A Bibliophile’s Tribute

 

It’s been a year since I enrolled myself as a member at justbooks.com. The experience has been rewarding at many levels. I have a considerable collection of books, accumulated over the best part of the last 3 decades. My first real passion was (perhaps, is?) for cricket and I read a lot of cricket autobiographies and biographies through my teens. Secunderabad Club, of which my dad was a member for a few years, had a fantastic collection of cricket books and I read books by Neville Cardus, Don Bradman, Dennis Lillee, Clive Lloyd, Fred Trueman, Richie Benaud and whatever else I could lay my hands on those days. After that phase, I lapsed into classic whodunits – books by Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Erle Stanley Gardner, a bit of Alistair Maclean. I tried sundry fiction written closer to modern era, but apart from Frederick Forsyth, did not really like much else. Into college, and I only read Wodehouse. A great stress-reliever, you have to place a heavy piece of fabric like a towel, between your clenched teeth if you happen to read Wodehouse while on a train or aircraft, lest people question your sanity levels. When I began my working career, I decided I better get a bit more serious now, and started reading management and business books. Every now and then, I would get back to some light reading and that’s when I started collecting RK Narayan’s books. I have almost the entire collection and if you like your books to relate to the middle-class Indian life, there’s no one better than RK Narayan. I happened to move to Singapore a few years later. One of the best parts of the Singaporean life is their public library. You get to become a library member for a song, are allowed to borrow 4 books at a time, have the entire world’s literature at your disposal, can pick up and drop your books at any of their completely digitally tagged, almost unmanned libraries across the country - luxuries that you can’t find anywhere in the world. There, my favourite section was world history : books of the world wars and characters from that era like Churchill, Hitler, Anne Frank etc., biographies of world leaders such as Che Guevara, Charlie Chaplin, Kennedy and so on… Back home, I developed a renewed passion for Indian history and started accumulating books on Indian leaders, especially those by foreign authors and their perspectives of India’s struggle for freedom. By now, the shelves had started splitting and furniture acquisition to accommodate books became necessary. I never tried Kindle as I always liked to hold books in my hands and often fall asleep with them by my pillow. It was by chance that I dropped into a justbooks.com outlet, got hooked and have read rather vigorously over the last year to derive best value out of the annual membership fee and the allowance of reading 2 books at a time. They have a system similar to Singapore, albeit at a smaller scale; just pick up your books from any of their libraries and you can return them anywhere else. You don’t have to speak to anyone – it’s ‘e-nabled’. I must have read atleast 26 books, this last year, drawing from all of my favourite subjects. Short stories, which I must have read fleetingly earlier, now form a central part. But this piece isn’t about my favourite books or justbooks.com.

 

I’ve just said I’ve started really liking short stories. Difficult to say ‘why’. Perhaps I have reached that stage of my life when I would rather read the whole story at one go, than chew it in parts. Sports biographies do interest me, but I already know the stories. Management and business books typically talk down to you and you end up feeling ‘why can’t I do that’. It causes more stress than relaxation. They need you to concentrate when all you want to do is to read for the pleasure of reading. Humour is, well, not serious enough. Short stories must be told crisply, must maintain the readers’ interest right through, and give you a ‘twist’ within that short span, usually right at the end. But this isn’t just about short stories.

 

I’ve just read, rather breezed through, a translation of short stories of Saadat Hasan Manto. Born and brought up in India, torn away to Pakistan after partition, died a miserable, lonely death at the age of 42, but in those young years wrote over 250 stories in Urdu, some of them deemed so controversial that he was tried for blasphemy and obscenity several times. His writings mostly conveyed an overhang of depression, ridden with melancholy, reflective of those turbulent times either side of partition, when the unsuspecting common man gained little and lost much from this violent, mass-uprooting from either side of what became national borders. His stories glide easily and provide you a mental landscape without attempting to paint them for you, certainly different from most other short story writers. It would seem that neither India nor Pakistan really promoted Manto’s works much; most of the attention to his work has come posthumously and that too closer to his centenary year, a couple of years ago. But this isn’t about Manto either.

 

Aatish Taseer is the author of this translated selection of works of Manto that I just finished reading in less than 2 hours. 158 pages in fewer than 2 hours is a personal best for me. Normally, I tend to read one or two stories and then take a break, but not with this one. Apparently Aatish has written a couple of novels and has also written for Wall Street, Times and other leading journals. He must have, it would be a colossal understatement to say that he writes very well. What’s really praiseworthy is that he, urban bred and brought up on a diet of Queen’s English as we all have been, learnt Urdu to really appreciate poetry of those times by literary greats, none lesser than his own grandfather Dr. MD Taseer. We would not know if the translation did justice to the Urdu original, but then there’s nothing that we can complain about, it’s an outstanding piece of work. But, this isn’t about Aatish Taseer either, atleast not entirely.

 

Aatish confesses that he learnt his Urdu from one Zafar Moradabadi and dedicates the book to him. Zafar, obviously a literary great in his own right, agreed to teach Aatish Urdu for a modest fee to keep poverty at bay. In post-partition India, when Hindi promotion became all-consuming, Urdu found few promoters, save perhaps the Bollywood dialogue-writers and lyricists. Zafar, not cast in that mould, was condemned to take up an accounting job to make ends meet. (Coming from a professional accountant that seems blasphemous ?) When computers trampled over his rather rudimentary skills, he undertook writing PhD theses for students for small fees so that they could do well in their careers. His own modest accommodation in a nondescript locality of Old Delhi had but one room where a family of 5 could hardly fit themselves in physically. This is about people like Zafar Moradabadi. And, about Manto at some level. People who get little or nothing for their talents when they are alive, but get celebrated years after their death from which their families gain little or nothing. Subramanya Bharati, the great Tamil poet is another who got similar treatment when he was alive. Zafar is still alive; Aatish has paid an enormous tribute by dedicating his book to him. This piece is an attempt at a tribute to people like Janaab Zafar Moradabadi, who’ve kept our multi-cultural traditions alive, who are victims of our times, gifted and talented, but living, unfortunately, despairingly, in the wrong era.