The related but distinct muses of history and storytelling are distraught. An era in fiction has come to its end. Literary scholarship and research-based historiography are much the poorer. A city and the entire civilisation it had come to symbolise with all its elegance and finesse has receded into the annals of literature. As Naiyer Masud moves on to take his place among the assembly of the immortals, not only has contemporary Urdu literature lost one of its finest and richest voices, but the whole complex Lucknavi tehzeeb that informed his world view and that he had come to symbolise through his writings, seems dead and bygone. People like him are not born again and with their passing away a whole period is transformed into lost time.

A scholar and literary historian by training, Masud was a born storyteller. Already well-established as a meticulous researcher and distinguished scholar of Urdu and Persian, he surprised the literary world by taking up fiction. That the first stories were not a matter of beginner’s luck or accidental, even incidental, was borne out when he steadily went on to write more stories. The surprise was not in the fact that a leading scholar, with a reputation for being a stickler for facts, had turned towards fiction; the surprise was the kind of stories he was writing. Like nothing else in Urdu literature, the superbly crafted stories seemed to be woven out of the substance of dreams, a fine gossamer made out of insubstantiality, but completely real. They were elusive, elliptical, mysterious and mystifying. Nobody could claim to fully understand or grasp their meaning, and at the same time their spell was irresistible and nobody could deny the ingenuity that had gone into their writing.

A perfectionist to the core, Masud could never have been a prolific writer. His output was limited to 35 stories published in four collections. He once told me that he started writing stories as a teenager, but established his name as a researcher. He published his first stories in Shabkhoon, the modernist journal edited by Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, a literary icon and late-blooming fictionist himself. Many people were ready to believe that these stories could not be anything but translations. They were set in mystifying locations and written in a neat and clean style, completely drained of the kind of idiomatic expressions Urdu writers generally take great pride in using, sometimes to the extent of being overbearing. His first collection, Simiya, came out in 1984. The book baffled many readers and M. Salim-ur-Rahman, an astute critic of literature, described these as “intertextured stories” with “a certain opaqueness” and defying “any consensus of interpretation.” Masud’s style seems even more perfected in Itr-i-Kafur, published in 1990. Intizar Husain regarded him as the most important fiction writer of the day.

Acclaimed scholar and storyteller Naiyer Masud passed away on July 24, 2017, at the age of 80

Next came a story surprising even for Masud himself. This was Taoos Chaman Ki Mynah, the title story in the collection published in 1997. It showed a departure from the previous stories, as it had a clearly recognisable locale, a Lucknow opulent under its last ruler Wajid Ali Shah. The storyteller is well-served by the historical researcher as every bit of detail comes alive in the formally perfect tale of the theft of the talking mynah from the royal cage and its stay with a little girl whose name it learns to repeat, leading to the discovery of the daring crime. The ancient, but now lost, game of ganjifa provided the title story of his last volume that came out in 2008. A few stories remained uncollected. Masud was well-served by his translator, Muhammad Umar Memon, who slowly and meticulously translated all of his stories, initially published in separate volumes but later as Collected Stories published in 2015 — a volume to be cherished and read over and over again. Since then these stories have gone on to be translated into French, Spanish and Finnish. Masud, with his immaculate expression, speaks to the world.

Putting a perfect gem to light, a dramatic reading of Taoos Chaman Ki Mynah was given by the talented Zambeel Dramatic Readings group. When I had the privilege to introduce it at T2F in Karachi, presented through the charismatic Sabeen Mahmud, I could not help remarking that the mynah could well be seen as a symbol of the Urdu language or the princely India soon to be colonised and devastated forever. Few stories are so clear and sharp in their description and yet so vividly manage to give a glimpse of things beyond their confines.

Masud’s fiction has overshadowed the other books he wrote. He made his mark with a book on the life and works of Rajab Ali Baig Suroor, the author of Fasana-i-Ajaib and a trumpet-bearer of Lucknow who would hardly find any champions today. Masud wrote a number of critical and historical essays, but his most remarkable book is the study of Mir Anis, a lifelong passion for him. More than a literary biography, it is a vivid and rich study of anything and everything to do with marsiya, almost encyclopaedic in its scope. Among his essays, I can never forget the study of the marsiya about Za’far the Jinn. He wrote a number of fine essays on fiction writers as well as interpretations of verses by Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib. No less remarkable as a translator, he went on to render short stories from Persian into Urdu and a short book of Franz Kafka’s tales. He wrote a radio play and exceptional stories for children as well.

All of Masud’s writings are deeply rooted in his particular time and place. Born in 1936 in Lucknow, he was the scion of Masood Hussain Rizvi Adeeb, a well-known scholar of his day. Masud followed his father’s footsteps by completing a PhD first in Urdu, then in Persian, and became associated with the Lucknow University. Shy and retiring by nature, he lived a scholar’s life in his circle of friends. He seldom ever travelled and Lucknow became the world for him — a subject always under study and inexhaustible in its extent.

With great pride and inexhaustible knowledge, he set out to guide my first steps into this city. My visit was preceded by many years of exchanging letters (he was a very considerate letter writer) and I was fortunate to stay with him in his splendid family mansion, the aptly-named Adabistan, built by his father. Nothing else could have made my initiation into the city complete. He introduced me to the legendary Tunday kay kabab and Chowk ki balai, and then arranged for me to see the kotha of Kali Umrao Jan, a historical figure who may well have inspired Lucknow’s well-known fictional figure.

The difficulties of communications between India and Pakistan notwithstanding, he kept up a steady exchange of letters and books. He allowed me to bring out some of his books from Karachi. With his encouragement, I collected his critical essays on fiction and later on compiled a volume of his selected short stories. He sent me the manuscript of an expanded edition of his Ghalib essays. In his latter years he was bed-ridden and slowly his literary activities declined. Frail, he was not in good health when I last saw him. His letters had become shorter and shorter, declined in frequency and then ceased entirely. He was already on the downward slope. I sensed a foreboding when the last book I received from him came without his characteristic signature. The gentle, kind and affectionate figure is how I like to remember him — cultured to the core. He was a mentor who encouraged me to expand my literary horizons, to read and to write. A gentle light has gone out of the literary world, but the name Naiyer Masud will burn bright in my heart as long as I live.

The writer has edited Naiyer Masud’s critical essays on fiction and a volume of his selected short stories, published by Oxford Univeristy Press

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, July 30th, 2017