‘Heer’ we go again

The finest moment in Haroon Khalid’s new book is when Waris meets Bulleh Shah. Khalid’s imagination blazes, consuming and re-creating the fabled encounter. The writing is crystalline and dazzling, etching the encounter in a gem of an essay within the narrative. A few pages before, the writer has already hinted at his ambition. He will add a fresh hue to Ranjha’s rainbow existence — that shimmery archetype of the doomed lover. In a metafictional fold-up, he makes Ranjha say: “I donned an oral existence for centuries before I was immortalised on paper by Damodar of Jhang.” This Ranjha will be again ensouled with poetic truth, to come to life with more than the contingencies of reality. In this way will Khalid stake his claim to Waris Shah’s literary inheritance.

But then he is impatient, insufficiently prepared, and tires too soon. Unlike the great poet, he cannot hold the note. Different characters tell their part and side of the story, but the voice remains the same. The writer fails to be more than himself. He tries to speak in tongues, but they all sound false. You hear a drone that sounds like some mercenary 19th-century colonial translator’s monotone, soggy with stereotypes. When for once clichés are avoided, slang abuse pours in: Ranjha feels he has been treated like “a bum, a lazy ass, an arrogant prick”.

Khalid’s aim is to write “a novel, a qissa” —– a work “not to be read but to be heard”. But what he writes has neither Waris’ power nor pace, nor his nuanced rhythms to enthral the ear. He wants it to be “somewhere between poetry and prose”, but most of it is neither poetry nor good prose. The prologue suggests the book is meant to be at once fiction and metafiction, history and folklore. As a manifesto for an old ideology, it contains notes towards “a hybrid religiosity”, an odd term for syncretism reduced somehow to monism. The declared moral centre of the book is “gender violence”, but the narrative consciousness is unrelievedly male.

Neither does Khalid’s Heer have the comprehensive soul of Waris’ heroine. She is consumed by vanity. This Ranjha is not inspired by pure love either. He is impelled by a sister-in-law’s taunt to prove his worth by conquering the Sials’ daughter of peerless charm.

Khalid inflates his Ranjha’s moral persona: “He decided to travel to become one with Siddharth, Rasalu, Prophet Yousuf, Guru Nanak.” The parallel derives from a “magical rationality” the writer claims for his narrative, though the equation doesn’t work even as voodoo. The urge to instruct the reader in the correct way of navigating the text barely masks the writer’s nagging awareness that the book is not working. He wonders if the reader might not be “skipping” pages, and directly addresses him in a tone spitting scorn.

Khalid probably did not give sufficient thought to two vital questions. Who is the book meant for? What is the purpose of retelling this old but ageless tale? Aristotle pondered long on these questions. So did the author of ‘Mahabharata’. For both, great familiar stories harboured unexplored possibilities, fascinating mysteries that demand patient unravelling. Khalid, however, goes for quick fixes. The fourth chapter reads like a replay of the Holi song from ‘Sholay’ but evokes an abstract Spring, without naming any flower, fruit or bird. The third chapter remains the weakest as Khalid recycles Plato’s myth of the cave into a bad facsimile. The Maulvi tells the boys they have undergone transformation because they have understood the story. Later, Waris preaches the virtues of a utopian government of philosophers. A diminutive Greek ghost is thus smuggled into the heart of the Sufi text.

The experiment flounders mainly because it is undertaken half-heartedly. He keeps his muse mostly chained to old conventions. The submission of the literary work to a set of ideas further weakens it, the feeble attempt to rescue it in the epilogue notwithstanding. If he had listened to Waris, he would have let the tale compost in the deep mind, waited for its resurrection, and penned it when it asked to be penned.

— The writer is former professor of English, Punjabi University