An understatement: Masood Ashar is an unassuming octogenarian. Anyone who has met the eminent Urdu columnist would vouch for his modest nature and humble demeanour. Fine. No arguments there. But humility can sometimes work adversely, especially for a creative person.

Many of us who have seen and heard Ashar wax eloquent on the finer points of literary theories at literature festivals don’t know that he is a short story writer of high merit as well. This can largely be put down to his self-effacing character. He doesn’t like to talk about himself much. It is up to his admirers, of whom there is no dearth, to keep egging him on to present his creative side to them more frequently.

Ashar began writing Urdu poems and stories at a young age. His first short story, ‘Khaleej Aur Barrh Gayi’ was printed way back in 1948 in a magazine published from Allahabad. Three years later his family (which hails from Rampur) migrated to Lahore, Pakistan. Here he took up journalism as his profession, but never stopped writing stories. The first collection of his short pieces of fiction, Aankhon Par Donon Haath, was published in the 1970s, followed by Saare Afsaane in the 1980s and Apna Ghar in 2004. Sadly, the three books are not readily available in the market, but readers of Urdu literature now owe a debt of gratitude to Oxford University Press for coming out with a selection of Ashar’s stories, titled Intikhab: Masood Ashar, compiled and selected by Asif Farrukhi.

A selection of short stories from an under-appreciated author captures moments in time to set the tone of things to come

There is no need to know which story in the book belongs to which period of the author’s creative and professional life. He doesn’t give a timeline to the narratives he weaves or the characters he creates. He leaves it to the reader to decide the time zone in which the plots unfold. But the plots don’t unfold in the conventional sense: Ashar captures moments in the lives of characters who have lived in our world for a long time, who have been in situations familiar to us, and who have taken big decisions in the past, the effects of which are felt in the progression (or lack of it) of his stories. Moments unravel in his tales like pawns that set the tone of things to come in a game of chess. Unlike what happens in chess, however, there are no checkmates for his protagonists — they are either already pensive about what they have done or are living in the moment with a tinge of regret, and Ashar immerses the reader in this atmosphere by virtue of his tremendous dialogue-writing skills. Almost every story has the dialogic form running parallel to descriptive narration.

The reader gets the hang of this technique by reading pieces such as ‘Dukh Jo Mitti Ne Diye’. It is the exchange of meaningful lines between the men in the story that gives away the time period in which they exist. The reference to the cities of Dhaka and Khulna is enough for the reader to set the characters in a locale that has politics in the air. Politics, however, never takes centre stage. It’s the psycho-social factors, the unwanted offspring of political expediency, that remain in the foreground. Again, this is done by virtue of sharp dialogue. In a discussion on insects, a character asks, “Aur jo kerra zameen ka humrang nahin ho? [And what about the insect that doesn’t have the same colour as the soil?]”. The other replies, “Wo humesha khatrey mein rehta hai [It lives always in danger].” This is poignant. The reader knows what point the author is trying to drive home by employing the metaphor of soil.

In ‘Zard Patton Ka Bunn’, society comes under sharp criticism in a relatively direct way. At the heart of this story are communities and the tensions that simmer beneath the surface of neighbourly bonhomie. Ashar begins the scene rather gently and with a pretty regular premise of a sparsely inhabited piece of land getting populated, bit by bit, house by house. The more people there are, the more problems emerge. Again, the author does not reveal all; he trusts the reader’s gumption. Or does he?

Because when Ashar focuses on society, as is the case with ‘Dukh Jo Mitti Ne Diye’, he keeps things in a realistic space (sans fixing time zones). However, when he writes about human relationships — man-woman dynamics to be precise — he tends to situate his tales in a dream sequence that comes across as a figment of his protagonists’ imagination and not as an outcome of their actions and inactions.

Unlike what happens in chess, however, there are no checkmates for his protagonists — they are either already pensive about what they have done or are living in the moment with a tinge of regret

This is evident in the two ‘Khamoshi’ tales and ‘Kapaas Ke Phool’, whereas ‘Khwaab’ challenges the reader to treat a dream as just a dream. This is the author’s modus operandi. He doesn’t want reality to dilute the dreaminess of fiction. Herein lies an issue that he seems to be skirting with the help of his dialogic narratives: the purity of intent between opposite sexes. It’s not that easy a subject to understand; therefore he tackles it in the domain of the subconscious.

Ashar is a well-informed, well-read man who has a predilection for world literature, films and pop culture, and so the book is strewn with references from these realms. And that is where the universality of ideas and the timelessness of his characters come together faultlessly … like a dream.

The reviewer is a member of staff

Intikhab: Masood Ashar
Edited by Asif Farrukhi
Oxford University Press,
Karachi
ISBN: 978-0199405107
192pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, July 2nd, 2017