Syed Muhammad Ashraf finds human stories in animal kingdom

Chandni S Chandel

An assortment of Urdu short stories and a novella translated into English, ‘The Silence of the Hyena’ is an inextricable part of our daily lives. The real-life instances curated into the narrative of some stories flow quite smoothly, which makes for an interesting read.

Using animals as metaphors, the award-winning writer Syed Muhammad Ashraf, who qualified the Indian Administrative Service in his mother tongue, Urdu, has tried to get into the recesses of the human heart. He has tried to weave myriad human sentiments like sorrow, sensitivity, poignancy, competition and transposed them into animal characters with such ingenuity that the thin line dividing animals from humans becomes almost invisible. His stories are non-offensive, yet, are an intelligently-spun social critique. No doubt it fetched Ashraf the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2004.

Most of the stories have a high emotional quotient. Like ‘Separated from the Flock’, which delves into the after-shocks of one of the most painful, unforgettable, tragic human apocalypse — the Partition of India.

Though the original work is in Urdu, which would be more ornate with the appropriate alfaaz, translators M Asaduddin and Musharraf Ali Farooqi have succeeded to quite an extent since most of the stories are able to captivate and hold the reader’s interest.

The novella ‘The Beast’ immediately makes you identify it with a similar backdrop: the recent Hathras rape case in Uttar Pradesh. The narrative of ‘The Beast’ has a rape and two murders, and nobody knows who committed the crime. The protagonist of the story is a blue bull ‘Neela’ and its owner, Thakur Udal Singh, whose roots thread out from a small village to the town and extend further too. He is the village headman, chairman of the town council also and has business interests in the city. To safeguard his power and money, he befools everybody by creating a pseudo-image of his bull as being extraordinary and the destroyer of evil and when people raise their voice, he scuttles dissent by using the alibi of divine providence. Though it was published as a short story, ‘Numberdar ka Neela’, in 1999, the novel in Urdu was published in 1997. It is as relevant today as it was then and before.

Animals are like poorer cousins of humans, and they have little means to fight back, just like the hyena in the short story ‘The Hyena Cries’. It was paraded like a handcuffed criminal along the streets and it helplessly trudged along. The parallelism seems quite clear.

Many stories toss us into a reverie with instances which could have happened with anybody, irrespective of the barrier of language, religion, region; the emotions of human existence remain the same. The book elicits a re-read anytime.