There’s a tree, not far from my home, that blooms for about a fortnight. No one has yet been able to tell me whether its pinkish-white blossoms are apricot, apple or plum. Yesterday, on a cool March evening, I walked past the tree, expecting to see those blossoms withered or gone, but its branches were still laden with them.

My mind was on an essay titled ‘Bahaar/ Khizaan’ [Spring/ Autumn] that I’d been trying to understand. It’s in Sindhi, my father’s tongue, which I barely read, though I’m beginning to understand more of it. I’d rung my friend Ali Akbar — a native speaker of both Seraiki and Sindhi, who writes fiction in Urdu — for help. He recorded the essay for me in Sindhi, followed by impromptu translations in exquisite, literary Urdu.

The essay begins by celebrating springtime, when the whole world becomes absorbed in the colours of flowers, branches swaying in the wind, the sound of birdsong and the greening of trees and gardens.

It moves on to spring’s effect on the eyes and pens of writers. But from the early lines of the essay, the author addresses laazim-o-malzoom [concomitance] by pairing autumn with spring, the loss of colour and fragrance, the yellowing and falling of leaves from withered branches, the migration of birds and the impact the silence that befalls the garden in the season of ‘khizaan’ has on the writer’s pen, filling it with anguish.

Reading and listening to these passages, I reflected on what has seemed like an interminably dark, colourless, leafless season here in London; I was finally preparing for the coming of spring with new colours in our gardens. Though the essay ends on a note of seasonal transience, it’s also a reminder that autumn, too, will end in the cycle of the seasons.

When I’d first asked Akbar to translate some passages on love by the same author, he told me she described the kind of love that destroys ephemeral desires. All is gone from the lover’s heart — anger, deception, betrayal and other base emotions — except remembrance of the beloved, which bathes the entire world in the light of love, eventually identifying with the essence of love’s own self.

But these things, Akbar said, were quite common in Sindhi literature; they’d been preached ever since the day of the Persian Sufi Bayazid Bistami. Later, Sindhi Amil scholars tried to integrate the philosophy of wahdatul wajood [unity of being] with ancient Hindi philosophy, particularly in the Risalo of Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai.

Akbar asked who had written the essay. I told him it was by Badam Natawan, said to be one of the earliest Sindhi Muslim women prose writers. Neither a mystic poet nor a philosopher, she wrote several such essays for newspapers and magazines, which were collected in the form of a book titled Khush Khaslat Khatoon [The Good Natured Lady] in 1955, the year of my birth.

And I reminded Akbar that, even today, many young readers search for their philosophical and spiritual heritage in English, in the writings of Western scholars such as Annemarie Schimmel and William Chittick, or reach for various new-age philosophies to solve the existential dilemmas of their times.

The hybrid term ‘Sufism’ is often used even in Urdu and regional languages instead of tasawwuf; just as many readers reach for bowdlerised translations of Jalaluddin Rumi that stray far away from the original Farsi, essays such as Natawan’s, written for a general local audience, may still be significant today, not least for younger readers.

My friend Nasir Soomro, who writes poetry in English, says he’s more drawn to nihilism than to homegrown mystical writings. And yet, as a singer of the verses of Bhittai and Shaikh Ayaz, he was moved by Natawan’s ‘surreal’ passages on the relationship of writing and the seasons when he read them out and offered a preliminary oral translation in English.

However, I also wanted to know whether Urdu would be a better medium for me to appreciate Natawan’s multi-layered prose style. It was Nasir who had found the book for me, back in 2016. I don’t know where I’d heard of the writer, but I had Nasir look for it, hoping for an Urdu translation. With my non-existent Sindhi, I put it away on a shelf and forgot to ask for a translator’s help. When I picked it up a few days ago, the title and the first chapter, ‘Hamida’s Story’, led me to think it was a domestic novel, an impression underlined by the author’s pseudonym which denotes powerlessness.

However, a cursory glance at later chapter headings might have made me take the book for a woman’s guide to good conduct — especially since the author credits her mother with much of the wisdom she shares in her essays — had I not spotted the chapters on love and beauty, and spring and autumn, which I struggled to understand. But although they may well have been directed at a primarily feminine audience, they had nothing to do with domestic matters.

I can now decipher enough Sindhi to piece together details of the author’s career, from a Wikipedia link to a Sindhi article by Haseeb Nayab which gives the author’s birth date as March 7, 1924, rather than 1930 which her granddaughter, Tania Palijo, notes in a brief online sketch (Popati Hiranandani, the leading Sindhi woman writer across the border, was also born in 1924).

The daughter of a school headmistress, Natawan was born in Shikarpur. She matriculated from Bombay University and married shortly after. Her daughter Naseem Thebo and son Meer Thebo were both writers.

Natawan was conversant with Urdu and Persian as well as Sindhi, which possibly gives her prose a patina that transcends regional boundaries. She began to publish in 1950 and though she died in 1988, no works came out after 1966 (some remain unpublished). Her literary contributions were praised by the renowned Anglophone Sindhi intellectual, Allama I.I. Kazi.

Is Badam Natawan forgotten in her native region, because perhaps her work has a metaphysical tone and isn’t overly radical? Entirely by coincidence, Akbar and I were working on these translations on her birthday — March 7 — which fell earlier this week. The annual Women’s Day on March 8 seems an opportune moment to reassess, reclaim and remember the achievements of a pioneering woman writer.

The columnist is a London-based short story writer and novelist

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, March 13th, 2022