Stories That Refuse Simplicity

SITAARON SE AAGE INTRODUCES READERS TO HYDER’S EARLY NARRATIVE EXPERIMENTS, WHERE SATIRE, MULTILINGUAL TEXTURES AND INTERIOR MONOLOGUES ILLUMINATE A SOCIETY POISED ON THE BRINK OF IRREVERSIBLE CHANGE

- YAUVANIKA CHOPRA

Ex-Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar presenting the symbol of the Jnanpith Award, "Vagdevi", to Qurratulain Hyder in New Delhi on January 9, 1991

“Many concentric circles ripple out when a stone is flung into the quiet and still waters of a lake bordered by fig and olive trees and the star-shaped night-blooming jasmine. Don't they?... Wait a minute, there’s no need to go all poetic...No, I won't digress or my story will become incoherent. Besides, most of you intelligent people accept that there are many crests and troughs in life which is like a forked road, awash with tragedy or comedy or a little of both...”

This is from ‘Star Crossed’, one of 14 stories in a collection titled Sitaaron Se Aage by Qurratulain Hyder (1927-2007), translated from the Urdu by Fatima Rizvi. Hyder is a very difficult author to translate—her stories do digress often and deliberately, experimenting with interior monologue and narrative streams of consciousness alongside song lyrics and the onomatopoeic “tap-tap-tap” of raindrops or “splish-splash-splish” of a boat’ oars in a river, Her writing is always complex, sometimes convoluted, and never lacking in coherence, although it demands attention from readers whom she presumes intelligent enough to follow the labyrinths of her mind and characters traversing a milieu which is simultaneously cosmopolitan and culturally rooted.