur itself passes into fiction, as mere memory — a place which has been renamed Jatunagar.

An anthology that presents some of Intizar Husain’s works translated into English — fiction, essays, and a play

Husain’s stories invariably move from the specific to the universal. ‘The Unwritten Epic’ is a story about Partition and also that of loss, difficulties and change, so intrinsic to the migrations which have forged our world. Similarly, ‘A Chronicle of the Peacocks’ comments on another age-old reality: war and violence. The story has particular relevance today because it revolves around India and Pakistan’s nuclear tests and weaves in the legendary Battle of Kurukshetra between the Kauravas and the Pandavas in the Mahabharata. These tales, centuries apart, are unified by the description of peacocks, flying screaming and screeching in the air after the nuclear tests in the Rajasthan desert, and their shrieks of fear at the destruction, described in The Mahabharat, by dread weapons unleashed. The cries of the peacocks, the expelled bird of paradise in Islamic lore, become a metaphor for, and a warning of, the terrors imposed on nature and its gifts by man-made weapons.

The power of stories and the relationship between a storyteller, fiction, art and real life runs through several tales. ‘The Death of Scheherzad’ recreates the legendary creator of A Thousand and One Nights, but after she has finished her stories, been spared her life by the sultan and become his queen. In time, she realises that denied the intensity of the moment which impelled those imaginative journeys, she can no longer tell a story and that creating stories was her life.

Husain also engages extensively with mankind’s quest for beauty, truth, and spiritual enlightenment. In ‘Leaves’ the monk, Sanjaya, troubled by his desire for a woman, sits at the feet of the Lord Buddha and listens to his two legendary Jataka Tales, of his experience in his previous incarnations. These stories, and others that Sanjaya hears from Buddha’s companion Ananda, become a catalyst in Sanjaya’s emotional journey which nevertheless takes its own path.

The subtle and sophisticated stories are replete with stunning descriptions, and invariably move in intricate loops which are unified by metaphor, parable or theme. ‘The Boat’ unites and reconstructs the great legends of the great flood in different cultures, to tell of Gilgamesh, Noah and Manu. Each escapes from the rising waters in a boat, albeit in different circumstances, only to be confronted with the uncertainty of the unknown.

“I had to get back to Delhi. But that evening, Delhi was a sad and desolate city — at least that was true of the basti around Nizamuddin. Only a few days earlier, a caravan of migrants whose homes had been looted had left the area. On that rainy day, it seemed as if the silence and the gloom would never lift. Even Nizamuddin’s tomb, in the middle of an unpaved courtyard, looked dismal. The tomb was surrounded by tall grass. As I walked through the grass, I heard a peacock call from somewhere behind the tomb. When I turned around to look, I couldn’t see him, but I heard him call once more. It was a strange call, resonant of millennia past.” — Excerpt from the book

Nostalgia and memories of the past run through ‘Qayyuma’s Shop’ which juxtaposes memories of the lively gatherings at Qayyuma’s milk shop in pre-Partition India, with his soulless, modern, cement shop in Pakistan bathed in bright light. Husain employs gossip to great advantage. But often the power of the narrative lies elsewhere: in the tale that is not told, the words that are not uttered. The tensions which impel the surface story are heightened by suggestion, metaphor and resonance, linking past and present. This also emerges in stories set in contemporary Pakistan, such as ‘Comrades’ in which a man gets on the wrong bus; ‘Towards His Fire’ tells of a man’s crisis as a raging fire overtakes the building that he has lived in for years — the destruction of all his possessions threatens his very sense of self. ‘The Jungle of the Gonds’ draws parallels between today’s endemic urban violence with that of wild tribes in the past: an anxious family waits for its son and his friends to reach home, as curfew approaches and police cars patrol the streets.

The widespread violence which has overtaken Pakistan and the brutalisation of society is the focus of two stories, written in response to the 1971 war. One, ‘The City of Sorrows’ is a metaphorical tale of three dead men disfigured by acts of great brutality. The other, ‘Prisoner(s)’, is replete with unwritten sub-texts and describes the exchange of information and news between two friends: Javed who has returned from “over there” — East Pakistan; and Anwar who has remained “over here” — in West Pakistan.

The collection includes Husain’s play ‘Deluge’ which revolves around a group of people stranded at a railway station in an attempt to escape the flood which has swept over their basti. His experience as a playwright is given further context in his witty essay, ‘Stage Drama with Reference to Some Personal Experiences’ which tells of the many impediments imposed by the authorities on the author, due to confused metaphorical and political interpretations of a straightforward text, when none were intended.

In fact, the themes, ideas and concepts which run through Husain’s stories are underpinned by an excellent selection of non-fiction. His riveting memoir ‘Many Dreams Later!’ tells of his return after many decades from Pakistan to Dibai in UP, where he grew up, and where almost everything, including his family home, has changed beyond recognition. Several essays such as ‘Between Me and the Story’, ‘Vanishing Tradition’, ‘Literature and Love’, ‘The Blind Age’ and ‘Vikram, the Vampire and the Story’ provide valuable insights into his writings and his ideas on politics, art and literary trends.

Taken as a whole, these essays incorporate discussions on different literatures from Sanskrit and Urdu to English, French and Russian. Husain writes of the importance of love and passion in the Urdu ghazal and dastan. He asserts that a fiction writer’s primary role is to create a good story. He is critical of trends (inherent in the Marxist ethos) which regard the story as a vehicle to pass on reformist or social messages. In ‘Reason and Purpose of the Jataka Stories’ he points out that Buddha’s Jataka Tales are stories, first and foremost. They employ the storyteller’s mode of expression, different from that of Buddha as a preacher in his sermons. He comments on their immense scope, the way they encompass the whole of creation. He laments the loss of a literary tradition where trees, birds and natural life were part of stories as living, breathing entities.

The title of the book is taken from a conversation between Bhalla and Husain on the nature of storytelling and the way tales move across porous boundaries and “wander” through an uncertain, homeless space and reappear in different cultures, continents and eras. Husain remarked “kahani to awara hoti hai”. Bhalla has translated this into English as “the story is a vagabond” instead of using the word “wanderer” because he says “fiction, as a hobo, is concerned neither with borders nor laws”.

This is a truly invaluable book and a befitting tribute to a rare and exceptional writer.

The reviewer is a writer and a critic.

Story is a Vagabond: Fiction, Essays and Drama by Intizar Husain
(ANTHOLOGY)
Series Editor, Frank Stewart; Guest Editors: Alok Bhalla, Asif Farrukhi, Nishat Zaidi
Oxford University Press, Karachi
ISBN: 978-0199403608
396pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, October 16th, 2016