Introduction

In presenting herewith the English translation of selected Kashmiri short stories, it is intended that they reach a wider public. The milieu is Kashmir itself and language is Kashmiri which encapsulates in its fold the history, the dreams, unconscious, individual as well as collective, of its speaking community as no other medium does. Effort has been made to see to it that the immediacy, intimacy and facility of the original is preserved and maintained, much more so because some stories have been written decades back in the rural atmosphere and in small towns which were not much different in the sense of belongingness, rooted ness, and sell-sufficient closeness typical then of the rural side, in spite of oppression and poverty.

The stories, though not in a strict chronological order, present the life of the artisan, common people in different walks of life, their hopes and aspiration, small sorrows and joys, their afflictions, and unroll their lives in resolving their conflicts to a happy turn so far as the circumstances allowed, all along characterized by hope and optimism in spite of the social restriction though the rumbling of coming social dissolution can be read between the lines.

Again, there are stories where characters, instead of reigning supreme in so far as they are working out their own lives to a certain destiny in spite of the limited opportunity and vistas open to them. are play-things of circumstances and relegated to the background as only things put to use consciously or unconsciously for ends in which they have no say; circumstances and situations reign supreme. Effort will be made to make it clear how this change came into being and how the writer, while keeping intact his artistic expression, does not remain unaffected by them. A synopsis of the fast phase will thus be necessary.

Akhtar Mohi-ud-Din in his "Red Silken Trousers" shows Nabir Shala and his spouse living contentedly doing their darning despite their poverty, old age and deprivations. Nabir Shala is, however, painfully aware of his condition that he merely ekes out a bare hand-to-mouth living for himself, only fattening others who monopolize the trade. Oblivious to the miseries, he is giving mouth to songs and loves life and his environs that provide stuff to his soul. How he enjoys doing all this in his wooden shack of a but overlooking the Jhelum. His wife, too, in spite of the death of all her male children in their childhood and the poignant memories thereof, is unbroken and alive in so far as she relives her past intimacy in donning the only remaining red silken trousers of her bridal outfit to regale her husband. The interference of the scandalized son-in-law only provokes to assert the inviolability of his private life: "I am king and master unto my own domain, I have done nothing unbecoming by way of theft."

Omesh Koul's "The Heart" portrays Mehri getting more understanding and mature as she, from out of her initial dislike for Fatah, grows to like him after the vicissitudes of life and this tempers him into a feeling man, fell of concern for her, and he is no longer to this change a lump of clay that repelled her first. The expression to this change is understandably given through wordless sorrows and joys which need an immediacy like Rem Dyad to formulate in words. In Amin Kamil's "The Cock-Fight", the incident takes place in a town which is hardly different from the place in a rural homestead. The joys and envies and superstitions of the social lag are still common.

These pleasures are getting uncommon as the worries of changing social and industrial life wrap people up and tear them apart. The intimacy and the family-like atmosphere with its prying and petty harmless rivalries is apparent in the close self-sufficient social and economic life. The joys and comically queer envies and rivalries would leave them independent of extraneous sources of pleasure; the bread earner, besides, took on the high pedestal of the beloved one in fulfilling the small but significant demands.

Bimla, in Bansi Nirdosh's "This Too is a Feeling", is overtaken by remorse and pitying concern for the man who has been pining for years to take a look of her after he helped her out with an umbrella on a torrential rainy day. She does so in spite of the social propriety shown by her grand mother, aunt and uncle. This sense,
pathos and tragic unrequited love to man was gratifying and flattering to the heart as against the apathy, indifference and pure utilitarianism that mark relations now.

Ved Lal in Deepak Koul's "The Journey and the Fellow Travelers" is reminiscent of love and oneness with those to whom one was related then. He had earned the endearing sobriquet of "Mama"' as one's maternal uncle is called. In total disregard of his personal life and comforts, he parts with all that he has to meet the social bindings of Tota Koul's daughter in relation to her matrimonial life and of others with whom he comes across, all the while hopeful of being taken care of on his old decrepit age by those whose Mama he is. Meanwhile, the household breaks through various socio-economic compulsions of service, leaving Ved Lal alone and unwanted, clinging to his old memories and hopes and he finally finds himself in a 'dharamshala' where he dies friendless. His acquaintances whose company and social life he had enlivened by his humour and amiable nature do not feel concerned.

These are some of the representative stories of the period when insulation had not taken place; the sense of not being uprooted, of being close to nature with its characteristic rhythm, and the hope of things and life taking care of themselves on their own were an integral part of the emotional and mental make up of the individual making for that composure and contentedness which seemed to give substance and meaning to life as it was lived.

