Not so long ago, I received a phone call from Delhi. The person on the other end said she was putting together a selection of Urdu short stories with a focus on women. More about that later …

When asked about “feminist” writing in an interview conducted for The Paris Review by Shusha Guppy and Jason Weiss, the Russian-born French novelist Nathalie Sarraute said: “I have always been a feminist in so far as I want equal rights for women. But the idea of ‘women’s writing’ shocks me. I think that in art we are androgynous. […]” (A sentiment also expressed by Nadine Gordimer: “… all writers are androgynous beings” and “there’s no sex in the brain.”) Once someone asked her about the similarity between Marguerite Yourcenar and Marguerite Duras. She said, “[T]here was an enormous similarity: they were both called Marguerite! Otherwise there is not an iota of connection between them.” Elsewhere: “But I hardly ever think of gender when I write about my characters. I often prefer he to she because he is neutral but she is only female.” Sarraute once received a doctoral thesis the subject of which was the woman’s condition in her novels. “I was flabbergasted! But if I had wanted to discuss woman’s condition I wouldn’t have written the sort of books I have. Woman’s condition is the last thing on my mind when I write.”

In her authoritative way, Gordimer is more forthcoming: “By and large, I don’t think it matters a damn what sex a writer is, so long as the work is that of a real writer. I think there is such a thing as ‘ladies’ writing,’ for instance, feminine writing; there are ‘authoresses’ and ‘poetesses’. And there are men, like Hemingway, whose excessive ‘manliness’ is a concomitant part of their writing. But with so many of the male writers whom I admire, it doesn’t matter too much. There doesn’t seem to be anything they don’t know, either. After all, look at Molly Bloom’s soliloquy. To me, that’s the ultimate proof of the ability of either sex to understand and convey the inner workings of the other. No woman was ever ‘written’ better by a woman writer. How did Joyce know?”

Even though I don’t pretend to be a writer of Sarraute’s or Gordimer’s stature — far from it, I’m not even a writer, though I did dabble a bit in fiction in my salad days — and I know I will be damned for saying this, nevertheless, my own thoughts about the issue are not much different than Sarraute’s and Gordimer’s. So it is that I scrupulously avoid referring to a woman poet as “shaa’irah,” preferring to call her “shaa’ir.” As a “shaa’irah” she becomes a marked species (with its implied air of ‘second-rate,’ maybe even ‘third-rate,’ and of ‘condescension,’ whether intended or not). To me, Azra Abbas is as much a poet (not poetess) as Ghalib, and Khalida Husain as much a fiction writer (adeeb, not adeebah) as Manto. Period.

Back to the lady in Delhi. She said she would translate the stories into Hindi and include a comprehensive discussion of the topic (“feminist” fiction, I assume) in her introduction. The book is practically ready except for one of my stories, ‘Bijli Basant,’ which my friend Balraj Manra had recommended to her highly. She had spent weeks trying to locate me but had only just found my phone number. Would I please send her a photocopy of the story in question? In her following e-mail, which had her address, she had also attached her CV, a very productive life with impressive publications. Lately, a friend of mine in Canada mentioned that the translator in question is a writer herself and had once written a rather good story about a post-revolutionary Iranian woman who, rather than telling a lie (which might have saved her skin), openly admitted to having had an extra-marital affair because her husband had no interest in her sexual gratification. She spoke the truth valiantly, aware of the attendant consequences.

I was a bit unsettled, not so much by the request as by my own inability to fathom the purpose of a volume of short stories dealing with women. Is “women” a literary category? By my lights, no more than “man” is a literary category. No! As I said, neither he nor she is a marked species. Either one can be engaging in their infinite mystery as characters in a fictional construction, but not to tout the horn of feminism. I hope I’m not against the feminist movement, in so far as it seeks to accord half of mankind its dignity and its equality with the other half. (God knows we need it — badly!) In fact, I’m all for it. My wife of 48 years would know, as would anyone who has met her.

I have always been sceptical about such enterprises (so unabashedly rampant these days) — enterprises that seek extra-literary standards to analyse a piece of literary art. So my first thought was to bow out politely, without going into my reasons for why I would want to forfeit such an unexpected, let alone belated, opportunity of putting myself on display. But then I thought about Balraj. I didn’t wish to disappoint him. In a way I was touched by his kind remembrance of a piece of writing easily over 50 years old. What the heck, I said to myself, send her the story.

So I did, though not without some misgivings, and a measure of scepticism. The story was a piece of experimental writing. I had attempted to burrow deep inside the consciousness of a chronically ill young woman who, for some reason, passionately despises her sister-in-law. As the young woman broods over the events of the previous evening in the haze of her drifting mind, still throbbing from a residual headache, a reluctant thought begins to form that the sister-in-law wasn’t, after all, such a bad person, that her heart might not be impervious to a kind gesture.

