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April 14, 2002
REVIEW: Leaving home
DOOR KI AWAZ is a collection of fourteen short stories by Feroze Mookerjee, which are mostly tales of people who leave their country for distant shores. However, the stories are not about yearnings for the past or infatuation with the West and the consequent moralizing of how good the country left behind was and so on. These are stories of lives as they are lived, as a mixture of the old and the new.
Feroze Mookerjee was born in Lucknow. She was educated in Lucknow and Aligarh and migrated to Karachi soon after Partition. Here she entered journalism and wrote for the Civil and Military Gazette and for Dawn. However, she went back to Lucknow and then migrated to Britain in 1968 and settled there permanently. Even in her new home it was very difficult for her to forego the literary sensitivities of Lucknow. This was ingrained in her soul and perhaps this is why her topic for her PhD dissertation was Lucknow and the world of Sarshar. She has been writing Urdu short stories ever since she was a student.
At one time, Mookerjee wrote a popular column in a newspaper called Awaz and also published a magazine from London called Jumbish-i-Nau. Needless to say Feroze writes primarily about women and their oppression at the hands their husbands, other women and sometimes even their sons. All this is now part of societal norms.
Feroze’s most famous short story is ‘Ranai-i-khayal’, included in this collection, which in terms of its technique and story line is considered among the best short stories in Urdu. It revolves around her favourite theme of how men having given the title of ‘the better half’ to women have, in fact, totally controlled them by making them believe that they are indeed weak and in need of man’s protection.
But in “Ranai-i-khayal” the woman does break away from the ‘better half’ syndrome by proving that neither men nor women are each others’ keepers. The protagonist, Raaj, when committing an act of transgression tells herself, “I am Deepak’s wife, but not his property”, and she decides that she has the same right over her life as her husband has over his.
“Sadaqat Hussein Khan ki kahani un hi ki zubani” is the story of a man who is a gay and has no interest in women. However, on the insistence of his mother he marries a woman and on the wedding night tells his bride, “I am not going to touch you. Just tell me whether you want to sleep on the bed or the sofa?” Homosexuality is a new topic in Urdu literature and this is why this story is important. Although the narrator is a man the story is basically of the choices his wife makes. She lives within the unconsummated marriage but has children. When the children are grown up and leave home she too walks away to live a life of her own.
“Moolsari ka phool” and “Purana ghar naye basti” are stories of people who go abroad seeking a good life, while focusing exclusively on solving their economic problems. In the process they create many new ones for themselves. The former is the story of a child who is left behind with his grandmother while his parents leave the country in search of greener pastures. The child grows up thinking that the grandmother is his mother. When the parents come and get him, his mother is a stranger to him. When women leave their children behind they create a deep wound in their psyche that is seldom filled.
“Purana ghar naye basti” is the story of the upheaval that took place in the wake of Partition. People left their ancestral homes, in most cases, out of compulsion to start afresh in a new country. In this story, the extended family which lived in Lucknow has migrated and only two elderly widowed sisters have been left behind.
The heroine of the story, Abida, is the daughter of one of them and lives in America. She comes to Lucknow not only to visit her mother but also to rekindle the romantic notions of her youth. What, however, is so charming about the story is the grandmother’s complaint that her daughters haven’t been taught to speak Urdu and the older lady cannot converse with them. On the other hand, she tells the young girls to speak their American English slowly to enable her to understand the American dialect. So while the land is old the inhabitants are new and new paradigms have to be set to take the relationships forward.
“Anmol wirsa”, “Yadein”, “Ilteja”, “Talaash mein” are all stories which find a whiff of the past, that is, the homes left behind. But the story unfolds into new vistas like the lands the protagonists seek and find. The nuances of the daily life in these new lands are woven into the story and skirt around the problems and weaknesses of the society left behind. The first three stories mentioned above are particularly poignant and touch the heart.
The stories in Door ki awaz are among the ones which have broken new ground in Urdu literature. For one, like Asad Muhammad Khan and Muhammad Khalid Akhtar to name a few, Feroze has overcome the trauma of Partition and the ‘red fort’ syndrome, which seems to haunt many Urdu writers, and writes about life as it comes. She derives her inspiration from middle class urban dwellers of big impersonal cities, who struggle with new economic and social realities.
Even in her personal life she is a true representative of the ‘gunga jamni’ culture of Lucknow with its value system and philosophy. There is a rebellious streak in her stories and her characters are also defiant.
The book is well designed and the painting on the jacket cover by noted artist Nahid Raza gives the book a thoroughly modern look.
Door ki awaz (short stories)
By Feroze Mookerjee
City Press, 316 Madina City Mall, Abdullah Haroon Road, Karachi-74400 Tel: 021-5650623, 5213916
Email: cp@citypress.cc Website:
www.citypress.cc
145pp. Rs150
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