ONE big difficulty with our modern fiction is that it has developed a love for an intellectualised mode of expression. Perhaps it started with the emergence of the trends of symbolism and abstraction in our short story. Firstly, these trends had an intellectual attitude inherent in them. In addition, those were the years when Sartre was very much in vogue in our literary and intellectual circles. Of course, we had primarily come to know him as a novelist and a playwright. But soon we discovered that a philosophy known as Existentialism is associated with his name. This came to stay as an added charm to his literary reputation and it worked well with us.

Those years of the 20th century have long elapsed. But the intellectual mode of expression our fiction writers had developed during those years still lingers. That, they think, stands as a guarantee of seriousness for a writer.

But the novel I am going to talk about is a complete departure from this style of writing. In fact, it was its unpretentious way of saying things that attracted my attention. And it is from the other side of the dividing line that I have received it.

Anees Ashfaq from Lucknow is the author of the novel Dukhyare. Ashfaq is primarily known to us as a critic and has to his credit a number of collections of such writings as well as a collection of short stories. But this is the first time that he has come out as a novelist.

The beginning of the novel may give an impression to the reader that the author, speaking in the first person, has abruptly started recalling his days gone by. The reader will take time to realise that the narrator here is a character of the novel, the youngest member of a displaced family, who, while remembering his dead mother, is also distracted by the memory of his elder brother, who too now is long gone.

His memories of his brother remind him of those sad days when, in his worry for him, he searched for him, not knowing in which mosque or imambara he was dwelling. After his ancestral home had been confiscated, he had refused to live with the family. He was now a wandering soul little caring about his next abode, a hujra in a mosque, a corner in a church, or some covered space in an imambara. However, finding an old imambara in a dilapidated condition he felt compelled to settle there for a while and make arrangements for its repair.

While wandering the city in search of his brother, the worried younger brother comes across some strange people, those whose properties have been confiscated and who are compelled to live in abject conditions. How strange that after being deprived of their elegant living they are now content to find shelter in a dargah or in an imambara. They may be seen as abandoned souls remembering times when they commanded respect and carried a sense of grace with them. That speaks of a culture that was. The pomp and show of Nawabi times no longer exist. It is now a desolate city. But desolation, when carrying signs of a vanished culture, has a charm of its own. That charm is still there.

Ashfaq has not cared to take pains to depict it. He goes on writing with ease and facility. The characters portrayed by him talk and behave in their own natural style. The novelist is sensible enough not to intrude into what they are doing and saying. A widow along with her daughter is very much content to find shelter in a corner of a haveli, which is already in ruins. Their engagement in the work of golden embroidery is seemingly a professional activity. Despite this fact, it is more than a professional engagement. The work in their hands speaks of cultural refinement.

These people are not overtly religious. Their deep religious sense is seen finding its expression in their culturally rich rituals.

Briefly speaking, Dukhyare, though written in a very simple way, carries much meaning on the cultural as well as humanitarian levels.