Jab Tak Hai Zameen
By Nasir Abbas Nayyar
Sang-e-Meel Publications
ISBN: 97869635-3649-2
155pp.

John Updike has quoted D.H. Lawrence as saying that, “And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness.” I was reminded of this Lawrence quote recently by Nasir Abbas Nayyar’s new story collection, Jab Tak Hai Zameen [Until the Earth is Intact], which traverses some uncharted areas of the human mind.

A successful man encounters the loss of his language; a wife suddenly faces the fact that animals and birds are now reluctant to come near her; a husband is perplexed by dreams in which his wife is seeing others; a prayer leader encounters the devil — in many of these stories, a problem is introduced and then the story is about how the protagonist grapples with the problem. So, basically, the structure of these stories is ‘conflict driven’ and the conflict is in the mind of the characters. Some protagonists are able to fix the problem and solve the conflict while others, who do not succeed, succumb to further degeneration.

I will specially like to mention three of Nayyar’s stories in the limited space available for this review. The first is: ‘Varghalaya Hua Aadmi’ [The Allured Man]. This is a story about a man who is gradually forgetting the language of his childhood, or his mother tongue. This story can be read as a postcolonial text, where an imperial language usurps even the inner self of the colonised, whereby the colonised becomes dumb.

His servant (the servant of a servant, whose name, interestingly, is Khalifa or Caliph) has got his language intact and sympathises with his lord because he, the servant, thinks that “Satan” has occupied the mind of his lord. Here the coloniser is likened to ‘Satan’, as Satan is supposed to be the one who captures the mind first and draws a man to do things he otherwise would not have done. We know that Nayyar has written much about colonialism and postcolonialism in his critical essays.

Dreams, colonisation, relationships, literary puzzles and mortality — Nasir Abbas Nayyar’s collection of short stories attempts to grapple with ideas originating from an unexplored consciousness

In ‘Main Panah Mangta Hoon’ [I Seek Refuge], there is a religious man, a prayer leader of a mosque, who actually faces Satan. Satan has come to him to solve his own problem and tells him that, for humans, there is always a window open in their despair, but his, ie Satan’s, despair is complete and seamless. The prayer leader has no answer to his problem and is himself terrified about his continuous presence before him.

Another story ‘Apnay Maazi Ke Khuda’ [The Gods of One’s Past] is about a couple whose marriage, a love marriage at that, is being torn apart. The wife sees that her pet animals are feeling revulsion towards her because of a certain odour coming from her. This story is a steady study of a marriage in the process of being broken, but then the story tumbles over like one of the characters in the story, and it finishes in a haphazard way, leaving the reader dissatisfied with this haphazardness.

One story is a bit tricky, where the narrator tries to find three writers whose books were lost to history. The story is itself a maze or a jigsaw puzzle, which reminds one of Borges. The narrator reads an old book where the author mentions, in a footnote, a writer whose book was burnt. Then the same author of that old book writes in another of his books about another writer whose book was burnt because he had mentioned the name of the banned author. The narrator finds a book by a contemporary of this old-book writer in which another writer talks in the foreword about a third writer whose book was not allowed to be written.

What did that banned writer actually write? That is the question. The banned writer wanted to write about the ‘Jannah’ [Heaven] of his own liking, where he wanted to live with his mother instead of with any young beloved. Was this writing worth a ban? Well, it’s for the reader to decide. As a reader, this story reminded me of two interesting ideas of Derrida: one, his revolt against ‘phonocentrism’ (traditional preference of speech over writing) and the other, his arguments against the ‘stable centrality’ of structure.

A structure may be religion, culture, language or any organised system of thought. He terms this ‘centrality’ totalitarian in nature and wants language in the hands of a writer to play free. The idea of ‘Jannah’ is a central concept in Muslim beliefs and the banned author of Nayyar’s story was trying to deconstruct it, so his books got burned and the authorities wouldn’t allow his thoughts to remain in written form.

And then, finally, there is a story which is somewhat different from the other stories in this collection, as it comes from the heart, rather than the mind. In ‘Woh Aakhri Din’ [Those Last Days], a father is depicted as dying. The story is told from the points of view of the kith and kin, who have gathered around the dying father and who narrate those days to the younger son who was not present in “those days.” This is one of the finest stories in the collection and depicts well the feelings of a dying man who “spoke too little, but he didn’t need to speak. The whole of his self had become a tongue.”

That dying man is watching things and relations around him one last time and is sometimes sad, sometimes angry and sometimes content with his fate. The depiction of multiple narrators and multiple points of view make this story a representative story of our culture, where the last story of a man becomes all the more interesting because of the multiplicity of narratives about him that lead “the flow of our sympathetic consciousness.”

Dreams are one uncharted area of the mind that remains hugely unexplored. Nayyar has not only originated some of his stories from his dreams but also written down some of his dreams the way they occurred to him.

In the end, I must quote a line from the story ‘Woh Aakhri Din’, where the narrator says, “Not everything that unfolds in the heart and mind of a person can sneak into the books.” But that is what fiction is best at trying. Nayyar has demonstrated it artistically in this book, so it is worth a meticulous read.

The reviewer is a poet, novelist and translator. His new Urdu poetry collection Gul-i-Dogana has recently been published by Maktaba-i-Daniyal

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, August 10th, 2025