Shadow Lines

A world which may not be as nightmarish as Joseph K's in The Trial, but is not any less elusive. Life and death, experience and being, the whirligig of timeeach of his stories is merely a variation of a single theme. Intangible and eternal, his fiction has no fixed boundaries. There's no beginning or end. Because life is like thatcircular. Masud stays off the expected, the effable and the ordinary in each of these stories and lends an air of unreality to the real (Sheesha Ghat); a sense of timelessness to the temporal (Interregnum).

Each narrative evokes old-world Lucknow, where he has lived all his life. So you have intricate details of some grand Avadh mansion, may be a single carved door; or some insight into the life of hakeems (Nosh Daru). Incidentally both his parents hailed from families of hakeems. What adds to the beauty is his measured, unexaggerated prose. A prose which is nothing like what the Urdu symbolists or abstractionists had envisagedthere are no verbal pyrotechnics but for a string of delightful Persian/Urdu quotations: Gar nau-bahar ayad-o-pursad ze dustan/Gu ay saba keh an hame gulha gaya shudand (If spring comes asking after friends, sweet Breeze,/Say that the blossomsah, the blossoms turned to straw).

In The Essence of Camphor, Mah Rukh Sultan is under the spell of a kafoori sparrow.

"A lot of people are scared of it."

"Of the kafoori sparrow?" I asked astonished. Of kafoor (camphor), said Mah Rukh Sultan. It makes people think of death." Kafoor?" I repeated." But kafoor is a cure for many pains." "Death too is a cure for many pains," (she said). This ephemeral tone is typical of Masud's stories.

The Myna from Peacock Garden, a tale of a myna and a little girl who share a name, Falak Ara (ornament of the sky), moans the passing of an era: the nawab of Avadh. Like kafoor, whose fragrance lingers, each of his characters, Jahaaz, Parya, Mah Rukh Sultan, Lal Chand, Kale Khan abides in memory. Masud wrote his first short story, Nusrat, in 1971 and Shamsur Rehman Faruqi, that sensitive Urdu critic, published it. Faruqi once told Muhammad Umar Memon who has edited the collection with an inspired flock of translators that Masud's stories go nowhere, they're like dreams. Go, submerge yourself in his fictional maze. His stories, fragments of a dream really, workas Kafka would say quite like an axe for the frozen sea inside us.