Tag: Naiyer Masud

‘Ganjefa’ by Naiyer Masud, translated by Muhammad Umar Memon

I first read a story by the Urdu short story writer Naiyyer Masud in the Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, edited by Amit Chaudhuri. Later, I came across this volume of his stories in translation (that edition published by Penguin India) in a bookshop in Pune. They really are extraordinary stories, “shimmering”, as the translator notes in his preface, between the mundane and the dreamt. ‘Ganjefa’ (which means a game of cards) opens with the narrator noting, “I began to feel bad about my life the night of the riots.” A young man educated in Allahabad and now returned to his native city, Lucknow, where he doesn’t work, but lives (as his dead father used to) off his mother’s earnings. After the night of the riots, humiliated by being asked by the police not only “What’s your name?” and “Where do you live?” but “What do you do?” he decides to look for work. “Gradually I started to go out less and less, or rather I should say more and more, because now I stepped out several times a day, only to come back shortly thereafter, go out again, return again…”

First published in 1997, collected in Snake Catcher, Interlink Books, 2006

‘Interregnum’ by Naiyer Masud, translated by Muhammad Umar Menon

I find I get more pleasure reading around among the many offshoots of Kafka that rereading Kafka himself.  Can Xue has Kafka in back of her somewhere, but Naiyer Masud’s first-person dreamscapes are tied a little too easily to the fact that he’s a translator, into Urdu, of Kafka. Lucknow exists in Masud’s stories as a kind of isolation chamber of the old in the new, and perhaps a particular, older Islamic cultural life in contemporary India. There’s a tremendous sense of stagnation and ferment and of how memory and consciousness are impacted by these, like water passing through rock.

‘Interregnum’ is a father-son story, of patrimony and instruction and resistance to both. The narrator puzzles over what and how and who is teaching him, and over the traces of his father, a mason, in the restored decoration of the city.

Someone once noted that Oshima’s Merry Christmas, Mister Lawrence is more or less the only POW movie where the whole story doesn’t revolve around escape. I don’t know exactly why that seems like the only thing for me to say about Masud’s work and his Lucknow, a city that to my knowledge was his lifelong residence, but I’m going to go with it.

In Essence of Camphor, The New Press, 1999