Louis Bunuel, a celebrated Spanish film maker, told his biographer after having settled in Mexico an anecdote about city’s culture: ‘a man enters an apartment building and requests the caretaker to guide him to a certain apartment. The caretaker tells him to go to the next building. When he goes to the next building, he is told that the apartment he is looking for is in the first building he came from. He goes back and wants to know why he has been misguided. The caretaker takes his pistol out and shoots the man. The next morning the leading newspaper carries the news; a man killed for wanting to know too much’.

Retired Col Nadir Ali’s life was spared because he didn’t want to know too much. But still he got his nervous breakdown because what he saw proved too much for him. What he saw as a young army officer posted in erstwhile East Pakistan [now Bangladesh] in 1970s crisis, simply defied description. He witnessed a story that has overwhelmed many a storyteller and stills remains untold. It was perhaps a story of extraordinary gravitas.

When Nadir Ali recovered, he turned towards literary expression which had a great therapeutic effect on his mental and physical health. It was, in fact, a paradise gained. He began interacting with Punjabi writers and literati which inspired him to become a committed writer. Poetry came to him as his first choice. Most Punjabis are wont to express themselves in verses. He was no exception. He composed some of highly evocative poems. He, coming from the traditional rural background, was soaked in Punjab’s literary and cultural ethos. Punjabi was his natural language though he knew English and Urdu equally well. I vividly remember his rising serotonin level when he would recite his freshly composed poems to me taking me as a lover of poetry which I have always been. His simple expression was at times so spontaneous that it carried the guileless innocence of a child overwhelmed by a sense of wonder. Some of his poems proved for me my dose of dopamine.

Emergence of a new genuine poet is invariably a revelation of the unrevealed; a world imaginatively constructed becomes a means of knowing what unknown or little known is which we live surrounded by.

Then during the days he was in the process of being established as a poet, he began writing short stories. It was no big surprise. We all knew him as a very engaging conversationist who had loads of stories to share. His generation generally knew the art of conversation which was a sort of continuation of great oral tradition nurtured and developed over thousands of years.

I can recall when he was recognised as a sensitive story writer, he would look at me with a chuckle and say: ‘you dissuaded me from composing poetry’. What happened was that after reading his short stories, I told him that fiction was his real forte. He understood his strength and potential as a creative writer. His interest dwindled in poetry with the passage of time and he concentrated more and more on his story writing producing some of the finest pieces of fiction in the contemporary Punjabi literature. He had deep organic cultural roots coupled with a cosmopolitan outlook that went beyond the boundaries of class, caste, creed and gender.

Nadir Ali loved to explore themes of inequality, oppression and man-woman relationship from humanistic perspective. He upheld Marxian ideal of society but didn’t allow the strait jacket of ideology to interfere with his creative writings. Similarly he had a very healthy notion of use of language; his natural speech was his literary language. Despite the fact that he had been close to some of the writers who had bias for Lehndi dialect, the one used by classical writers, he chose for his expression chaste central dialect which was accessible to a far greater number in terms of communication. This was a convincing proof of creative sanity of his mind which he thought wasn’t very sane.

Creative chaos or insanity at some level, hidden or manifest, is an essential element of a writer’s psyche. An apparently sane and stable mind would never be able to see world other than what it appears to be; humdrum lacking any deeper significance. But at the same time Col saab, as we used to fondly call him, was a devoted family man and could be described as uxorious which created in him a streak of pragmatism, an art necessary for survival in an oppressive, non-democratic traditional society solidly based on rigid hierarchies.

Poet Brecht rightly emphasises in one of his articles that surviving to tell the truth is as necessary as knowing the truth. So Col saab did not touch in his fiction what he saw in erstwhile East Pakistan during its darkest days which caused his angst. In intimate conversations, he would stun us with his incredible stories full of savagery and compassion, bravery and cowardice. With a sardonic twitch and ironic smile, for instance, he would narrate in details how an army officer was awarded for his ‘gallantry’.

The officer in question hiding behind a newspaper was relieving himself in a wide open space when a stray bullet whizzed past his ear. He made out the story that he had all alone repulsed an enemy’s assault. The top brass bought the lie. How rascals and rogues, scoundrels and perverts indulged in weirdest shenanigans at Dhaka Club while the country burnt was one of his favourite topics.

Fiction writing was the fulcrum of Nadir Ali’s creative carrier. He didn’t write much but what he wrote lucidly reflected human predicament; successes and failures, dreams and nightmares. He can rightly be ranked among the best of short story writers this land has produced in contemporary times. Some of his stories underpinned by spontaneity are so artlessly artistic that boundaries between what is artistic and non-artistic stand blurred. He showed us how little could be more and insignificant could be significant in a world kept oiled by apathy and acquiescence. Col saab, we loved the stories you told us with your seraphic smile but what about the ones untold that you kept to yourself? Perhaps you wanted to spare us the pain or perhaps it was your unbearable existential pain that forced you to be discreet. But being a passionate raconteur you cannot fall silent. Keep telling the stories wherever you are. The winds would carry your whisperings to us and jog our memories of you, the man who preferred sound to silence. — soofi01@hotmail.com

Published in Dawn, January 11th, 2021