Time out of joint

It’s never easy for an artist to negotiate the whirlwind of history. There are those who were silenced by it, like the Austrian writer Karl Kraus, said to have been rendered speechless by Hitler. And those who went on to prescribe silence to others, like the philosopher Theodor Adorno, believing as he did that there could be no poetry after Auschwitz. Faced with the bloody shakeups of history, each work of art — just as every human life — begins to seem irrelevant. And so, the natural impulse of the artist is to resist direct engagement with the impersonal forces that shape history.

Ikramullah’s tales of Partition are emblematic of that aesthetic aversion. These are portrayals of lives which were fortunate enough to have escaped the riptide of the bloodiest event in Indian history. Regret is a set of two novellas — Regret and Out of Sight — each presenting a deeply tragic narrative of displacement and permanent exile that millions in the Indian subcontinent were fated to experience in the August of 1947.

“Many Augusts have come and gone, and on each day of this month I have seen how the sun and the monsoon moisture blend together to produce the same fierce smells in the soil, the crops, the houses, the trees and the growth along the riverbank that I had come to know in August 1947.” These lines are uttered by Ismail, one of the two principal characters in

Out of Sight . He flees just before riots break out in his hometown, and is the only survivor in his family to resettle across the border in Sultanpur, Pakistan — where the crops and trees are all just as they were in India, yet ineffably different. The water along the riverbank too is just water, but Ismail knows that it doesn’t belong to the Beas which “used to be my river in those days”.

A poet once said that in the first few years of our lives, we have already felt everything worth feeling. That may be one reason why our idea of home is inextricable from the memories of childhood. The finest moments of

Regret are to be found in those first few pages of the book — belonging to the first novella — which Ikramullah devotes to the early years of two friends. The young boys Ehsan and Saeed together can easily lay claim to the title of literature’s youngest flaneurs.

The children spend their days occupied with aimless wandering — they bunk school, walk the streets of their town in Punjab, collect empty cigarette packets, and watch the passing trains. At one point Ehsan takes Saeed, who is narrating the story, to the ‘Cold Well’. And here, for the first time explicitly, we perceive the ghastly shadow of sectarian divide, soon to turn violent. The well “had been divided in the middle by a board: one side reserved for the Hindus and Sikhs to drink from, the other for Muslims.” This is a brilliant metaphor for what Freud called “narcissism of small differences” taken to absurd lengths.

In Regret , we also get to see a recurring and implicit image of disaster — a premonition of the times to come — in the form of the passenger train. It was only a few years before the Partition of India that the train, in Nazi Germany and the whole of Central and Eastern Europe, became a symbol of doom. The Jewish American musician Steve Reich called his string quartet on the Holocaust ‘Different Trains’, in which the instruments recreate the resonant rhythms of a moving train, providing an ominous backdrop to the overall sound.

At the beginning of Regret , we hear young Ehsan say that “every passing train makes me want to hop on and ride off somewhere far away.” Reading this, we come to a pause, vainly hoping that the child’s wish is not granted. But only a few years later, we are told, both Eshan and Saeed, separately, join the necessary exodus to Lahore.

Ikramullah’s emphasis in both these novellas is on marginal lives. In Out of Sight , the more overtly political story of the two, he explores a cruel irony of life when a Muslim community, after having escaped one oppressive majority in India, is persecuted in Pakistan for belonging to the Ahmadi sect. Bashir Ahmed, an Ahmadi Muslim, is the other protagonist of Out of Sight , and just before the mob of rioters reaches the Ahmadi colony in Sultanpur, Ahmed does what his friend Ismail did many years ago in August 1947 — and what Ehsan and Saeed did in the preceding novella Regret — he flees the historical moment, bringing the book to a close.

Writing that moves us also makes us want to seek out the writer. But in Ikramullah’s case, this remains, at least for the reader of English, an exercise in futility. In his introduction to the book, Muhammad Umar Memon, who along with Faruq Hassan has produced this fine translation from the original Urdu, writes that Ikramullah “is the type of person who doesn’t go after visibility or publicity.” There’s not a trace of his life or work to be found anywhere in the online Anglosphere. Nominal points of curiosity are addressed by Memon’s introduction. We now know that Ikramullah lives in Multan; that he has been writing prolifically since 1962; that his stories grapple with complex themes of political violence, incest, homosexuality; and that his work has achieved critical acclaim and suffered state censure. What we don’t know is whether this writer will get the readership his work truly deserves.

Vineet Gill is a Delhi-based freelance writer