Samina Nazir’s new collection, Kallo, marries humour, wit and a quiet sensitivity in its narration of women’s lives in South Asia. The book comprises six short stories and two plays, and each story is named for its female protagonist. The short stories, ranging from the titular ‘Kallo’, to ‘Rajjo’ and ‘Baji’, capture the hopes, desires and struggles of ordinary women, while also touching on the refraction of gendered experience by caste and class.

Housing a diverse set of women characters, the book’s strength lies in combining Nazir’s feminist sensibility with an intimate, granular depiction of Deccani culture, as the reader is transported to the sounds, sights and smells of Hyderabad across the border, the cadences of its distinct Urdu dialect dominating the page. By centring women’s voices and the domestic space, and entrenching her narration in a pan-South Asian imaginary, Nazir’s book is homage to the work of the Subcontinent’s progressive feminist pioneers, a la Ismat Chughtai and Rashid Jahan.

The first story in the book, ‘Kallo’, tells the tale of two women, Mishtari Bano and Kallo, who find solace in each other’s companionship after suffering setbacks at the hands of the patriarchy. Mishtari Bano is shunned by her husband after it is discovered that she is barren. She swallows her grief and humiliation as he takes another wife, virtually cuts off all contact with her and, one day, even moves away to a nearby village. Her spirit broken, Mishtari Bano toys with the idea of ending her life, but her painful ruminations are interrupted by an injured, petrified Kallo collapsing on her doorstep.

In a parallel plotline, we learn that Kallo is an orphan who was living with her uncle and aunt, made to toil day and night and sleep on a tattered sheet outdoors, exposed to the elements. As if this ordeal weren’t enough, she is raped by her uncle when her aunt is away.

When she discovers this, her aunt turns Kallo out, accusing her of seducing her husband. Mishtari Bano takes Kallo in and thus begins the transformation of each of these characters, a liberating journey of finding trust, affirmation and joy in a female friendship and a romantic relationship — although Nazir’s subtlety does not enforce any labels on their intimacy and, instead, lets the story unfold on the fluid terrain of a transgressive, queer desire.

Short stories combining heart-warming family drama with hard-hitting social commentary make for engrossing reading and are a welcome addition to the oeuvre of Subcontinental women’s writing

In terms of form, Nazir’s storytelling captivates the reader’s attention from the very beginning, drawing on a colloquial, everyday tone, speckled with the literary flourish of rich description. The first person narrator in ‘Kallo’ is neither Mishtari Bano nor Kallo herself. The role is embodied instead by a simple-minded woman in the neighbourhood, whose conventional, envious eye heightens our sense of the rebellion staged by these two otherwise timid women.

However, despite the fact that the story takes its name from Kallo and is relayed in the voice of a third character, it nevertheless privileges the middle-class subjectivity of Mishtari Bano over the working-class Kallo’s. Despite a move to humanise Kallo through her relationship with Bano, earlier passages that present an exoticised construction of Kallo as a savage brute, with objectifying descriptions of her body and physical form, are not sufficiently addressed by the story’s resolution.

Similarly, the second story in the collection, ‘Rajjo’, also captures the inner world of its middle-class characters in a far more nuanced, complex manner, and we get little to no insight into Rajjo’s interiority. At times, there are also problems of inconsistency in the narrative voice; for instance, it is difficult to follow when the writer switches from a character’s perspective to an omniscient narrator’s viewpoint.

That said, ‘Rajjo’ must be commended for its excellent treatment of caste among Muslims in South Asia. The subplot around the “untouchable Hindu” Rajjo’s conversion to Islam, and her subsequent sexual exploitation at the hands of a seemingly pious man, astutely reveals the hypocrisies that veil the connections between gender, caste and class oppression.

Perhaps the story I enjoyed the most is the lengthier ‘Baji’, which chronicles the fortunes of an upper-class Muslim Hyderabadi family across two generations of its women. ‘Baji’ strikes a poignant note by bringing together themes of cultural change, familial relations and women’s personal struggles.

Rendered almost entirely in Hyderabadi Urdu, the story’s language and construction make for refreshing reading in a post-1947 literary landscape that has increasingly seen a state-endorsed Persianised standard Urdu displace regional dialects in Pakistan. Although Nazir’s oeuvre as a whole represents a cross-border South Asian imaginary, ‘Baji’ in particular invokes the memory of pre-Partition culture, giving us a view into life on the other side, into the world that migrants from Deccan left behind as they came and settled in Karachi and other parts of Sindh.

The story revolves around the character of Mateena Begum, who eventually comes to be known simply as “Baji” in her very large family. Mateena Begum is one among a dozen siblings, whose lives unfold in the austere Ghaffar Manzil against the backdrop of Partition, and the economic, social and cultural changes that define Muslim lives in post-Independence India.

The haughty Mateena Begum is married off to the cold, London-dwelling Anwar, who leaves for England shortly after their wedding takes place. Her unfulfilling marriage finally ends in divorce, as she refuses to comply with her husband’s demand that she sell off her parents’ mansion in Hyderabad to join him abroad. Thus begins Mateena Begum’s descent into Baji, a compulsive hoarder and bitter, foul-mouthed matriarch, who now reigns over Ghaffar Manzil after her parents’ demise.

The second half of the story shifts the narrative to her niece, Aliya, whose warming relationship with her aunt slowly reveals the oppressions of patriarchy that Baji had bravely staved off, a battle to which she lost part of herself. The story ends with Baji’s death — she passes away peacefully, dressed in a beautiful sari and her finest jewels, redeemed, finally, as Mateena Begum once more.

The story ends with Aliya ensconced in an apartment, alone yet content, as it seems she has left her own cheating husband to build a life for herself in the very city that symbolised her aunt’s downfall and humiliation: “Anwar’s London.”

Combining heart-warming family drama with hard-hitting social commentary, Nazir’s Kallo makes for exciting and engrossing reading. The book is a welcome addition to the oeuvre of women’s writing from the Subcontinent, narrating the lives of women from a perspective that privileges their agency and subjective experience.

The reviewer is currently pursuing a PhD in Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Cambridge

Kallo
By Samina Nazir
Maktab-i-Danyal, Karachi

ISBN: 978-9694191010
220pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, July 4th, 2021