Potohar: Khitta-i-Dilruba
By Shahid Siddiqui
Jhelum Book Corner, Jhelum
ISBN: 978-9696624523
335pp.

Shahid Siddiqui’s recently published collection of essays, Potohar: Khitta-i-Dilruba [Potohar: Land of the Beloved], combines the formal layering of creative non-fiction with an almost encyclopaedic engagement with the Potohar region.

Set primarily in Rawalpindi and the adjoining areas, these essays and narratives span several decades. At times, they have a lover’s tone — imagine Wikipedia entries written and arranged by an accomplished artist who grew up in the city, and you will have an idea of what I am talking about.

During the pandemic lockdown, I came across Siddiqui’s creative non-fiction by accident on YouTube. I am not sure how the algorithm for these websites works, but perhaps it sensed my need to be soothed. These days, I don’t read much Urdu fiction or non-fiction. I read poetry sometimes when I cannot sleep, but that’s about it.

It was late at night, I think. I was allowing the algorithm to feed me, to play whatever came next. The lights of my room were dimmed. I was mostly listening, hoping for sleep and heard the disembodied voice before I knew anything about the author.

A lyrical collection of essays about the region’s history, culture and myths presents complex and layered humans engaged in ordinary human activities

I think it was the moment-to-moment narrative style which made me turn the brightness up and look at the video’s title. A series of images flashed on the screen as the stern but earnest voice read the entire contents of an essay. This is an essay set to music, I thought, the way American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan read his Nobel Prize essay. That was my first introduction to Siddiqui’s voice.

Siddiqui picks and chooses what he wants to write. Some essays in Potohar are portraits of people he knew growing up. They are imbued with layers of nostalgia, but also the image-driven quietness of a Sherwood Anderson short story. These stories of a past beyond Siddiqui’s reach are full of yearning.

Some chapters are profiles of notable people from South Asia who belonged to the Potohar region. But the information they contain will not be found in a newspaper or any other book. The author seems to summon the facts from his palace of memories, recounting the geography of Rawalpindi, narrating where the houses were, what happened to them and imagining scenes where necessary. The collection is preoccupied with concerns of memory, history, temporality, art and coming of age, but is arranged with the orderly fickleness of an artist.

Siddiqui holds a doctorate in linguistics and has written important policy books about Pakistan’s educational reforms. He has also written a lyrical novel in Urdu titled Aadhay Adhooray Khwaab [Half Unfulfilled Dreams], which leaves the reader in no doubt of Siddiqui’s literary credentials — he is a master of form.

I went to meet him. Over tea — the peacocks, visible to me through his office window, lounging on a neem tree — we spoke about his work. He pulled out his published books and laid them in front of me. I must have counted a dozen. With a quiet humility, he spoke about the essays from Potohar, some of which have appeared previously in notable Urdu newspapers. They represent not a cursory, but a lifetime’s worth of devotion and engagement with the Potohar region.

Siddiqui has carried these histories of Rawalpindi’s neighbourhoods, universities and adjoining villages even as the great wheel of time turned and the places and people he writes about vanished or transformed. My favourite thing about these essays is that, behind all of them, is a lingering and overarching quest to examine the self. To understand what the self wants. This quest runs like a river through the collection, connecting the larger arcs.

The book’s first section has essays about the author’s mother, the village mela [fair] and crop cutting — a pastoral. Siddiqui yearns for country life before technology disrupted things and situates this yearning amidst an idealised family life. The chapter ‘Meri Maa, Meri Ustaad’ [My Mother, My Teacher] begins with the image of the graveyard and its rising tombstones where the author visits his mother’s grave. The collage of images rendered here is soaked in pain, but it seldom turns sentimental.

There is a celebratory and commemorative tone to parts of the book, which is balanced by the elegiac chapters. One figure in the pastoral section is Sakina, a young companion of the author’s mother and a fixture in their home. Sakina is addicted to eating matti [soil] and coal. She smokes cigarettes and hookah. She is an orphan, but has inherited wealth. She refuses to marry her cousin after all the wedding preparations have been completed, because she thinks he is too beautiful and interested more in her land than in her. Her figure casts a long shadow over the author’s childhood memories of his village. The last image of Sakina is the author gazing at her body during her funeral, years later.

The section ‘Potohar Ke Bichhrray Sitaaray’ [Potohar’s Lost Stars] contains profiles of such figures as Bollywood’s Gulzar, Meena Kumari and Sunil Dutt. Siddiqui writes about Gulzar from the domestic space of his own study. He is interested in Gulzar’s poetry but, for him, the primary frame is still his own selfhood.

In ‘Potohar Mein Faslon Ki Kataai Ka Mausam’ [Harvest Season in Potohar], Siddiqui renders scenes of crop-cutting in the village with the precision of the landowner Konstantin Levin recounting the rituals of farming in Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina. Siddiqui understands the enduring and universal quality of such peculiar moments of communal work.

At times, I wanted the chapters to be longer, as many were written first as newspaper columns. However, Siddiqui’s preoccupations concerning family, history, spirituality, temporality, place, literary inheritance and academic life are interwoven throughout the book. The collection feels like a throwback to Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small-Town Life, with that same sturdiness of prose, structural flexibility and the sweeping gaze that is still able to focus on the minutiae.

Reading the essays on the page, however, I missed Siddiqui’s voice, which I had first found on YouTube. In one essay, he recalls a phone call he received from Gulzar — the poet had read Siddiqui’s essay that recounted Gulzar’s return to his hometown of Dina. Siddiqui writes that Gulzar had said, “After reading your essay about my return to Dina, I thought I was not alone, but that you were with me on that trip.”

Such is the effect of these image-driven narratives; they stay with readers and begin to work upon them. Siddiqui brings forth a vast range of subjects and people and renders them with a characteristic intimacy. To find the history, culture and myth of the Potohar region cobbled together with such care and lyricism is pure joy.

The collection is written to be consumed by serious readers of literature as well those with a casual interest in the history and culture of the Potohar region. Siddiqui’s progressive values permeate the white spaces between the paragraphs. Through hundreds of anecdotes, I couldn’t find a single false note and, like all great works of literary non-fiction, the spiritual quest is at the heart of the collection.

With so much fiction and non-fiction about Pakistan being topical and addressing hot-button issues, I was grateful to find in this book a range of complex and layered humans, portrayed engaging in ordinary human activities. It’s a reminder that, amidst the hysteria of news cycles, normal life also goes on in this country. People are born, they live and travel and, in spite of everything, they grow old. Be warned: if you pick up this book, Siddiqui’s warmth for the Potohar region will infect you.

The reviewer has an MFA from Purdue University and a PhD from Florida State University.

He can be reached on Twitter @MunibAhmadKhan

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, April 9th, 2023