Possibly no other writer would work so hard at revealing things as Naiyer Masud does in concealing them. And this despite relentless detailing, precision and clarity of writing and expression! In his refusal to make things easy for the reader, Masud requires a close reading; such is the mesmeric pull of his writing that he pulls you in with all the insistence of a dream despite its blurred outlines and disregard for time and space. Once inside his world, which is part magic realism, part Kafkesque world, there is no escape. There is something so seductive, almost hypnotic, about this collection that the conventions of story-telling—plot, character, narrative—become meaningless; the word and the suggestion is all.
Many questions have been raised in literary circles about how best to describe Masud. Is he a modernist or a post-modernist? Is he a writer of fantasy or surreal literature? Masud himself acknowledges the influence of Edgar Allen Poe and he has translated Kafka into Urdu. A scholar of Persian and Urdu, a former professor of Farsi at Lucknow University, Masud has been an avid, eclectic reader all his life. The range of his reading is reflected in his writings, making him difficult to categorise. There is a deliberate attempt at creating a landscape that is unfamiliar, unrecognisable and uncategorisable: this is done by a conscious purging of idiom and using a language that is measured and precise. As Masud himself says, “I don’t want my language to give away, however obliquely, the temporal identity of my characters.”
An erudite introduction by Memon and an extremely illuminating interview with Asif Farrukhi throw ample light on the occasionally mystifying contents of the book. They help the reader enjoy Masud’s unique style more fully, a writing that has few signposts, that is self-referential as few other works of fiction and, yes, even occasionally self-indulgent. These ‘fragments of consciousness’, as Memon calls them, follow the reader long after the story has ended “like a shadow, yes, but suggestive in their fractured imagery of some presence somewhere in the beyond”. For this reviewer, an enduring image was of the girl with the crushed feet who sat propped up against a tree in a house, a tree that shed its tiny yellow leaves all over the girl. Who the girl was or why her feet were crushed, or even why she sat under a tree as it shed its tiny yellow leaves all over her is irrelevant; what stays is the image and the language it is clothed in. Immaculate, precise, spare and completely shorn of adjectival excess or rhetorical flourishes. And yet, strangely lyrical too.
Some stories, most notably the early stories from the collection Simiyan, have a childlike lack of guile and probing. In fact, Masud wrote Simiyan when he was 12 years old; he rewrote it and added substantially to its details later. In most stories, people go for long walks, enter crumbling homes, stay on for what turns out to be years, live lives that require a complete suspension of disbelief; what they eat or do in ‘real’ life is seldom of any consequence. Despite the pile-up of details and the minutiae of inexplicable phenomena, there is never a straight retelling of ‘actual’ events. Memon likens the experience of reading a Naiyer Masud story to “walking into a maze with no possibility of ever getting out. A hypnotic circularity, a curling back upon oneself over and over again”. After reading some, if not all 35 stories included in this Collected Works, the reader will find there is indeed no way of getting out of the maze; what is more, the maze begins to feel like a wonderful place to be.
