Friday short fiction #18: Pakistan
Hamad Darwish I will always be there 2008
"I feel if there's one little thing I could do, it's to make people realize: We are not worthless because we inhabit a country which is seen by Western eyes as a primitive, fundamentalist country only... I mean, we are a rich mixture of all sorts of forces as well, and our lives are very much worth living."
- Pakistani author Bapsi Sidhwa, 1990
“Pakistani writing is like the new young fast bowler on the scene, but Indian writing is like the spinner who’s been going for years and whose greatness is assumed.”
- Pakistani author Kamila Shamsie in The Guardian, 2009
Mohsin Hamid, 'A Beheading' (GRANTA #112, AUTUMN 2010)
Granta's 'Pakistan' issue last Autumn focussed unflinchingly on the country's dangerous side, such as this jarring story from the author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist. It's short and visceral, and does very effectively what it says in the title, however I still have problems with first-person narratives that end with the narrator's death.
Saadat Hasan Manto, 'The Dog of Tetval' (c. 1950)
Soldiers at war in the Tetval mountains across the India-Pakistan border encounter a dog that strays between their positions, with each side trying to give it their own national identity. In his time Manto was the most famous writer in Urdu, a satirist and journalist who mistakenly migrated to Lahore and spent the next eight years drinking himself to death. 'The Dog of Tetval' is very well known in Partition literature (along with his equally famous 1955 story 'Toba Tek Singh'), and this new translation reads far easier than others of his writing that I've encountered this week.
Najeeb, 'The Fake Pakistani' (CHOWK, 2011)
A quick, sharp second-person story about an Afghan immigrant into Pakistan, and one that hints effectively at the chaos of people's lives in that part of the world.
Kamila Shamsie, 'A Desert Torso' (OXFAM, OX-TALES: AIR, 2009)
An elegantly constructed story about a poor Muslim who's acting as courier to a Buddhist relic that's been smuggled out of Afghanistan. The thing I liked most about this story is the way it conveys the sense of bigger forces at work, and then towards the end expands on that sense with even larger, religious and historical dimensions.
Favourite short story of the week: Daniyal Mueenuddin, 'Nawabdin Electrician' (THE NEW YORKER, 27 AUGUST 2007)
Nawabdin, a decent man with thirteen daughters, does the right thing for a hitchhiker but pays badly for his kindness. This story opens a window on daily rural life in Pakistan and at the same time feels like a breath of fresh air. Mueenuddin has been all over the American short story scene in the last few years and was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2009 and the Pulitzer in 2010. Worth exploring.