Over the last few
weeks I have been seeing a lot of “best of 2015” book lists, and of course I
only focus on the ones that include translated fiction, not be swayed by others
opinions I only started reading others favourite lists since I put together my
own personal list. The majority of the listings featuring translated fiction
have a number of similar works, but today’s book, my second favourite work,
does not feature that prominently in the debate, why it has slipped under the
radar I don’t know.
I originally attempted
to source this book purely because it was translated from the Urdu and comes
from a region where I have had little exposure to the literature. Fortunately
after troubles downloading the eBook in Australia, getting quoted astronomical
postage prices for a copy from overseas, the publisher New Directions came to
the rescue and sent me a copy. I’m forever grateful that I have now been
exposed to an amazing writer from the area bordering India and Pakistan.
Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi,
born in 1923, is a highly respected businessman as well as a multi awarded
writer. From General Manager at the Muslim Commercial Bank in 1950 to the
President of the United Bank in 1977 onto Chairman of the Pakistan Banking
Council, following his father’s footsteps (his father the Speaker of the Jaipur
Legislative Assembly). In January 1950
his family migrated to Pakistan after the Urdu language was replaced by Hindi
in India, so four years after the partition of India and the creation of East
(later to be known as Bangladesh) and West Pakistan (later to become simply
Pakistan).
“Mirages of the Mind”
opens with an explanatory, uncredited,
“introduction” where a “reading guide” is presented on the
“encyclopaedic culture”, the “Poetic punning”,
“narrative digressions”, and “cultural nostalgia”. Whilst handy at
assisting with the reading, these instructions are not mandatory and a reading
of the book would not be diminished without the assistance,it does contain some
memorable material, including a quote from Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi himself:
You cannot write humour until you love your
target or subject of attack. Love is the foremost condition. In satire it’s not
necessary.
Yes, this is a humour
filled story, whilst containing lashings of satire, it is primarily a funny
tale, one with a unique structure.
Our work is split into
five sections, each containing chapters, those containing subheadings and
within them quotes of world poetry (with a bent towards the Urdu poets of
course). So rather than a linear plot, we have vignettes, different story
tellers, flash backs, oral tales and interpretations. Yes it does sound
“challenging”....
I spent a significant
portion of this work thinking “Don Quixote, Don Quixote” and although the
parallels are at times obvious, this is not simply the tales of a “Man of
Karachi”. Let’s have Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi himself describe the plot (this
appears in the “Author’s Afterword”):
‘The Mansion’ tells the story of a
dilapidated, abandoned mansion and its hot-tempered owner. ‘A Schoolteacher’s
Dream’ is about a depressed horse, a barber, and a secretary. ‘Two Tales of the
City’ is the story of a small room and the eccentric man who lived there for
seventy-five years. ‘The First Memorable Poetry Festival of Dhiraj Ganj’
presents caricatures of one teacher and the founder of an infamous country
school. ‘The Car, The Man from Kabul, and The Lampless Aladdin’ is a
long-winded series of anecdotal sketches about a ramshackle car, an illiterate
Pathan lumber merchant, and a lying braggart of a driver. In all, the
characters, whether they be central, secondary, or merely to fill out the
scenes, are all by definition ‘common’, and when it comes to social status,
ordinary; for this reason, they deserve extra attention and consideration. All
that I’ve seen, learned, and loved about life has come through such people. It’s
been my bad luck that the ‘great’ or ‘successful’ people I’ve happened to run
across have been entirely second-rate, rancorous, and superficial.
Our storyteller,
narrator, is two fold, our scribe, Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi himself who add his
notes and Basharat, who tells the oral stories, which are scribed. This can
make for confusing reading, however it is the stories of the minor people which
is the key here, whether from the mouth of Basharat or the quill of Yousufi the
richness of these low social class players is what you are enjoying.
To start with we have
Bashara Ali Farooqui’s father-in-law, Qibla, who once a feared wood merchant in
Kanput, moves to Karachi and loses his “kingdom’, although reduced to living
with his daughter and son-in-law in Pakistand he spends his time looking back
to better times.
With digressions and
meanderings a feature, the path you follow with Yousufi as your guide, is never
dull. I felt slightly reminiscent of Charles Dickens’ “The Pickwick Papers”,
however it is not only the travelling and the rich characterisation or humour
that comes into play in our work, we have the biting satire of Pakistani
society, even a criticism of the quality of historical Urdu prose:
Sometimes words are dressed up in angarkha
gowns, sometimes in floor-length cloaks, sometimes in scholarly turbans,
sometimes in dinner jackets, and sometimes in fool’s caps. Sometimes words wear
anklets, and sometimes they wear fetters. And sometimes they are like trained
monkeys that dance on a showman’s command.
Maulana Abul Kalam Azad wrote about his birth
like this: ‘I, alien to time itself, born into the wrong era, a stranger amidst
my own people, raised pious folk, ruined by desire, named Ahmad, called Kalam,
can from the world of non-being into the world of being in 1888 (1305 Hijra),
and thus was accused of living.’
People don’t write like that anymore. People
aren’t born like that anymore. Not even a C-section takes that long and causes
that much suffering.
