June 8, 2003

Naiyer Masud is one of the finest contemporary Urdu short story writers, whose work captivates the reader as it opens up a window to a transient and fleeting world mirrored in the inner, subjective worlds of ordinary people — perfumist, apothecary, mason, snake-catcher, occultist, chronicler, gardener, and wanderer, among others. What distinguishes his fictional world is the authenticity despite the dreamy ambience. Masud derives his raw material from the real world and skillfully chips away the solidity of things, of objects, of feelings, and attempts to uncover what lies underneath. Shorn of specificities, unanchored in locale, Masud’s stories lend themselves to an aura of mystery and universality.

A modest and frail man, Naiyer Masud lives in his ancestral home in Lucknow, India, along with his wife, three daughters and a son. Relatively less known in the subcontinent among the readers even till today, Naiyer Masud, a noted scholar of Persian and Urdu, is writing fiction since 1971. He won immediate acclaim for his distinct literary form and content in the West when his stories were translated into English and introduced by Professor Mohammad Umar Memon who devoted the entire 1997 volume of The Annual of Urdu Studies, Centre for South Asia, University of Wisconsin, to Naiyer Masud.

A year later, ten stories published in The Annual were printed as a collection, The Essence of Camphor, in 1998, by Katha, India and in a shorter version (containing six stories) in 1999 by The New Press, New York. His stories, since then, have been translated into French, German, Italian and Hebrew.

Written in elegant, lyrical prose, woven with graphic details, and mostly told in the first person, Masud’s stories capture the lives of marginalized communities, of individuals living on the fringes of society or engaged in occupations that are slowly dying out. In the process, Masud chronicles vanishing values, fading culture, dying institutions and withering relations in a society in throes of change. The reader, while traversing the narrator’s universe, feels the currents of turbulent change underneath the calm, shimmering surface.

Masud has an uncanny gift for weaving artistically three elements of life — time, space and movement — together in his stories. Time flows back and forth — past and present, childhood and adulthood. Space, both man-made and natural, assumes life of its own; rooms, doors, arches, pillars, trees, lakes, jungles, and wastelands throb and pulsate. Movements of animate beings and inanimate objects, human gestures and gesticulation appear choreographed, forming irreducible part of the whole composition of the story.

In “Nudba” (Lamentation), one of his finest stories, the restless wanderer driven with a desire to learn about human settlements roams from one place to another in his ancient land, observing and spending time with communities that are slowly dying out. The wanderer-narrator confesses humbly that he didn’t learn much about these communities because he never stayed long enough in any community and whatever little and confused information he could gather was expelled from his mind soon. With the exception of one thing that clung to his memory: their ritual of congregational lament on death.

The men sat on their haunches in a row on the bare earth, with the women sitting likewise in a row facing them. Each man-woman pair would touch first elbows, then wrists, then slap each other’s palms, then interlock their fingers and say whatever was needed to be said; they would then separate and once again link their elbows and repeat their words. Their lament would rise repeatedly in a crescendo, then begin to fall, then rise up again, like the ebb and flow of the sea, until everyone’s eyes were rolling back in their heads. They all finished the lament in faint, quavering voices, and dripping with sweat, pulled away.

(From “Lamentation”, translation by Prof Mohammad Umar Memon)

In “Nosh Daru”, Masud weaves a story of two aging indigenous pharmacists — teacher and disciple. The simple, yet many-layered story gives us the glimpses of a world that has disappeared within the lifetime of a single generation. The teacher and his disciple once combed together riverbeds, ponds, lakes and woods to collect herbs, resins, and pollens to prepare formulae. Now they are aged and dying. The age-old institution of teaching and learning, that passed on from ustad to shagird is gone. The disciple’s grandson runs an English pharmacy and the teacher’s son doesn’t practice the apothecary’s trade. A crucial change in society is revealed through the fact that the teacher is a Muslim and the disciple Hindu. Once in the subcontinent, people belonging to different faiths and beliefs bonded together, co-mingled, learned from and taught one another.

In “Sheesha Ghat”, the story that won the Katha Award for Creative Fiction in 1997, Masud tells us a strange, beautiful, dream-like story of five people whose lives crossed paths in a glassmakers’ settlement blackened with soot: a boy who stutters, a middle-aged poor man who has adopted the boy, a village clown who earns his livelihood through mimicking, a shape-less, middle-aged, woman who lives on a big boat by the lake, her delicate, mysterious daughter who roams the lake on a tiny boat.

A remarkable quality of Naiyer Masud’s writing is its restraint: it is subtle, muted and low-keyed, free of even the slightest trace of sentimentalism, yet not devoid of pathos. Masud says that the restraint is deliberate: he writes a story at length, then takes out parts from it that leaves the reader wondering, questioning, in her own mind, and arriving at her own interpretations. And that is exactly what Masud wants: igniting the reader’s imagination.

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