Born in Lucknow in a pre-Independent India in 1929, Hajra Masroor came from a family of writers and poets, including two of her siblings and her mother. After Partition, the entire family eventually moved to Lahore in newly-created Pakistan. Her legacy has perhaps been overshadowed by that of her elder sister, Khadija Mastur, who has been translated into English by none other than Daisy Rockwell, but Masroor too was an exemplary writer in her own right. Her short stories, according to her translator Tahira Naqvi, “dealt boldly and affectively with the complexities of social and political upheavals faced by ordinary people.”
She published six collections of short stories, along with a book of one-act plays, in her lifetime. All these stories were collected in an omnibus volume, Sab Afsanay Meray, published in 1990 and it is the source for this translated edition that collects eighteen stories from Masroor’s considerable body of work. While the Partition is central to stories like “Death and Milk”, which portrays violence and exodus in a remote village and “The Deceased Nation” that depicts sordid details of a refugee camp, most stories are about the “bitter realities of life as well as the wounds and traumas of the inner lives of women.”
The wounds inflicted by patriarchy
In the titular story, the narrator spies a group of monkeys: “Sitting on the parapet, blackened with mildew, was a sickly, whimpering monkey surrounded by several fat monkeys busy scratching a black, ghastly wound on his back with their sharp nails… No sooner had one started puttering around in the wound than the other bared his teeth, slapped his eyelids and followed suit.” The story is titled after a Hindi muhavara, “bandar ka ghaav karna”, literally translating to “a monkey’s wound”, which is used to refer to an issue that is never settled, a wound that is never healed, because there is excessive interference and inspection.
A woman’s body is the site of the wound that patriarchy perpetrates upon them. “An ordinary abrasion was scratched by poisonous nails until the scratch turned into a big wound. A wound that would putrefy on the inside and become toxic.” The protagonist, unmarried in her mid-twenties, receives constant abuse from family. In “In The Darkness”, Zehra laments how her life has been “spent in an environment where a woman’s status was not much higher than that of a slave.” While her brother slept late, lazed around, and only stirred himself to go to college, she had to help her mother in running the household.
Many of Masroor’s women are not satisfied with their station in life and try to rebel against the cruel structures that curtail their actions and attempt to dictate every aspect of their behaviour. In “Ashes”, a group of young ladies are openly in revolt. They do not care how their dupattas fall, they smoke cigarettes stolen from male members of the family, and write poems about love. Even Bari Apa, who is very prim and proper at all times, has a secret love affair. The beautiful Najma in “The Slap” is married against her will to a bestial man just because he is rich and keeps meeting her old flame.
These rebellions do not usually end in happiness or a decisive break from the patriarchal establishment. The narrator of “Ashes” is in love with Zia, a new neighbour, but she discovers that he is romantically involved with someone else and all her hopes are turned to ash. Najma gives birth to a girl that resembles her lover and not her husband, intended as a “resounding slap on society’s face.” It is made tragic by the fact that the child is stillborn and Najma herself dies soon after. Her victory cis short-lived; it cannot erase her punishment.
Women and internalised misogyny
More often than not, the ones holding back these women from acting on their desires and fulfilling their dreams are other, older women who have slowly internalised their oppression and implicitly accepted their subjugated position in society. Through them, Masroor depicts how patriarchy brings its victims to its side and co-opts them. In both “The Monkey’s Wound” and “In The Darkness”, the narrators are held back by their mothers more than their brothers or fathers. Suffering through multiple pregnancies and their husbands’ abuse, they coddle their own sons while holding back and imprisoning their daughters.
In “Oh God!” Daadi has her orphaned granddaughter, Nanhi, on a short leash and keeps her busy in sundry tasks in the household. Possessive to a fault, she castigates and cossets her by turns, holding her responsible for the actions of others. The eponymous little girl of the story “Bhag Bhari” is raped by Malak Sahib when she’s sent to give him a towel for his bath but the mistress of the household, Bari Malakni, blames her for the act instead of her son. Bhag Bhari is “always too feisty” and after all, “he’s a man, what can he do?”
Tahira Naqvi’s translation capably replicates Hajra Masroor’s idioms in English. She retains a good amount of Urdu terms, even though she initially has them in italics and awkwardly provides the meaning in parentheses. Stories like “The Flame of the Oil Lamp” and “A Baby Girl” brilliantly showcase women’s unmet aspirations and the suffering they undergo whether due to poverty or their family condition. Of special note is “The Third Floor” which depicts quotidian life in an apartment complex. The collection highlights Masroor’s open and unflinching gaze, and must pave the way for more translations.
The Monkey’s Wound and Other Stories, Hajra Masroor, translated from the Urdu by Tahira Naqvi, Penguin.