June 29, 2003

The wind rustles in the corridor. A door opens in the distance. Some people are talking in the room at the end of the corridor. A little girl walks across a field, book in hand. She dreams a story. One day she may write it down on paper and not realize that she is becoming a writer in the process. An aging woman holds a viewmaster over her eyes, changing the picture with a swift click of the hand.

She dreams of the Niagara falls, planning a journey to the majestic waterfall and a voyage in the Maid of the Mist. The journey keeps getting postponed like so many of life’s unrequited secret ambitions. But her dreams of the voyage fade from her heart as her husband keeps postponing it on one pretext or the other and finally reveals that the passionate waterfall had come to be some sort of a rival for him.

Heart disease takes its toll and what is left is the woman with the viewmaster in her hand and the longing for a journey in her heart. Talking about her books and stories, Razia Fasih Ahmad peers over her glasses to look me in the eye. We are sitting in her drawing room and the conversation drifts from the circumstances of her life to the books she read and the stories she wrote, the people she met and the characters she created. She sits back, sips a cup of tea, turns the leaf of her new collection of stories and talks about the books in her life and the life in her books.

This is a snapshot of the present, not the start of the tale. It begins somewhere in a childhood with a promise of exciting journeys. And this is where I come in. Two little kittens begin a stowaway journey, which will take them all over the country, all its cities and all its landmarks. It was as a child that I first read this book Sair-i-Pakistan and Razia Fasih Ahmad became a name which was to be a component of my childhood mythology.

Recently somebody suggested to its author that the book should be reprinted. “Things have changed since then. Everything in the book seems to be under construction — Mangla, Warsak and the Quaid’s Mazaar.” Such things may have been “zair-i-tameer” then. It was a country on its way to development. The construction got completed a long while back. But the anticipated development never materialized. Have the little kittens lost their way in quest of the country?

The story of her lifelong involvement in literature begins in childhood. She says that she was an avid reader and felt lonely as a child. “I was very conscious of my loneliness, although I had ten brothers and sisters and played a lot with them,” she says. Her father was in the Indian Railways and the family lived in a number of small towns.

She started reading early and reading Urdu novels by the time she was in the third or fourth grade and she was into English novels by the time she reached the seventh grade. She fondly talks about how much she enjoyed school, specially putting up small plays which were all written and produced through home productions.

“I would read anything I could lay my hands on,” she says. Qurratulain Hyder fascinated her and she read Ismat Chughtai without understanding what “Terhi lakeer” and “Lehaf” were about. “I read Meray Bhi Sanamkhaney and developed a mental picture of its author. I was struck with the glamour of the kind of lives those people lived and the houses where they stayed. It was much later that I realized the ordinariness of their lives. By that time, I was living in the cantonment as my husband was in the army,” she says. That was a time for dispelling of illusions and the writer was about to emerge from the reader.

She wrote her first story when she was studying in the ninth grade. “I read something which made me feel that I too could write something like this,” she says and it was with this sense of ease and natural felicity that her first story emerged. “It was about something which haunted me. I lost my younger sister when I was small. I used to look for her. I would scan the sky hoping to catch a glimpse of her in the clouds. I wrote a story about two sisters, one of whom was painting the portrait of the other sister. But the girl died before her portrait could be completed.”

The story was called “Na-tamam tasweer” and was published in Ismat, the magazine largely devoted to women’s writing and founded by Rashid-ul-Khairi. She describes that she did not even write her address on the story because “when it is returned, my brothers and cousins will get to know and they will tease me.” It was through her school friends that she came to know that the story had been published.

She became a regular writer of children’s stories and her first book too was a collection of these. “There was never any particular encouragement or discussion from the family but my father told me that if I wanted to write then I should move on from children’s magazines to serious journals,” she says. Soon she was writing for Adab-i-Lateef and Humayun. Her literary career was launched. Although her stories were published regularly, she was unknown to the literary circles. She got married to her cousin who served in the army and was posted in a number of small towns. Leading a typical cantonment life she completed her education, acquiring a master’s degree from Peshawar.

She came into prominence with her novel Aabla-Pa, which won the Adamjee literary prize in 1965. She says that the announcement of the prize took her by surprise. She recalls how she and her husband were with friends when she heard her name being mentioned in the Bangla news. She was surprised and could not make head or tail of what was being said. Only later did it dawn on her that her book had won a prestigious prize. It became a bestseller and is still her best-known (but not the best!) novel. Poet and writer Fatima Hassan who is researching the development of feminist literature in Urdu, considers it important as it had an independent-minded young girl as its central character.

“Aabla-Pa was the novel of my childhood,” says its author. It also marked the end of her literary apprenticeship. More novels and stories followed. By and large, my favourite among her works is the short novel Tapti Chaon, the story of the large hearted woman who kept the home and family together.

I recall critic Muzaffar Ali Syed, who had a keen understanding of fiction, singling it out for praise as a character study which reminded him of Flaubert’s A Simple Heart. Razia Fasih Ahmad herself has a different story to tell. She says that she based it largely on a woman whom she knew but when the story was published, some people told her that women like this are creatures of the past and they exist only in writers’ imagination, not in flesh and blood.

The author’s favourite among her novels is Sadiyon Ki Zanjeer, a depiction of the 1971 days on a large scale. She researched the novel for a long time, talked to eye-witnesses, read and even visited Bangladesh to get a sense of the overshadowing historical events. She says that she had to write the novel four or five times.

She pauses to say that she may have over-done her labour on the novel. Among her stories, her own favourites are Surkh Palang-Posh Ki Raat and the more recent Makab which describes three characters, plus, minus and multiple trying to solve the puzzle of the famous cube. “One day all the pieces will definitely fit. I cannot say when,” she remarks.

A matter of lifelong fascination for her are the Bronte sisters. “I identify very much with them. They were all independent spirits and each child came to writing on its own,” she explains the reasons for her continued fascination, which may result in a book.

“I have read everything I could lay my hands on and have collected heaps and heaps of notes. I have all the facts. Now I have to add the fiction to the facts.”

A turning point in her life came when she went to the US in 1985. It was to be a short visit to see her son who was studying there. But then one thing led to another and she stayed on. She has keenly observed immigrants and someday may write a novel about them. These displaced and dislocated people certainly make an appearance in her stories, the most recent collection of which is entitled Wirsa. “I keep remembering Karachi and want to come back to it more often. There is so much loneliness over there!” she explains.

Immigration has brought about strange changes in Razia Fasih Ahmad. It has turned her into a humour writer. In a strange twist of fate (after all, truth is stranger than fiction) she has emerged as a poet too. She recites her poems at literary gatherings in the US and has been appreciated by Shanul Haq Haqqee and Jamiluddin Aali. Haqqee sahib even suggested that she should keep “Rajji” as her literary takhalus as the name “Razia” is incorrect in its popular pronunciation. This is one advice she has not taken! Her maiden collection of poems takes its name from a couplet by Mir. It is about a chink in the cage from where one can glimpse the garden wall. Can a writer wish for more than this?

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