The world around, with the western world spearheading it, suffered many change and was overtaken by the inanity and hopelessness of the mechanical and industrial life. It appeared all the more hideous because of the break up of home, by hypocrisy and tenseness and superficiality of social life. Man got a drift due to the collapse of old values and faith, unrelieved by any cohesive cementing factor in the shape of new values and any all encompassing faith. Its wars produced 'shell shocks' and 'soul shocks', leaving the individual stranded and causing colossal social dislocations, financial and economic crashes and bankruptcies, with millions dead and maimed. All this made it a categorical imperative to spin new alternatives and new nostrums.

Of all this Kashmiri were blissfully unaware, much like Jane Austin's characters are ignorant of Napoleonic wars. They were still contended with their lot:

Taryi Jarman asyi kyah karyi looloo
asyi garyi batti asyi kyah karyi looloo.
(Let the German cross over. No worry, we have
the rice to eat at our home).

Or of a still more earlier phase, a nursery rhyme sung by
children in chorus:

garyi chhuni zaalun/gatshav swani shallun/haari tsatav
lot.suy dimav aarmyis/aarum dyiyi haak/haakas dyimav paak..

An amazing contentment amidst poverty and famines, and pluck and fortitude to lump it if they could not take it.

Europe was socially disintegrating and getting disillusioned, and the optimism of their revolutions and democracy was a far cry. Misuse of science and other disciplines had dehumanized all institutions, landing humanity into the blind alleys and paradoxes which the thinkers and politicians wanted lay and question. The critical and mentally independent individuals were already confronting their governments and calling their bluff in showing the hollowness and hypocrisy of democracies and institutions at home exposing their predatory and exploitative character in the colonies and abroad. Democracy had come to mean mere endless debates, only drowning in its noise and din the protests against vested interest and using masses at large as cannon fodder. Versilles Treaty, its repartition and humiliation indicated that German Nazism would pose a threat to entire humanity, physically and spiritually.

Yet the ideas of democracy, liberation and the giant strides taken then in the realm of science and other disciplines left its imprint which inspired tile sensitive people in various countries, including India. They were inspired to pull their countrymen out of poverty and social stagnation that had made them a prey to social backwardness, superstition and casteism and its sanctification by indigenous priesthood in league with the local landed gentry whose common interests locked them indissolubly together.


What if tile devotion, orgies resulting from the participation mystique released in various socio-religious festivals were tapped and directed against poverty, social backwardness and what is more, against the more palpable foreign rulers who, to begin with, unwittingly though, let the social change happen through their railways and innovations in communication etcetera, but later on took counsel that to maintain their colonial domination, it was better to let things be as they were.

The colonial domination could be hoisted with its own petard, by taking a leaf from its own history. The treatment of Indians in South Africa as creatures of lesser breed, for instance, proved ore of the igniting factors. The struggle that followed was not impervious to changes that came on their own after unremitting and conclusive struggles. Then the unbounded enthusiasm and zeal thus released helped to change the face of countries as first rate powers, brimming with faith and optimism in organised manpower.

The struggle was guided of necessity by a blend of many years and experience, a blend of liberal democracy with a streak of Fabian socialism, Soviet planning and industrialisation with blatant overtones against obscurantism. There was also an unavoidable ingredient of the faith of the majority in Indian culture and history as it was thought necessary to revitalize the sagging morale, vanishing self-respect and unity which centuries subjection had had indistinguishably made a part of consciousness and also sunk to the depth of the subconscious.

The use of religion was not without precedent, the Europeans also had used it as a ready source of enthusiasm in using its egalitarian elements in their treatment of the Jews, consigning them to ghettoes, pogroms and later on to gas chambers making them self-consciously exclusive„ only to find salvation and pride in their scripture as the "chosen people", awaiting their Messiah and the promised land.

In Indian movement also, there was its presence with not inconsiderable emphasis on culture, finding its imagery, vocabulary and imaginative cast in myth, with streaks of xenophobia. This was overdone in that even caste-rigidity, child marriage and suttee were gloated over by the zealots. All this did throw up its alter-ego in evincing distrust at the inadvertent use of such indigenous elements by individuals schooled no less in the European traditions that had inspired Indian intellectuals despite a love-hate relationship.

The division of India brought in its wake a communal holocaust In the frenzy unleashed, neighbourliness, friendly relations, and other values lost their warmth and sanctity, and all without exception was sacrificed at the alter of hate and distrust. Brotherhood of man, reverence and regard for womanhood were cast to winds much to the stultification and discomfiture of religion to which mobs, run amuck, owned their allegiance. Brute, if brute really is such, was on the rampage, red in claw and tooth. This traumatic experience on so astounding a scale, too, sunk in the subconscious of the subcontinent. The switch back to medieval with hunting, lynching, punishing apostasies, heresies, feuds culminating in vendetta paled into insignificance. Incidentally, in the present manifestation, this outburst, archetypal in its primitive ferocity, was adduced to withholding genuine out-let to mounting aggression against the foreign oppressor who, not content with causing democritisation, was driving a wedge between the communities, much needed for their continuance.

