By Gaurav Dikshit

The incantatory quality of Urdu writer Naiyer Masud’s ‘fictional universe’–as translator Muhammad Umar Memon puts it–would seem witchcraftish to isolated and uncertain readers. Brittle and fluid, the painstakingly imagined worlds of these short stories have no resemblance in world literature. As silent and palpable as a dream, they rustle the senses until one realizes they are quite unprecedented in form and as ambitious in their idea of fiction and of tragedy.

Masud has said his stories are based on his dreams, some recurring over months which he keeps recording on waking up. He has also confessed to be a ghar-ghusna (stayer-at-home), a phrase quintessentially of Lucknow, the city where he has lived all his life in the house his father built. Writing his first story at the age of 12, he retained its plot when he began publishing at 35. He has survived by teaching Persian at the Lucknow University, though he says “My true occupation, at any rate, is reading and, occasionally, writing.” In being a writer of fiction, he is making a substantive claim to the space in literature for the singular voice, standing up for solitude in the common interest, as it were. To be able to write, he has said, one must either be very good or very different.

The first story in Snake Catcher, Obscure Domains Of Fear And Desire, is the first of four of five stories in Masud’s first published collection Seemiya (‘Metamorphosis’ or ‘the art of creating illusions’) that have been retained in their original order by Memon, heeding Muhammad Salim-ur-Rehman’s observation that “as if deep down there were a prolific intermingling of roots” among the Seemiya stories. The story consists of fragments, the first of which opens with “We kept looking at each other, in silence, for the longest time ever,” and the second: “I have given up talking, not looking.” The exact words are encountered again in The Resting Place, which in fact reproduces towards the end the beginning of the first story. The Woman In Black ends with “I shut the door and was never able to open it again”, returning at once to the prefatory quotation of the previous story: “Hide–but where? Each door I close opens up another.” Each story is a series of complete fragments, and stands on its own, yet the four Seemiya stories together defy all genres.

Masud’s stories are emphatically personal. They record his fantasies and shames but the despair is contemptuous of sentimentality. His characters seem afflicted with anxiety at first, but possess ambitions that leave behind hope. His narrative technique appears to feed on illusion, but employs a sensuality that makes dachment impossible. A character wanders into ‘total darkness’ and relates his experience–a frantic squinting of eyes, deep breaths in search of smell–with such feeling and honesty it engenders empathy in the reader. For all the strangeness of his imaginary universe, and the silence of his solitary characters, that Masud is speaking the truth becomes progressively obvious.

Masud’s refusal to speak of the world as it were is not an exercise in abstraction but a Wittgensteinian strategy– What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence. Time in his stories is coeval with consciousness; it is hurried at moments of arousal, it is still at moments of consummation. His characters are conscious of that at all moments. Masud resolutely claims storytime as a distinct category. The temporal structure both enables and determines the story.

A passionate lover of poetry, Masud has said he takes enormous pains to cut out poetic characteristics from his fiction, once challenging a translator to discover a single metaphor in his work. Clipped, utterly bare, his prose has nevertheless compelled Agha Shahid Ali to say Masud is “without doubt, a poet’s storyteller.” Masud has said he’s found Kafka’s style useful, but in the tradition of Lucknow’s urdu literature he comes from, he comes out of nowhere. And the comparison with Kafka is fallacious. Masud is tormented neither by modernity nor his family.

Like the Bhulbhulaiyyan of his beloved Lucknow, the architecture of Masud’s stories seduces the reader into a labyrinth from where she has to find her way out on her own. Accused of being baffling, his stories are extremely reassuring to those who believe the writer should be above all honest. Penguin’s investment into translating Indian regional literature should be a cause for cheer.

(Guest contribution for Kafila. Gaurav is a fellow Lakhnavi and a journalist with a daily newspaper in Delhi.)