The Mirror of Wonders and other tales by Syed Rafiq Hussain, Translated by Saleem Kidwai, Yoda Press,
New Delhi, 2013, Rs 250, pp. 165.
Syed Rafiq Hussain’s
literary career was as remarkable as it was brief. A challenge issued by his
younger sister and daughter spurred him to write in Urdu, a language he could
barely read. Claiming that the ‘difference between English and Urdu literature
was like that between a spinning wheel and a cotton mill or a bullock cart and
a train’, he felt no need to read Urdu fiction. Yet, he chose to pick up the
gauntlet thrown by his sister and daughter and write something to improve the
prevailing standard! Replete with spelling mistakes, Hussain wrote the outlines
of his stories in a mixture of Urdu and English. He would bring the drafts,
written in his unformed Urdu handwriting, to the two ladies who would go over
it painstakingly and insert Urdu phrases for the English ones. His niece
recalls those frenetic sessions: ‘Between him, his sister and daughter there
was a special bond; they also played an intellectual game between themselves
where each had to tell a tale which made an assigned impossible situation
probable.’
Hussain’s first short
story, ‘Kalua’, was about a dog. In a short autobiographical sketch, he reveals
the method behind his seeming madness: ‘Before I wrote [‘Kalua’] I walked all
those streets and lanes of Lucknow where Kalua had wandered. The details of the
railway crossing at Aish Bagh, where Kalua sniffs at the corpse of his mentor
Bucha are still etched in my mind.’ Hussain wrote over a span of less than a
decade, crafting his stories during his spells of unemployment and never
accepted remuneration for any of his stories. He died of cancer in 1944; his
first collection, Aina-e-Hairat (‘The
Mirror of Wonders’) was published a fortnight after his death.
Hussain’s personal life
was unconventional, to say the least. Born in 1895, he lost his mother at the
age of seven; after some haphazard home tutoring and erratic schooling, he ran
away from home. He reached Bombay with a bundle of books on mathematics and two
sets of clothes, worked as a coolie in a foundry, carried iron for 12 hours a
day, ate at roadside eateries and studied. Eventually, he took admission in an
Engineering College in Bombay, was reunited with his family and after quitting
several jobs found himself working on the Sharada canal in the Terai region. The
Terai exercised a spell over him and appeared in his writings in all its
vastness and mystery. Its densely forested tracts, its ravines and gullies, its
valleys crisscrossed by many rivulets and the animals, especially the tigers,
that had made it their home for centuries appear in this collection in a manner
that is startlingly new even for English readers; when they first appeared in
Urdu they must have charted unknown territory.
For someone who claimed
to hate animals and never kept pets, Hussain showed a keen eye for detail in
describing the behaviour of animals. Also, for someone who claimed to have read
‘four or five’ Urdu books, his stories established his reputation as a prose
stylist and master story teller; the fact that this reputation rested on the
eight stories included in the collection that, incidentally, comprised his entire
ouvre, is no small feat. Combining the lyricism of William Wordsworth’s nature
poetry with the exactitude of Jim Corbett’s shikar
stories, The Mirror of Wonder and Other
Tales is quite unlike anything in the repository of modern Urdu literature.
‘Unfortunately, my
intelligence and the fickleness of my temperament had ruined me,’ Hussain writes
with no trace of false modesty. And elsewhere, he admits: ‘I am a small man, I
am true, I am mad, I am crazy. Whatever I am, here I am.’ Arrogant and
enigmatic, yes, but also immensely talented and profoundly philosophical as is
borne out by these stories that deserve to be read at leisure rather than
described in a few short sentences for the purpose of this review. Yoda Press
is to be congratulated for re-discovering these hidden gems, immaculately
translated by Saleem Kidwai.