This notwithstanding, the thing remains that idealism and optimism of different persuasions were the key notes and the people participated in millions to make their dreams come true, no apathy and fickleness born of indifference had appeared to scotch the dream; ultimately bringing into being the Freedom at Midnight' with its `Midnight Children'.

The Augean stables of poverty, illiteracy, and social backwardness were to be cleared; a colossal project but to be implemented in our own way, eschewing the inhuman and coercive path drat some other country, in more or less similar conditions, pursued. It was necessary to draw upon the experience, culled from different sources with a new wave of enthusiasm, tainted though with a `night-bitten dawn' (shab guzidah sahar).

There came the plans and understandably the mixed economy, and also the quest for national integration, as the tryst with destiny was not merely taunting borrowed plumes, but living and carrying out a unique experience of drawing the masses into the vortex of social, political and economic transformation, the entire masses. The appropriate mantras and the electrifying timely slogans mobilised the entire populace to bring about cherished dream earlier, and to bring about practical change in economy and in so big a country it needed an expert economist, a general planner, above all the politicians to make the people believe that they really participated as the real architects.

Politicians, approach boils down to holding out promises as to what their party could do if it was returned to power, and once in power, to getting entangled in organisational procedures, strategies, tactics and its own labyrinths; the ultimate aim being relegated to indefinite future. Then the forgotten promises are repeated and statistics is manipulated showing that promises have been made good, much to the astonishment of the common man who is simply aroused, moved and panicked only to be made use of for private and public ends of the politicians. This actual manipulation as a tool and the make-believe participation make for a neurotic and a self-destructive personality to be satisfied in substitutes, however. fake, and excitements, of whatever sort, as meaningful participation for creating values altogether precluded. A pragmatic, unthinking, unethical massman, prey to now anonymous and then to overt authority, results.

An effective leadership was finally opted for which, in identity with the radical circles, was committed to the upliftment of the masses, taking the cue from the notion that exploitation and the exploiter may use any manner of exclusive fervor that suits its ends, essentially predatory and ravenous in nature. Our peasantry and the exploited classes in general had far early found a common cause, and with the growing conviction went whole hog with its programmes and struggles.

Here in Kashmir, the uniqueness of a new awakening did not grow in a vacuum. It was already in the germ. There existed far back in Kashmir's history the precedent of minorities enjoying the pride of place as councellors, generals, court poets, literary figures with the indigenous rulers as well as in the Pathan, Sikh and Mughal rule, living in peace in consonance with the level of the society and culture. The atmosphere of amity and brotherhood was strengthened and extolled into a standard of virtue by the long tradition of the Rishi order and the sufis who emphasised the one common divine source and exposed to ridicule the sanctimony and hypocrisy of those who sought to divide.

The radical element on the new awakening, too, had manifested in Kashmir in several forms and made its political condition in Kashmir, a considerable role was played by the radical strand in Indian politics which in its turn had been influenced not only by the giants strides taken by the socialist countries in people-oriented economy and industry and also calling a final halt to the onrush of fascism and Nazism. The influence opened much wider vistas and imagination before Kashmir politics which made economic freedom and the political one as interdependent and worthy of realization.

Soon after 1947, the landless peasant became the master of his land and was helped to get rid of the centuries old subjection and inconceivable poverty. In a sense, the radical sections in India could count it as an alimentary realisation of their vision and a harbinger of such a possibility there. But could other social interests be reconciled to this change?

The culminating solitary struggle against the feudal system was felt to be too sweeping a change in the Indian context and also against some elements in the welter of Indian nation the scions of the ex-maharajas were also figuring in the Indian polity. The resentment within the state, numerically very small though, being aided and abetted from outside the state, started the beginning of distrust and the harrowing jig-saw puzzle which seemed impossible of a solution. The incomprehensible element in the mind-boggling volt face is the unavoidable impression that the radical element seemed to have lost all fight in them and not only let the things be, but willy-nilly became the accomplice. It could be a projection and self defensive mechanism for the non-radical, but the radical elements, once dragged into it, on the plea of national integration, saw the nigger under every wood pile and an apparition behind every bush.

