Reviews and Essays

Emerging at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Urdu short story straight away engaged with the era’s most pressing concerns – colonialism, inequality and the subconscious – while also artfully making use of European Modernism, Perso-Arabic prose and folkloric storytelling traditions. The legacy of the short story in Urdu has been continued in the West by writers like Nadeem Aslam, who was born in 1966 and writes in English; but most of the fiction in Urdu that receives attention in the English-speaking world was written by those born before India’s Partition in 1947. The best-known of those authors is Saadat Hasan Manto, a translator of Oscar Wilde and Victor Hugo, who tried to remain free of dogma in an age of nascent idealism. His dark tales of freedom fighters, murderers, necrophilia and brothels, offer cynical yet sensitive portraits of the years surrounding India’s Independence. As Mazhar ul Islam puts it, Manto “wanted to show mankind a true picture of itself”.

Mazhar ul Islam, a Pakistani civil servant and short-story writer, was born two years after Partition. The Season of Love, Bitter Almonds and Delayed Rains, his first book to be published in English, is a collection of fiction, poems and essays from the past two decades, rendered into colloquial English by Christopher Shackle. Echoes of Manto are evident in “The Sound of a Pot Breaking at Nightfall”, a neorealist tale of death and forbidden love. Silky, a sweeper, is an Untouchable Christian who works for an upper-class Muslim bookseller, Mr Ehsan, a “man of liberal views”. He encourages her not only to clean for him, but to cook, wash his clothes and even study in his home, though this breaks the rules of religion, class and caste. Astounded by her master’s humaneness, Silky becomes obsessively devoted to him, while he grows enamoured of her beauty and loyalty and eventually attempts to kiss her. Unable to abandon her pre-ordained place in society, she shuns him.

When her blood-drenched corpse is discovered, Ehsan believes her death was suicide. “Now I remember how she once said, ‘Mr Ehsan, if I don’t do what you tell me to, may God grant that I die!’” For ul Islam, it is impossible for love to transcend religious and class differences to become a romance. Society’s hierarchical framework is deeply internalized by Silky the sweeper, and while Mr Ehsan attempts to transcend the confines of conservatism, he is entrenched in a world rife with inequity and hypocrisy. His honesty only brings misery. Ehsan is a familiar figure in ul Islam’s world – one who suffers from the “disease of truth”.

I wish that more of this collection’s realist tales were as well crafted and nuanced as this one. But many of the narratives read like fables and are ridden with simplistic irony. The strongest stories are the surreal Borgesian ones that defy interpretation, in which watchmen morph into wolves, and people get trapped in cups of tea, and tape recorders and cameras are juxtaposed with figures from Punjabi folklore. In “The Sand’s Edge”, a man returns from work to find a heap of sand in front of his home. He hesitantly steps on it and is transported to the Cholistan Desert, the subject of the Sufi saint Khwaja Farid’s lyrical poetry. There, he is greeted by an enchanting woman who seems to be the desert’s human incarnation. Ul Islam describes the scene as having “the fresh clearness of a young woman who had just bathed”. His otherwise terse prose is regularly lightened with such ethereal images, which are deftly translated by Shackle. The voyager and his sublime companion take a camel ride to the tomb of a holy man. During their journey, Sufi utterances that are critical of the sanctimonious forms of Islam descend on them “like revelations”. Throughout his work, ul Islam makes clear his discontent with institutionalized Islam in Pakistan and finds solace in the religion’s mystical and philosophical forms.

The man in the story has to to return to a world that cannot be reconciled with his spiritual, rural utopia. His female guide’s parting words, “You’re someone who’s completely off track”, suggest disillusionment with modern life, a recurring theme in this book. In another story, a man goes mad and complains that “the city has become full of ignorance and want. We’re being beaten with rifle butts and made to dance like monkeys”. The main source of this disenchantment seems to be life in a country that has been plagued by martial law, human rights violations, and censorship. “My people have spent a lifetime in oppression / In their homes / The atmosphere of jails was sown / In their true words / The poison of lies was mingled”.

The Season of Love, Bitter Almonds and Delayed Rains is a heartfelt, poetic critique of Pakistani society. In an era when the Indian English-language novel predominates in the West, it is an important addition to the corpus of South Asian literature available in English. Defined by diverse elements – Sufi poetry, Punjabi folklore, Picasso and Kundera – it is a mirror that chillingly reflects all of humanity’s shortcomings.