A writer’s angst

Tales that bring together fable and myth, illusion and reality, pain and laughter.

May 02, 2015 03:09 pm | Updated 03:09 pm IST

What Will You Give For This Beauty?; Ali Akbar Natiq, trs Ali Madeeh Hashmi, Penguin, Rs. 299.

What Will You Give For This Beauty?; Ali Akbar Natiq, trs Ali Madeeh Hashmi, Penguin, Rs. 299.

Ali Akbar Natiq’s powerful and violent collection of short stories takes the reader to the heart of the untamed spaces of his native Pakistan’s rural Punjab. The landscape is familiar and the stories — reminiscent of Manto and Premchand — come across as a multifaceted fusion of hate and shame, betrayal and bitterness. Natiq weaves together different stories with the warmth, mischief and anger of a writer casting an acerbic eye on his native land.

‘Jeera’s Departure’, the opening story, ends on a dismal note with the sacrifice of the storyteller Jeera so that the Beas would once again return to its original glory. Overwhelmed by superstitions, the villagers believe that ‘the river is disappointed with us. When we stopped offering sacrifices to it, it stopped our livelihoods. Our lands have become desert.’ The charismatic storyteller once provoked Pir Moday Shah who offered him an award for telling a gripping story. Jeera had the audacity to ask for his white stallion. Religious men are easily angered and take revenge like all commoners. Natiq’s derision for religion in stories like ‘The Maulvi’s Miracle’ and ‘The Mason’s Hand’ is apparent.

His characters contain wild, nearly irreconcilable traits as seen in ‘Qaim Deen’, a heartbreaking story of a thief who braves the river and snake-infested forest to steal cattle across the border, only to help the poor in his community. But nature does not spare him, as his fellowmen declare him mad and tie him to a tree where he is finally drowned in the angry waters before help arrives.

The last story ‘The Mason’s Hands’ blends pain and hunger through the image of Asghar who is led out of the lock-up to be punished by the chopping off of his hands for stealing shoes outside a mosque. Penniless in Saudi Arabia, Asghar’s experience is shared by the immigrants who leave their homes in search of prosperity. Asghar’s father warns him: ‘You should do what you think is good for you. But let me tell you one thing. There is nothing but humiliation in those Arab places.” Moreover, religious faith or life in the shadow of the apathetic mosques in Medina has no solace for Asghar’s terrifying litany of misfortune ending in the loss of his hands on which his profession as a mason depends. The final outcome is a blow but it is the strength of the story that finally makes us realise that the end could not have been any different. Life’s struggle with traditional beliefs, with economic deprivation in a hopeless and bleak world of homelessness, vagabondage, philistine godheads, family dysfunction and the decline and fall of communities is intrinsic to the culture that Natiq satirises, condemns or laments.

Natiq is unable to free himself from ritual, ceremony and romance, an obsessive struggle of imaginative escapes that are mysterious and illuminating. And, despite a world of despair and despondency, the feeling that this world is the creation of God with all its glory and splendour pervades his fiction. The brief experience of nature’s blessings in an arid land is visible in the sad life of Asghar as he takes rest in Medina: ‘He put his bag next to one of the trees and entered the moonlight orchard. In the final hours of the night, the moonlight filtering through the date trees in the desert transported him into a world of wonder.’ Fable and myth, illusion and reality, pain and laughter come together in Ali Akbar Natiq’s assured and light-footed creative act of confronting the inevitable world of harsh reality.

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