Further, the debut of Kashmir politics from its initial narrow confines into a wider expanse of Indian panorama had something like the interpenetration and the feel that an infant gets in contact with its mother, or whosoever takes the motherly care of him, a sense of merger and an indistinguishable unity, very much conducive to confidence which leads ultimately to growth, individuation and maturity. But this individuation and measure of physical independence is misjudged by the possessive mother as separation and confrontation, probably its own insecurity in relation to past unconscious fears. The possessive attitude actually wants conformity, that deceptive sameness and. uniformity giving a reassuring look of stability, progress and absence of strife, but ultimately bringing into being an initiativeless thoroughly dependent emotional and mental make up. So this growth and individuation began to be looked askance; a thing to be given up under an imperceptible duress at first, but later on to be suspected and persecuted by a hole and corner technique which makes the erstwhile blue-eyed boy touchy and defensive, simply because all that he does is not taken kindly to and liked. This seems to confirm the persecutor in what he chooses to believe, with a hint of plausibility to those who question the unnatural treatment as also to allay the conscience-pricks that raise their head. They want him to walk all right and conduct himself well, the critical minds are told, but at the same time see to it that he should get a slip or else they would not be able to fix him in his aberration.

Then followed a period of confrontation and ill will which in an atmosphere of bitterness made everything look topsy turvy and turned everything foul into fair and fair into foul, lending credibility to mud-slinging, to alternative views put forward earlier and now getting a new lease of life by those who were dead set against the relation, and all this led to incarceration and trials over a long period of time. Meanwhile all the adventurers, time-servers and all those who had to settle old scores became more loyal than the king. The idealism, romance, fervour and ethics became dowdy, shabby and too cramping, to be only derided and cast off. Faith and devotion in sustained hard work and integrity became to he deemed as encumbrances and hobble in the race for power and pelf. You had not to prove your credentials in terms of expertise, capability and long-term mental and financial equipment for a slow but steady investment in a future, but in short cuts in success attainable Loyalty and unfaltering yesmanship and acquiescence to keep wagging your tail in liking and taking the spill over. Thus came into being a man who was thoroughly intractable, not amenable to normal and matter-of-fact influences as prolonged confidence tricks and infructousness of well-meant efforts had produced a warped personality, the butt of ridicule, victim to all venomous shafts that are aimed at one who you choose to hate and subdue in spirit.

Since this prolonged state of affairs was giving dubious dividends, old memories began to be felt with some acuteness and urgency as things were getting out of hand.

The old skein had to be unraveled and torn threads to be joined a new. Here was an opportunity to clear the breasts, to understand the "difference" aright, not as confrontation but as a desirable component. But again it took the form of cutting something to size and reminding of your smallness to make you behave. Then again the see-saw of allowing to be put into power and destabilizing because the identity element was apprehended to be the unpredictable dark horse to be broken in and tamed to carry other goods also and allow other drivers to hold the reins to be free suspicion.

All this trying and traumatic experience was sought to be made bearable right from the moment the distrust and ill will got pronounced by “shabi shalemaars" and “Jashni Kashmirs", and the ‘pearl eyed parrot' in the golden cage continued in its strains the refrain: `Thou art, thou alone art" which regaled some in the belief that they really were and also assuaged the pain of many in uncertainty by the anodyne of whatever sort "The Bitch Goddess of success" continued to be given the bonees and praised in songs.

And to let off the steam, in the stadiums and gymnasium whole host of 'player' and 'sportsmen' were bred, reminiscent of old Roman amphitheatres, necessary to prevent restiveness. And this worked too. And you could see long and interminable queues and crowds listening to commentaries, even for nights, very much liked and envied by the string-pullers of this harlequinade to throw people off the scent and to cook things uninterfered and also the present people as non-thinking and non-feeling a lot to be swayed by anything, provided they got fever and excitement, in effect to be reducible to biddable entities, even if they showed different allegiances. This delusion, and the tolls it took later on, that no sensible and right-thinking dispensation could opt for, had to recoil, but they never knew.

Now let us see how all this gets reflected in the anguished soul of the common man as the short stories of the second phase reveal.

He was seismographically sensitive to all that was happening around him. Like all sensitive feeling and thinking individuals he, no doubt, withdrew in part to himself face to face against unsurmountable odds of apathy, ill will, many such frozen layers of dead weight, with the difference that awareness did not take leave of him. True, he did not lapse into slogan mongering or take to acrimonious protests because his art thus would not remain art, nor would it afford a peep into the soul of the common man, his anguish, festering sore, unrequited love and his implicit craving and aspiration.

Amin Kamil, in his "Infernal Creature", beautifully describes the changed circumstances and the now new anonymous shroud thief unrelieved more heinous against the relief of old Gana Mokul who did despoil the dead bodies of the shroud but did not leave the dead bodies exposed for all to see. Then the insight into mass-psychology, how a moral malady grown common, becomes a sort of customs and ritual, almost acceptable like proper customs in something of a prognosis, unmasked the victims of the shroud theft would let a casual wayfarer know:

"We were at the grave."
Has that been robbed?'
The grave gives you to understand that."
'Let the hell take him."

These four sentences with a syllable or word not more or less would bespoken much like a ritual of bathing, burying and reciting various funeral prayers and then hurting abominate curses to the new shroud-thief. The culminative contrast is “There is not another man to be found like Gana Mokul, "There is much more in this 'Zwaji Pathri' than meets the eye.

