|
|
November 16, 2003
REVIEWS: Youthful impressions
Some openings can be deceptive. And in this novel, it is simple to the point of being disarming. An out-stretched, almost invisible, hand is holding out the katara, the tangy unripe fruit of the tamarind tree in a tempting offer. A sharp and precise taste, a note which strikes just right and immediately places before us the young girls who are conjured up. Here is the brown-haired girl making a generous offer to the un- named other girl who is seeing these things for the first time in her life. She immediately responds with a frightened “No!”
But negatives in the opening scene may not be final. Going towards the classroom, she encounters another young girl, who reminds her of another friend and this time offers some books, which are accepted. In another quicksilver sentence, we encounter the girl’s fear of exposure before all others who seem much stronger than her and we sense her vulnerability. These are to be the defining features of this young girl through whose impressions and emotions the novel develops.
It is the world of a young girl which Khalida Hussain has brilliantly recaptured. Her novel may well be described as “A portrait of the artist as young girl”. Her protagonist, Mona, is growing up in Lahore in the days immediately following the Partition. The city and the times are perceived through the eyes of this girl and it is through her impressions that we get to know the changes taking place in the outside world.
Girls from across the border getting admission in her class at college, their language and expressions, their sense of the world and lifestyle “over there” are triggered by the events of 1947 and the changing fortunes of the old family are indicative of the changing times.
Mona and her gradually expanding psyche are at the centre stage and the world revolves around her personal, intensely private vision. With great subtlety and delicacy of expression, Khalida Hussain has managed to capture the workings of the young girl’s mind and the world of her innermost feelings.
Seldom does one find such a rich, emotive expression in the Urdu novel and Khalida Hussain must be given due credit for adding an unexplored dimension to recent Urdu fiction.
A consummate artist and a master of the short story, Khalida Hussain was ideally suited for such a task. She appeared like a bright meteor over the horizon of the Urdu short story in that rich and varied decade of the 1960s with a handful of brilliant stories like “Sawari” and “Hazar-Paya”, intense and powerfully written narratives, loaded with multiple possibilities of meaning to the point of being enigmatic. But she also disappeared rapidly from the scene.
Many years later, she made a re-entry and has steadily embarked on a constant stream of stories which carry her unique signature, a combination of powerful language and an unsettling depth of feelings. The cultured mind and refined sensibility, apparent from her fiction, are also evident from her literary criticism.
This is the first time she has ventured in the realm of the novel. Those of us who have read her short stories will not find ourselves on an unfamiliar terrain. It is as if a story was widened and expanded to include more.
Acutely alive to the passage of time, there is a chronological order in the tale but only a bare plot. The maturation of Mona’s world is what we follow serially, rather than through any twists or turns of fate. The novelist’s method is to reveal the impression of the moment.
For Virginia Woolf, these impressions constituted the essence of life. “Recall,” she wrote, “how at the corner of the street, perhaps you passed two people talking. A tree shook; an electric light danced; the tone of the talk was comic, but also tragic; a whole vision, an entire conception, seemed contained in that moment.” Khalida Husssain is essentially a different kind of writer but she has woven her novel out of such perfectly recalled moments.
The method is also its own biggest shortfall. The world of the young girl is so much soaked up in itself that it carries almost no sense of significance of the events beyond themselves. Simply seeing through the impressions of this girl and realizing that a whole country developing and politic as well as social rot setting in, can be rather limiting. At one point in the story we read about young college girls carrying pictures of handsome army officers with a view to marriage, and then there is Ayub Khan being admired for his Clark Gable looks! College girls may gush over a handsome dictator but surely the discerning reader wants this to be questioned and probed rather than papered over.
Similarly we read about the 1965 war with the overflowing sense of outraged patriotism which many people experienced around that time. However can we read about the events of 1971 with that same wide-eyed innocence? Surely there must be other narratives crossing and cutting this one and other points of view? But this novel sticks to its own authorial voice with not even a bow of acknowledgement to the world beyond that moment’s impression.
The main character, Mona, herself remains a cut-out figure, a paper doll with excessive sensibility rather than myriad emotions. Like many women of her background, she has accepted a role of passivity for herself. One cannot recall any other book which captures so clearly the sense of anguish which sensitive adolescents feel as they learn to suppress their true feelings in the name of social decorum. A hint of romance with Hassan is also subdued and does not develop into anything beyond a painfully acute feeling of loneliness.
There is a great sense of loss and pain at the end of the novel, which the author has beautifully captured. It is hard to forget the poignancy of this feeling once you finish the novel. It is not a book which leaves you once you put it down. For the sheer beauty of its language and its power to hint at strange and complex worlds of feeling, this must be one of the most significant novels to appear on the scene in recent years.
Kaghazi Ghat
By Khalida Hussain
Dost Publications, 8-A, Khayaban-i-Suhrawardy, PO Box 2958, Islamabad
174pp. Rs130
|
|
|
