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Melting Moments
"Man, an Indian woman is not worthy of being called a woman! Bloody, she’s more like a smoked out cane stick, even a she-calf is better than her. When you pat her at least her tongue lolls out instantly. But our women! They have the pretences of ballad singers: you have to beg them a hundred times over. Hunh!" These telling quotes reflect the pride and prejudices of the non-resident Punjabis of the Bhaji and Bharjaiji of the Birmingham variety brought alive in the short stories of Punjabi writer Raghbir Dhand. Rana Nayar has now made these stories available to the readers of English in a meticulously translated and edited volume called Melting Moments. Dhand is at his best while exploring the world of the migrant Asian working classes and these stories indeed capture the moment well. Heavily laced with conversation that is often in the form of quotable quotes these stories unravel the intimate world of the people there as well as their joys, sorrows and concerns. While the migrants from Punjab focus more in the stories of the writer who is a part of this community but he also weaves fiction around other communities—migrants from Bangladesh and Pakistan as well as the local British people. Some of the stories explore the dialectics of the communication among these communities very well. Some of the stories are set in the Indian soil but Dhand is at his best when telling tales of the life and experiences in the Promised Land. Born on November 1, 1934, at Jandiali Kalan, Sangrur district, Dhand did his Masters in history from Panjab University and worked as a schoolteacher at different places in Punjab before choosing to migrate to the United Kingdom in 1965. After working in factories and officers for several years, he did his teachers training and became a schoolteacher once again. The publication of his first anthology—Boli Dharti (The Deaf Earth)—brought him serious notice as a writer even though he had been publishing short stories since 1956. Nayar writes thus of the late writer, "As an individual and a writer, Dhand always sought to negotiate the complex, ghettoised, feudal Punjabi identity through the mish-mash of racism, politics of exclusion, identity, language and culture. These stories deal exclusively with the problems of a dual identity." As a writer, Dhand was known to use language with the deftness of a painter’s strokes and the achievement of this volume is that the translator is able to retain this ability in the English language, which is a very difficult task indeed. This volume is important not just because it is the first ever attempt to showcase Dhand’s work in the English language but because it has ben done so well with a insightful introduction putting each of the 14 stories in a perspective. Melting Moments becomes a step forward from the translator’s first book, From Across the Shores, which was a collection of 16 short stories by different Punjabi writers from the UK. |
"JUST look at Ms
Dilshad, the way she pretends all the time. You know, I went to her
house in Amritsar. My gosh! What a house it was? Full of houseflies.
They ordered some Fanta from the bazaar and forced the bottles in our
hands. Of course, my husband drank it out of sheer politeness. But you
know, how I hate such cheap stuff. I just gave away my bottle to the
chauffer…"