The story "What Matters is the Head" describes again a dispute between two Thanadaars ever a corpse for investigation. It is necessary, therefore, to show unmistakably towards which side the head of the corpse points to lying as the corpse does on the demarcation line between two 'thaanas'. The technicality and the general forensic procedure, thus, takes the pride of place, relating the case in point to oblivion. In this wrangle over technical niceties as to who will have the upper hand in appropriating the corpse and the jurisdictional right, the by standee is bewildered and finally he asks for the final resolution of the case as to what is to be done with a vast jurisdiction and not one like the ramshackle of a 'scavengers hut' at Khanpore, where never do well rickety constables he had got flogged by his sepoy, as they had tried to turn the head of the corpse towards their side, replies, "sadne do ji (let it rot), what matters really is towards which side was the head lying. So long as this is not resolved, the matter will linger on as it is". The story reminds one of Tolstoy's novelette The Death of Ivan Ilyich', in which the doctors instead of attending to the illness of the ailing man, wrangles over the rightness or otherwise of the diagnosis much to the exacerbation and ultimate demise of the patient. The dying man in the course of 'treatment' is reminded of his inauthentic self as used to give judgment to the accused unmindful of what that meant to them.


Akhtar Mohi-ud-Din in his ‘The Love Story of Madanvaar and Padmaan', shows the intensity and seriousness of their love and their pledge to live it up, keeping the torch of their love aflame and bright as it faces the fiercely raging storm of the different truth-perceptions of their fathers. Then in the loftiness of their love as from heights, they perceive that though truth-trees of their father strike and dress each other down with their branches, the different truth-trees had a common root They feel pleased and promise to let their fathers know that the truth-trees had a common root, informing them if they strike at the common root the trees will come crashing down. They, however, with the passage of time see no need to guard the flame of their love against the storm as it abates. Instead, with the coldness in their relations setting in, they imperceptibly begin to own different truth-perceptions of their fathers, pulling their children in the contrary directions till Madanvaar and Padmaan die disconsolate one after the other. It is neither a traditional nor a photographic representation but an eye-opener to our own plight; how, in spite of awareness being there, it is not lived up to its logical conclusion, notwithstanding the awareness presenting time and again people relapsing into what they had striven so hard to get released from. This is true of men and situations when awareness and safeguarding the values that matter are abdicated for soporific routine, where, through sheer boredom and ennui, there is complete reversal of values, much to the distress in which human situation gets inter-twined and choked.

In Akhtar's another story, 'Thou Art, Thou Alone Art', he is acutely sensitive to the atmosphere pervading many last decades. He succinctly and eloquently represents the onset of despondency after the intoxicating optimism and initial giddiness of success prove illusory. This phase, he feels, repeats age after age and each time the illusory success recoils, making men feel that they felt short of their inner reserve tries to see 'on the other side of the wall' as a dim perception. In this dim perception of what is on the other side of the wall? 'and' 'what died then when there was nothing? after blood trickled down the skies when he as Nimrod had thrown a sling to the skies, he very graphically presents the lucid intervals in human life situation when 'darkness unmitigated' is relieved by a shade of light.

A tremendously big show is being enacted on this as well as the other side of the wall. Age after age, I grow a new skin like a serpent, and doing again what I had tired myself of doing in the ages gone by. In each new life, I believed in good faith that I had done something entirely new, so novel that I had never done before. In every age, I threw a sling to the skies and struck my head against the lamp post, recognising in every age the only colour which according to my lights is the crown of all colours... the darkness.

The indistinct perception of the other side of the wall has happening all along as one system gives way to another, and one vision is supplanted by the other. There is a necessity of weaving of myth if one is to live and not to lose heart in tiffs endless desert where your feet are rewarded by blisters. The wayfarer has to find a meaning if only to retain a semblance of sanity. Myth is not just fiction but a great energiser, and by the feel of wholeness that it gives to a limited being, it drags him on to new constructions and new visions, only to reveal that we have run aground getting sore headed. It is a negative teacher because it every time, after initial optimism, reveals to be vulnerable and limited. But does man learn?

Had Krishan Koul in his "Remorse Let Loose" reflects the first flush of optimism and zeal have petered out The very names, Pedro, Doctor, Saith and Tarzon are far removed from the rootedness as mere labels and make believes, probably the titles seeming more real than the reality. The very attachments keeping them in contact with reality seem encumbrances and the very 'august' events taking place in the guise of very remote and abstract happenings only fit to be carried on as mere lifeless formalities to be made fun of and scoffed at How can these simulacra fill their void but in listening to the scores in cricket even when they are carrying the pall of Pedm's mother? The shopkeeper remonstrating against this unconscionable behaviour evokes a rejoinder that if the dead was not late all these seventy years, how will these ten minutes matter. This behaviour on their part scandalises Pedro and the priest all the more when at long last they cry out while carrying the dead body, "Three have fallen!" and the priest understood it to mean that the dead body had fallen down thrice an ominous foreboding. While the dead body is burning on the pyre, they talk of their imaginary love affairs and all the rot. Then the ultimate remorse, burst in Tarzan at a farther corner, when his pals think him to have whisked away to the cinema show which they had intended in case the funeral come to an early end, is a pointer that this sort not in remote unforeseeable future might come booming with gun only to get out of this futile existence to get an impression that they really live.