The “experimental” part of the story lay in the desire to suggest the vague intimations of change by distancing myself from ritualised language — something Max Frisch calls “alienation.” Given my experience and ability in those days, I thought I had succeeded, but perhaps not, as I was to realise later when the story proved incomprehensible to some readers, and was totally misapprehended by others.

Before the story was eventually published in Karachi-based Seep, it was twice rejected, including by the editor of Savera, who was bluntly forthcoming: “Your story cannot be published in Savera; we will be sued. I’m returning it.”

Ahmad Nadeem Qasimi, who had a reputation for being a thorough ‘gentleman,’ sent a gentler and more nuanced response (dated November 28, 1963): “I’m deeply grateful for your submission to Funoon. Even as I enormously like its technique and find your style very engaging, the story’s treatment of the sexual element, I’m afraid, might conceivably precipitate dangerous consequences in the context of my editorship. I’m returning the story with much regret. Please don’t mind and consider that I do so against my will.”

By my lights, dim though they may be, the story had neither smut nor objectionable political content nor sex. All it sought to achieve was the beginnings of a subtle transformation in the consciousness of the protagonist.

Qasimi Sahib’s response both saddened and amused me. Saddened because he said he liked the story but couldn’t accept it; amused because he evidently liked it without getting its drift. After both emotions had run their course, I began to wonder what it was Qasimi Sahib, and even more so the editor of Savera, might have thought was provocative enough in its content to make minions of the law come chasing after them to put them into the dock. I exercised my brains as much as I could but failed to identify the offending part, if there was one. Some days later, the mystery began to unfold. By “sexual element” Qasimi Sahib was most likely referring to a minor detail in the story: my description of the scars left after a couple of surgeries on the stomach, close to the abdominal area, of the chronically ill young woman, which prompted her doctor cousin to suggest in jest, Why don’t you have a zipper stitched into your belly so that anytime an organ misbehaves we only have to open the zipper, yank the organ out and promptly zip you up again? This, apparently, had also raised the hackles of the editor of Savera.

I had compared the visual image of the incision and suture scars radiating along either side of it to a centipede.

Apparently, the editor of Savera had let his imagination run amok. He probably thought that the image was my crude way of referring to the lower anatomy of the woman and getting away with it, leaving him to face the consequences. When I figured out my imagined offence, I didn’t feel the need to vindicate myself to either editor. Even if what they probably imagined had been the case (though it was not), it would have been well within the limits of literary art — which is fabricated reality after all — and within my freedom as a writer.

I felt sympathy for the endearing Qasimi Sahib. I could appreciate his sensitivity to an otherwise trivial detail. A few years before this event, in October 1958 I believe, I was in Lahore. I visited Qasimi Sahib, then editor of the Lail-o-Nahar weekly, and gave him a submission. He asked me to come back the next day; by then he would have decided whether to accept the story. I went the following day. He was not in his office. The police had taken him into custody sometime during the night, I was told. This turned out to be the fate of many other prominent Progressives under the recently imposed martial law. Such draconian measures slapped on the literary establishment — with the memory of Manto’s and Ismat Chughtai’s trials for alleged obscenity in their work still looming large and fresh in the memory — made literary journals far too circumspect in accepting work which might get them into trouble. The atmosphere of anticipated fear resulted in voluntary self-censorship, which, regrettably, continues to this day. So, in a way, Qasimi Sahib’s wariness was not at all ill founded.

Not much had changed a quarter century later (late 1980s) when a book of my translations was published and then quickly withdrawn from circulation. Reason: it included an article by an English writer who had just become anathema throughout the Muslim world. So I was sceptical about sending my story. I couldn’t see how it could meaningfully serve an avowedly “feminist” purpose. Except for the two female characters, there was no overt or covert message for or against “feminist” aspirations. The subtle transformation it alluded to could have occurred just as easily in the life of a male character. But the woman in Delhi seemed to like the story: “It was really a delight going through your story. A beautiful one.” Regrettably, as expected, her delight didn’t take long to dissipate. “I have read your story, repeatedly many times, but my thought process did not reach anywhere. I called Balrajji, about this story. Either you explain this story to me or if possible send me any other of your stories, which has a woman as a character.”

That I was being asked to explain my work meant it was too obscure, perhaps even opaque, and I had, alas, failed. My first impulse was to do what I had hesitated to do initially — bow out. However, for whatever reasons, my weakness got the better of me. I wrote to her that everything is in the last two paragraphs and explained briefly what I intended in the piece. I also sent two of my mediocre stories — to be sure, with women as characters. “I have completed [the] translation of your story ‘Maasi’,” she informed within a week. “I liked all stories but ‘Maasi’ attracted me more for this book.”

I hope our delight in reading literature will come from the life of characters in a piece of writing, regardless of their gender. And, yes, from our ability to learn this basic fact: Fiction blatantly lies, but beneath all its dense, obscuring layers of lies it conceals a delicate core of truth. Could the purpose and joy of reading literature be anything other than retrieving this core of truth … and appreciating all the ingenuity of the writer in hiding it?