Kooza is a collection of vignettes and short stories published by Oxford University Press (OUP) with the stories selected and edited by Zahra Sabri. As the foreword to the 40 written pieces explains, the idea was to get unpublished writers to send in works in the Urdu language.

This time the language is native and the geographical net widespread. The places that become the setting for many of these brief narrative accounts range from London and Dubai, to rural Punjab; the writers also hail from a diverse range of cities and provinces.

There is no central motif to the book and the writers were asked to write about whatever they wanted. However, this doesn’t mean there’s no unifying theme to these writings; there are consistencies of language and settings. As Sabri explains in the foreword, “it was interesting to look for the kind of things people write about in Urdu when asked to write about anything.”

Poverty and religious fanaticism are frequently evoked to lend structure to the stories. Most vignettes are about financial struggles, the difficulties and burdens of the working class in Pakistan, and their vulnerabilities in the face of a self-righteous clergy and corrupt autocrats.

This theme is set with the very first story Dhai Kafir (Two and a half infidels) by Ahmed Majeed. A Christian, a Hindu and a Shia Hazara are seeking safe passage abroad through illegal immigration after their lives come to violent impasse in Pakistan. A station house officer — with a zealous father who longs for the day his son will kill non-believers in a police encounter — uses the excuse of these three men breaking the law to do just that.

Another story, Gujji Aur Gujja Peer by Ahmed Mumtaz, centres around the mother of a young boy killed while waging jihad in Kashmir. As the mother of a ‘martyr’ she gets the kind of social attention, especially by a cleric, that she has never received before in her life, having always been a domestic worker, poverty ridden and with no social standing. She is dazed and confused by her newfound status and despite the grief of losing a son, welcomes it because she doesn’t know what else to do.

Though the stories eventually lighten up, poverty and religious fanaticism persist as themes. There are a few interesting digressions, however.

Yaad Sitaare by Tasneem Kausar is about a woman thinking back to how her household would be gripped in excitement when her mother used to pull out an old sandooq in which all her family’s heirlooms, trinkets and possessions were contained. Her own household, now that she’s a mother herself, displays no interest at all in these things, being consumed with their cellular phones and the internet, she recounts ruefully.

Hamare Gher Mein Bhi ‘Youm e Haqooq e Naswan Manaya’ Gya by Hooriya Gul, is about a woman who demands women’s rights be recognised by way of asking her husband to hire domestic help because she is sick and tired of cleaning rooms all day. But the help hired is also a woman, a fact ironically mentioned at the end when the mistress is off to a women’s rights rally while the working woman is directed to clean the toilets.

You Damn Saala by Naeem Baig is an interesting account about a man migrating to Dubai for employment and meeting another unemployed man from India who doesn’t speak much Urdu so his dialogue is English transliterated to Nasta’liq.

Urdu itself is a prominent theme in some tales. Urdu Ka Kaam by Daud Malik is about two students who spot a teacher of theirs from back in school, who used to give impassioned monologues on the demise and neglect of Urdu and the need for its revival. They find him at a shop with his son. When his son asks for something in Urdu, the former teacher corrects him by encouraging him to repeat the same request in English.

Such subtle ironies dot the narrative observations in Kooza. At times they feel like personal memoirs while at times they are just a few pages of descriptive writing, a slice of life, the setting of a scene from a film or perhaps a chapter from a novel.

Rozina by Muhammad Arif is about a woman who is in college while also doing a secretarial job in the morning. She lights up an otherwise masculine office with her femininity. There is a half-page long sentence simply describing her appearance and character, and at times the two merge and become the same. The writing is literary, dense in metaphors, and the depiction wistful.

Some of the vignettes, however, come across as didactic and sermonising, a facet the foreword recognises; it is always a challenge to encourage people to write without dictating what they should or should not write about. Also, some of the stories have an underlying moral lesson to them.

The collection is a wonderful window into both the plight of contemporary Urdu literature and its possibilities. There is a generation of young writers who want to tackle difficult topics like ethnicity, language, religion, mortality, and life.

They seem eager to uncover the ironies of life and one hopes OUP will soon follow up with another volume, with stories of a more superior quality. Several writers part of this collection deserve to be published again.

Kooza
(Short Stories)
Selection and introduction by Zahra Sabri
Oxford University Press, 2015
173pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, July 24th, 2016