Koul's "Profound picture" portrays how a common man having finally been given to understand that he does not matter as precluded from any participation whatsoever, is rendered apathetic and indifferent to matters that affect them virtually. he may deliver fun at the circus jokers' trousers slipping out of his legs, but as if with a vengeance surprisingly impervious to many things he is bereaved and denuded of by the circumstances imposed on him without his knowing. His apathy and silence are perhaps desirable because if people give tongue to what they feel that might ignite gun powder and explosives the shape that the misdeeds of the perpetrators of the miseries assume. Then presuming that the worst is over, the newly won freedom entails how this is to be preserved and achieved. This as utopia is projected like a prophecy into an indefinite future ever more receding even when you are coaxed to move on and on. The 'Devi's temple vanishes behind new chinar tree of which countless many are left behind without your getting anywhere.

Finally, the man with the white shirt and pajama cannot make out who the villain in the picture is, father or father-in-law or the maternal uncle of the hero or the heroine, and this intractability and incomprehensibility make the picture 'profound'. The man who was to read the paper, prepared over a long period of time and attend the seminar, who at long last was getting an opportunity to avail himself of the things that mattered and made him 'estimable', might well exhort the 'eunuchs and those who laugh at the circus joker's pants slipping off his legs are woefully ignorant of things stripped naked of their very being. Will they ever be undeceived?

In his "An Offensive Tale", the very undoing of academic world is depicted in the student community being made use of for nefarious and paltry ends. The poor professor, over wrought by the circumstances, forgets to wear his pants. This poor man overwhelmed by the misery, tries to console himself with similar and far more serious transgressions of other professor and the Boss himself. Wanting to enlist the support of students to break the encirclement of his colleagues, who in collusion with the Boss are hell bent on starting the investigation in the presence of the Hon'ble Minister. His very effort reveals to him how they too have their fingers in the pie in grabbing of the college funds, the embezzlement and misuse of which he wants to make them aware of. The bathos and anticlimax make the professor feel that he is picked on alone, when the real crimes leave the 'tactful' people unscathed. He feels that he might give up his ghost there on that very chair, waiting for the period to end only after seven minutes when the Boss would start the investigation.

Then what is one to do in the pervading gloom, overwhelming misery, futility, and hopeless dejection? The Swamiji in Koul's "It is Night Yet', would have us believe that the biting, piercing cold, snowstorms, torrential rains, avalanches that overtook the three people staying at the tourist but at Banihal after having undergone more horrendous experience, is mere maaya or like a dream, which when up, is no longer real. Perhaps this approach also seems a way out when the anguish of the real situation is so excruciatingly painful that it can only be borne by benumbing the pain, by a soporific if need be, and make one move again by a dreamer an ideal, however remote and unattainable, lest one altogether freezes. But the morning, when the maaya will be over, is faraway and it is night yet and the hair raising experience is to be put up with

Hraiday Koul Bharti raises up all the Kafkaesque experience in man in general driven to corner by hopeless situation. The individual rendered desperate and ineffectual would not stop short of dealing death to others if he could, and debarred from this, becomes self-destructive with a morbid mentality of treasuring cobwebs, poison, thorns, aversion to sunlight, the very things symbolically inimical to life affirmation. In his "Crown of Creation", a present of cobweb is made by the man to his spouse. Here the thorns used to make crowns, the poison derived from the cactus, on whose leaves feed the scorpions, have their customers both for taking themselves and serving to others. The spouse cautions her man against the 'chipkali' (the lizard) as it stings a man after two and a half 'garhis' (a measure of time). The man reassures her that he would also sting it back as he would also be reminded of his own nature in the same measure of time. Now, whose two and a 'half 'gharis' will end first? His spouse apprehends that the chipkali's' two and a half gharis will end first and thus would sting first The man sets her fears at rest that he would take to swindle in setting the watch back, which the 'chipkali' would not be able to (to as it is not the 'Crown of Creation' like him. This perverse pleasure and gloating over the capacity of doing what even the poisonous reptiles would not do is the hall-mark of The Crown of Creation, ironical though, so unhinged and set awry by the situation.