Back to Qibla, his
move to Karachi came about as “Pakistan came into being” and all of Qibla’s
enemy’s had moved there, he “couldn’t live without hating them” and the large
scale migration had caused his income to be non-existent. He had no other
option but to “cut the cord’. Of course Qibla finds the migration difficult. To
adapt to change you need “tolerance, patience, gentleness, and flexibility.”
Attributes that Qibla, as a tyrant, does not possess, “the fact was that these
qualities weren’t considered attributes in feudal society. Strictness, wilfulness,
haughtiness, harshness, and a bad temper were all thought to be the strengths –
and true qualities – of a feudal character.”
Our second section
follows QIbla’s son-in-law Basharat’s time
as a dreamer and a schoolteacher, a wood trader and a horse and cart
owner (and all the tribulations that go with that). In this section we get to
see the poverty in Karachi:
In front of the bank, a man was selling fish
from a platform raised four feet off the ground. His undershirt had countless
holes in it. His undershirt and lungi were covered in fish blood and guts. When
his hands got dirty, he wiped them on his lungi so that the old gunk absorbed
the new gunk. From time to time, when he splashed water over the fish, a swarm
of flies flew up, and only then could you see how small the fish were, and
which type. The filthy water and cast off fish parts flowed down a drain and
collected in a canister. When he sold a big fish, he used a cleaver to hack at
it, and the blood and guts flowed into this canister. When the canister filled
up, he set it to the side and started using another. Standing on their hind
legs, cats would dart their mouths forward to catch the discarded meat parts as
the refuse slid toward the canister. Those watching were terrified that the
cleaver might suddenly clip one of the cat’s heads and then – POP! When a young
woman came by to buy fish, the fish-seller would make a fist and shout curses
longingly at the cats. In one hour, he sold two full canisters for one anna
each. A man told me that the poor would cook their rice in it to give it a
fishy aroma. Three households shared one canister. Among the poor, only those
that were relatively better off cold afford this luxury!
Although the narrative
vividly displays a warts-and-all picture of Karachi and the lower social class
inhabitants, it is also a work richly filled with nostalgia, dreaming, talking
of times that were better. Our book’s title refers to nostalgia; “The river of
memories flowed on, but it descended into the mirages of the mind”. Even our
author gets nostalgic, one of the many footnotes:
It’s sad that we’re quickly losing track of
the old and beautiful names of colours. Tomorrow who will be able to recognize
them? Vermillion, nut brown, aloeswood, jujube, cotton, azure, camel, emerald,
red onion, scarlet, grass, dark purple, chicory, nacre, pearl, lotus, light
green, pale yellow, falso-berry purple, jumun-fruit mauve, tobacco, golden,
watermelon, earthen, ochre, mung dal, mulberry, orange, grape, raisin, dove,
deep purple, pistachio, peach, peacock, ebony, ambergris, henna, violet,
saffron, pale purple, as well as mystical and vulgar. If we’ve buried our
word-hoards in the earth, then that’s one thing. But we’ve also buried the
rainbows that sprang from the womb of our land.
Khan Sahib is a wood
merchant and broker, he comes to Karachi to retrieve a bad debt from Basharat,
as is custom whilst in Karachi he stays at Basharat’s home and we then enter
into a plethora of tales about this larger than life character. Our book is
bursting with cultural gems:
Khan Sahib’s frequent visits to Karachi to
recover his arrears made him fluent in seven languages. I mean, he could curse
in Urdu, Persian, Gujarati, and four local languages. As far as possible, he
cursed out the objects of his displeasure in their mother tongue. But if he
happened to run short of swearwords, or felt like they weren’t having any
impact, or if the person was really shameless, then he hammered the last nails
into his coffin with some choice Pashto phrases, which cursed out several
generations of his ancestors. There’s no doubt that the Koka_Shastra – curse
words that are in vogue here make English curses (and those of all other
languages) seem like feather pillow for a pillow fight, or the gurgling of
babies burping up breast milk.
The gradual loss of
Urdu language, the cultural impact is a subject that also crops up throughout.
Remember, Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi himself moved to Pakistan when Hindi replaced
Urdu as the official language in their area, these events, trickling through to
our novel:
How could it possibly be that your beloved
tongue is cut off at the root, the flag of sincere tolerance is lowered, and
yet the culture left over would flourish?
Basharat often says that he will never forget
how and illiterate Pathan from Peshawar made him give up his stilted style of
greeting, which has been nurtured in his family for four generations.
In the section “Two
Tales of the City” (of course a play on Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities”) we
suddenly learn of Basharat’s wife’s death and he himself starts to suffer from
nostalgia. There is a wonderful quote to describe this, however our
“Introduction” uses such so I’ll move on.
You know you are in
for a ride when the introduction to your book says it’s “a challenging book. It
is challenging because of its length but more so due to its erudition.” Never one
to shirk a challenge, and given I was looking forward to reading some Urdu
fiction in translation, I dived straight in. And what a wonderfully colourful
and rich world we have.
Personally this is one
of my highlights of 2015, yes a difficult book, but not as daunting as our
introduction leads you to believe, a journey into a different world, a cultural
gem and one that will surely be included in debates when the Best Translated
Book Award nominees are being discussed.
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