Master storyteller
Jyoti Singh

Snake Catcher by Naiyer Masud. Penguin Books. Pages 243. Rs 250.

Placed at par with Kafka, Borges and Murakami, Naiyer Masud is indeed a master storyteller. Passionately involved with fiction, he began writing stories in his early boyhood but did not start publishing until the 1970s. It was his friendship with Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, Urdu literature’s most astute critic who revived his desire to write fiction. He has published two dozen titles, including fiction, children’s books, translation and research work. His fiction includes Seemiya, Itr-e-Kaafuur and Taa’uus Chaman ki Mayna. Notable among his translations is a volume of Franz Kafka’s short stories and parables entitled Kaafka ke Afsaane and numerous contemporary Iranian short stories, which have appeared in quarterly Aaj.

The stories contained in Snakecatcher are a translation of his stories written in Urdu, by Mohammad Umar Memon. These tales best reveal his style, purely distinct, rendering a fictional world trying to diagnose the human situation. Although the reader finds the stories well formed yet finds oneself lost in their maze. They are elusive—with no beginning or an end. This seamless narrative structure grills the readers mind so that one ends up trying to fathom the symbolism hidden in such an endeavour. If they do not begin at a distinct logical point and reach the denouement, appearing to be open ended it is precisely because they do not deal with reality as something divisible or linear. Most of the stories are prefaced with quotations, especially from the Persian mystical lore. Strangely enough if one is to approach the stories, situating them against the backdrop of these quotations—in the domain of reason—they would be less accessible.

If Ganjifa narrates the story of a paralysed father living off his daughter’s income and a son depending totally on his mother’s income, Weather Vane shows how a wife, negating herself masochistically, undergoes slow and silent death, caring for her ailing husband who in turn is hardly reciprocal to her; Custody and Resting Place bear streaks akin to the Theatre of the Absurd where chaos, confusion, uncertainty prevail; Epistle is the protagonist’s walk down the memory lane to fulfil a dying mother’s wish; The Woman in Black lets a peek into the life of a beautiful girl with deformed feet; Obscure Domains of Fear and Desire relates the coming of an age of a young boy who looks for realms of fear and longing in the houses he inspects—the reader encounters Masud’s fictional world, a mirror image of the real world embodying a single concern under the apparent multiplicity of his work: the experience of being. Darkness, black colour, desolate empty courtyards and silent homes are recurrent images. He attempts to show the effect of time on "the experience of being" and that we and the society around us are its victims. The stories highlight how Time brings with it separation, loss, disintegration and decay at every level of experience—both within the individual and between individuals, within the community and between communities, and so on.

Open to myriad interpretations, almost all the stories are great seminal heart-searching documents and veiled commentaries on the human situation full of uncertainty, despair and anguish. To quell this situation, faith in God would bestow redemption, is what Masud tries to tell us. This is one reason why most of the readers would experience his stories in almost metaphysical and Sufi-like sense.

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