Furthermore, the man reaching of the end of his inner reserves at the end of his tether, has a feel that the world will end as it will be a 'Sunless Tomorrow'. The individuals undergo a metamorphosis with the fear of the sunless tomorrow, his skin turning into animal hide with ridges bristling with monkey-like fur. As he comes to himself after the swoon, he finds himself in a queer room where there are pages pasted to one another edge to edge, all pallid and tainted with blue blotches. The wall is made of the pages of history, some of which are straight and others upside down, still others askew and awry. There is a crack all along the taper-wall and the writing there is altogether faded. "The crack there on the wall is due to our mistake. We should have taken thought before hand that they will not bear sunlight. We should not have used these pages at all. They are the pages of history from the beginning of time. "they enclose him and he probably is what history has made him enclosed as he is in the room made of them. The doctors holding him on the operation-table have nothing like human in them, "bare skeletons in attire", nothing save their bald scalps is visible under the full blaze of six lamps which give more heat than light. The doctors are cold as ice with lime stone as their colour. They ask him to shriek out in order to be rid of his painful existence.

All the four raised a furor and cried out of fear……I cry out... aaaa, aaaa. My cry continues still, continues even today. I do not lose my breath and the cry does not come to an end. Now the cry turns by and by unto a monkey howl and my skin gradually turns into a hide wrinkling out on the ridges of which there is a dense hairy growth. The paper wall is now riddled with countless blue blotches... Outside, perhaps, that tomorrow has come, that 'tomorrow' that will see no sun...

The ever recurring theme of everybody bearing his own cross and the checkmate one gets in irresolvable situation, is presented in "Chakra Vyuh". The man plunges into a battle of life making a dent in every wall and gate, is caught in a situation of his own making or is existing there as such, must know how to pull out to come out a victor as the master of this technique of warfare was supposed to do. The hope of somebody bailing him out is more often than not precluded, making him, for all practical purposes, an expendable entity.

Mohammad Bin Ishaq Bin Ali's racket standing above the native racket hung on the nail over the wall and Abhimanyu holding up a chariot wheel poised for being hurled at Kaurou spearman soldier stand unattested like a petrified moment on the wall of the room. irrespective of the fact that Mohammad Bin Ishaq Bin Ali and his party have long before besieged in Biafra and that Duryodhana’s son has long, long back crashed Abhimayu's skull ending that day of Mahabharata. But the racket there on the wall, absorbing all the smoke, the blue-print for effecting a blend of Nigerian and Indian architecture in the brief case, and Abhimanyu still holding up the chariot wheel on his mighty arms that have not suffered the least bend stand there on the wall, like a painful situation, not thawing in being congealed there as a reality of the moment, with all the trails and tribulations of uncertainty giving an impression that his ‘Turn' has also come without so much as crossing the first gate of the 'Chakravyuh'.

A.K.Rahbar presents the present-day Gautam setting out on his mission in Bharatvarsha. His father, a big mill-owner, wants him to take over proprietorship of the mills and establish 'Gautam Nagar' or alternatively fight an election in a Harijan settlement and become a minister in the long run. All the plans of the father fall short of realisation because of the lockout in the mills and Harijans choosing a candidate in their own fraternity. Gautam, not succumbing to temptations, leaves his Yashumat to wander over the country where, in course of his wanderings, sees poor hungry people swooping upon curbs and cast off remnants and dredging them from out of gutters, adulterated goods, mothers not suckling their young ones, for the fear that it is contaminated and poisoned, long and interminable queues of unemployed youth with no gleam of life in their eyes, evoking the anguished cry 'Verily, this sansaar is an abode of misery.' His undiminished love for 'Yashu' also might not be suckling his babe. Then one day, in the midst of such absorptions, he gets a telegram: 'Dear Gautam, Live Long! May your mission succeed. I pray for you. Do not worry at all for me. I have married the Mill-Manager.

Today's Yashu will pray for the success of her Gautam's mission, but instead of waiting for him and feeling heartened in the pilgrimage of spirit as his 'ardhaangani prefers the Mill-Manager as the bird in hand rather than the two in the bush.

Rattan Lal Shant, in his "The First Lesson", shows the teacher who after a long wandering, resolves to bring life and hope to the neglected and forsaken region where he is sent as a teacher to join in a school. The first thing he confronts there is a coffin surrounded by a group of people. The man conducting him to the place tells him after the day wears to a close, 'How could they start a school here, Sir? There should be children of school going age for that. Six years have passed since the Pir Sahib of that hill over there got incensed with the people of below fifteen twelve years of age... the only child who was ready there was put in the coffin today." No comment perhaps is needed in view of the absence of such children and hopelessness that has caught on the people

Shant's another story, "whom should I talk of" talks of the grudge which the old generation nurses to the younger one, the growing irksomeness if not the irrelevance of their values and restrictions. The new generation is embittered for having carve out their own values in a world where circumstances force them to conform to patterns in a society cramping their life. They simply have to keep up with the society, with, its fake, artificial, and ad hoc standards. The old generation grouse that the present generation is not adhering to their values, the new one remonstrate that they owe nothing to them for they had no choice in being condemned to this sort of life rendered helpless; they recklessly expose themselves and others and in laughing under their sleeve.

