Open Magazine – August 07, 2018

http://www.openthemagazine.com 51

‘W

hat you end up
remembering isn’t always
the same as what you
have witnessed,’ writes Julian Barnes
in Sense of an Ending (2011). Memory,
one of the trickiest devices in literature
and life, often tends to trap the reader in
an enmeshed series of past events. not
so with Intizar husain (1925-2016), an
award-winning urdu writer whose styl-
ised prose is a longing for the tormented
past and a critique of it at the same time.
It is widely agreed that husain’s unique
blend of the supernatural, mythical and
uncanny in shorter forms of writing was
ahead of its times. this past in Din aur
Dastan is characterised by the turmoil
of 1947 and the forced uprooting of
millions of families that marred
husain’s psyche. nostalgia, a frequent
traveller in his works, exists not only to
interrupt time, but also to rebel, to give
the future a chance at life.
Din, or ‘day’, the first novella, like
most of husain’s fiction, relies heavily
on slumber and half-awakened dreamy
states. the tone of sentences like, ‘the
past floated around him like a fragrance;
an interminable sequence of long nights
and scorching afternoons; like a half-
forgotten dream’ gives us a sensation of

the dream-like. time and its navigation

are recounted effectively, showing the

author’s technical mastery. the meet-

ing point of multiple time zones often

coalesce in sleep; in fact, sleep acts as

a political thread in this book. Zamir,

whose memory guides the tale of a haveli

lost to Partition, is seen trying to conceal/

heal/reveal through sleep. It’s what falls

victim to the intersection of personal

and political trauma. as SJ Williams

argues in The Politics of Sleep: Governing

(Un)consciousness in the Late Modern Age

(2011) , ‘[Sleep] problems or concerns

regarding sleep are not simply a product

of society, but a prism or point of articu-

lation and amplification for a range of

other fears, worries, frustrations and

anxieties regarding contemporary life

and living’.

husain’s prose is more relevant now

than before because it reflects how

human fears find an outlet in story-

telling. the world doesn’t operate in a

vacuum. Rather, it functions in contigu-

ous relationship with the non-human

world. the erasure of elements from the

latter and impatience to listen to their

voices are reasons for a kind of spiritual

and intellectual decay to the author’s

mind. In Morenama (‘a Chronicle of the

Peacocks’), he had shown how human

decadence could be carefully studied

from the perspective of peacocks. of this

work, Keki n daruwalla had stated that

husain operates in ‘that twilight zone

between fable and parable’.

this is true of Din aur Dastan too;

the second part of the book transforms

‘history into the fantastic’ through the

use of high, elite, classic idiomatic style.

Written in the dastangoi oral tradition,

the tale is meant to be read aloud. In The

Story of the Shershahi Tower, the battle-

field of hazrat Shershah Suri is laid

down so visually that most expressions

may get lost if read solely as text. For in-

stance, ‘the earth reverberated with the

thunder of galloping horses, which even

reached the ears of the cow that holds up

the earth on its horns’ is such a fascinat-

ing expression that readers will pine for

more. this holds true especially for the

reader who doesn’t understand urdu.

If the act of translation means to bear

meaning across, let it also bear across the

meaning of the untranslatable. For me,

the untranslatable heaviness of husain’s

prose lies in places of forbidden sleep

and the languor of incomplete dreams.

that is where the story defiantly marks

its journey. and because long-lasting

stories are truly stories of wandering,

they also remind us how days go futile

in fighting over marked territories of the

‘nation’. husain in his later interviews

lamented the fate of in-between identi-

ties. So do his stories, seeking to rest not

in geographically tied boundaries, but

beyond. nishat Zaidi and alok Bhalla’s

translation is an ode to that vagabond

spirit that was husain. as a storyteller,

he had put it so well: ‘Kahani toh \awara

hoti hai (a story is always vagabond)’. n

books

The Art of Dreaming

Stories of memory and migration

By Rini Barman

Day anD Dastan:

two novellas

Intizar Husain

Translated by Nishat Zaidi

and Alok Bhalla

Niyogi Books

190 Pages | Rs 395

saurabh singh