What shall he cherish and value? 
"The sustaining aliment? "Its search being a siren call from across the desert, only waylaying him..." "his breaths?" He has been giving an account of them, ever since he began to take them... 
"His life?" Was it given to him on his asking? May be he might not have liked to be born yet.
"His society?" Its Mona Lisa smile was ever an enigma to him.
All along his life, he has been trying to fit himself to its measure, now falling short and then brimming over its confines.
The Narga they were supposed to be afraid of is in fact that in which they have been caught and where they have lost their way.

Then, the solitary character in Ali Mohd Lone's story, 'Vacuum` is so enveloped in vacuum that he would give away anything to get his vacuum filled in. He had found no answer to the problem of being and is so overwrought that the whole universe seems to have shrunk to even less than an atom. The problem with him is unlike those that we have confronted so far.

People in general manage somehow to plod, the very chains of business, confines of household and such other things tame and domesticate them. But the central character in "Vacuum" is free from such chains, and as such, finds himself alone. Nobody is there to communicate with in the noisy solitude. In his painful loneliness and lack of communication, he does not find any difference even in being hospitalised on account of a fracture, he takes it as an opportunity, a luxury, a romance in being different from the meaningless rounds of daily activity. The fact that the X-rays do not show any fracture disgusts him as he is thus denied the opportunity of sitting on a hospital bed with arms curbed under plaster.

This phase is very much like the 'petrified moment on the wall' in Bharti's "Chakravyuha", and the metamorphosed being in his "Sunless Tomorrow", who through sheer frightening prospect of such a tomorrow is reduced to this state, perhaps giving out his interminable shriek because he cannot locate this trouble in the general malaise where the new anonymous 'shroud-thief (in Kamil's story) not only despoils the dead bodies but exposes them besides to public gaze, or where the common man is beguiled by the circus joker's pants slipping out of his legs, unaware of how many things he is denuded of and not being able to know who the villain is, whether the hero or the heroine's father or father-in-law or her maternal uncle in H. K.Koul's "The Profound Picture". This state of mind is really the painful dilemma before a thinking and feeling man who, as the founts of life dry up in him, sees no way out in an authentic perception of life, but only in abdicating his self and surrendering before a father-figure of authority.

To conclude, the Savage, in Bharti's story, even after twenty years' absence on home coming, is still happy over the sunlight getting bruised and sullied as it crawls up warily over the cracks and pits on the wall, and finally expecting it to be irretrievably trapped in the tough and strong cobweb. 

His spouse asks him, have you ever thought of sunlight also? 
Why not?
'What' she asked as I pointed to the cobweb in thee corner. The sunlight was about to swallow the bait She swooped upon the cobweb with a single pull and, turning to me in guise of a gigantic being, held me in a tight embrace. Her warmth got the better of my iceness... Gradually, all the sacks got filled and all the pits played out and the sunlight flexed itself on the smooth soft glossy surface unobstructed. 

The savage, cold and indifferent as he had returned even after twenty years, got accustomed to it Even his illness, showing no signs of thawing, is asked about, but he replies that he is accustomed to it His illness could only be got over by love. To be reminded of the past mistakes, if ever they occurred, is only to fix him in his perversity, for which he cannot be solely responsible for he has been at the receiving end also. It is love, a loving concern, to take cognizance and, in the long run, accustoming him to it. If in making hits what he is, he only is not to blame, much more so, in this spiritual rehabilitation, he alone is not to see peace, but the other party should reach out in constructive cure and loving concern. 

The love needed is not the love of the possessive and insecure mothers who lake every sign of life, every hint of preciosity to I, unreliable, necessitating curbs and restrictions that make stunted and abnormal development ultimately, nor that Delilah like love which destroys the very strength, the very unique affirmative quality that identity possesses, to simply tame and domesticate but love which marks him out. It is only that trust, that abiding free flow of life that ensures unity rather smothering incorporation. What is needed is a whole man, rather than a big man, to conquer in spirit and love. An understanding and imaginative grasp to recognise him, entertaining the hope that the 'ray of hope' is still there undiminished in its brightness, uniqueness to be affirmed rather than smallness to be derided – that is the love that is need because the whole man not only thinks, but feels and loves too.

What is needed is to rise above petty calculations and the craze for lumping up of individuals and disparate entities for a generalists convenience, even when there is no need for it. It is this language of the heart and soul that the short story writer and the artist in him use and insist on being felt and understood as reciprocity in love.

M. Siddiq Beig