The short story form in Indian languages is truly special. I have, at times, been disappointed in short stories in English or European languages in translation, but that has never been the case for Indian languages. In fact, they have whetted my appetite so successfully that I have hungered for the authors’ other works with almost a manic fixation.
This streak continues unbroken with Hindi writer Upendranath Ashk’s (1910–1996) Hats and Doctors, a collection of short stories selected and translated by Daisy Rockwell. Rockwell, who studied Ashk’s literary works for her PhD research, had a long, interesting association with him in the final years of his life. The two would meet at his residence in Allahabad, where Rockwell would try to get him to speak about his writings.
A young student at the time, Rockwell would be intimidated by his capricious nature – he was brusque to the point of rude and was not enthusiastically favoured by colleagues. Nevertheless, his relationship with Rockwell was fruitful, and he came around to not only trusting her with his work but also saw her as a worthy collaborator in his literary legacy. Rockwell’s Introduction to the book, where she writes about her association with him and Ashk’s remarkable life, is a delight on its own. It is also here that she elegantly describes his brand of writing – “wicked sense of humour and a sharp eye for human frailty.”
‘A sharp eye for human frailty’
Of the sixteen stories in the collection, one has been translated by Edith Irwin, another has been co-translated with the author, and the rest by Rockwell. While the project was completed in 2002, it wasn’t until 2013 that the book was published. Hereafter, Ashk’s seminal novels In the City a Mirror Wandering and Falling Walls were published in 2019 and 2020, respectively, in Rockwell’s translations.
The stories in Hats and Doctors are decidedly middle-class in their temperament. Set in the immediate years after independence, there’s a strong class divide between those who have moved up the social ladder and those who continue to suffer in poverty. In a new nation, both rub shoulders, leading to interactions which are as hilarious as they are insightful. This new era has also changed the relationship between men and women, with the latter becoming more assertive, feisty, quick to put men in their place. These interesting (im)balances create a power struggle that the Indian culture is still trying to acknowledge and come to terms with.
The middle class also feels strongly about marriage and family. These too become important concerns in Ashk’s stories. He does away with the joint family structure and analyses the conundrums special to the nuclear family – a unit which was relatively new when Ashk wrote these stories in the ‘50s and ‘60s. In this liberal setting, the man of the house earned well at respectable jobs and the wife’s allowance allowed her to make decisions to run the household. One would expect that fewer traditional responsibilities would liberate the man, but in Ashk’s stories, they often give rise to a crisis of masculinity.
In one story, a professor feels secretly disappointed when he realises he cannot have his maid; in another, a middle-aged professor fatally injures himself while trying to impress a young woman with his flexibilty; in another, a man cannot believe a group of prostitutes dares to reject him; and in yet another, a man is unable to make love to his new bride on the nuptial bed decorated by his mother. The most brutal of these stories is “Dying and Dying” – a man travelling by train recalls flashing his member “erect, hard, straight like an arrow, ready to create” at his new bride in their first-class coupé but at present is disgusted by the sight of a half-naked man lying on the train floor after soiling himself from a bad bout of cholera.
Ashk also has much to say about the middle class’s stinginess, the worst victims of which are the poor working class. He also takes a dig at their poor etiquette as tourists. In “The Dal Eaters,” a miserly family makes a trip to Kashmir with no desire to enjoy what it has to offer or spend any money. They eat cheap daal and roti (that they also eat at home) and see no point in staying in hotels – in fact, the patriarch makes a case for relieving oneself by the Shankaracharya temple and washing their clothes in the Dal Lake! “Brown Sahibs” is another fabulously witty story on this issue. A rickshaw puller takes a native babu for a ride with false tales of sentimentality and nostalgia to make him part with an amount that would have been impossible to otherwise.
‘A wicked sense of humour’
Stories like “Who Can Trust a Man?” and “The Cartoon Hero” are hilarious caricatures of men who think of themselves as god’s gift to mankind. Their confidence in themselves is almost cartoonish, yet they are completely oblivious to it. In “Who Can Trust a Man?”, a man marries one woman after another, claiming that he has never experienced such conjugal bliss before. In “The Cartoon Hero,” a Congress party minister who looked like “the owner of some gambling den, a gang leader, or the proprietor of some disreputable hotel” throws his weight around in a train compartment and blames his fellow travellers for the discomforts he faces.
In the title story “Hats and Doctors”, a man falls ill when his friends begin to copy his sarotrial style and wear hats like him. Unlike him, they do not have fine taste, but even so, his pride is punctured. Perhaps a quick update of style is the treatment he needs.
“Mr Ghatpande” is a sober story about Tuberculosis – once a fatal disease in this part of the world. A group of patients in a sanatorium keep each other’s spirits high and exchange notes on the degree of their suffering. One wise man among them expounds the importance of willpower, the “veritable cure-all” for a disease as serious as theirs.
My absolute favourite story in the collection is “Formalities.” Caustic and hilarious, Ashk writes about the purgatory that the hosts find themselves in when guests overstay their welcome. A writer desperate to impress a director welcomes him and his wife to take up a room in their flat after the couple complains about a starlet who has come to stay with them and, in turn, has turned the house into a public space where all manners of men pass through every hour of the day.
The invitation was only meant as a courtesy but unfortunately for him, the couple accepts it. Soon, he becomes a stranger in his own house with the director’s wife annexing other rooms and taking over household responsibilities. Beaten and helpless, the writer tries the same tactic with a stuntman and manages to successfully occupy his home. The pecking order operates exactly as it is supposed to.
In Rockwell’s translation, the sentences hop and shimmy on the pages. Every word is electric. It lights up Ashk’s eccentric worlds. It is to the translator’s credit that every story feels so alive – its life force cleanly pouring itself from one language to another, with zero spillage.
Hats and Doctors, Upendranath Ashk, translated from the Hindi by Daisy Rockwell, Penguin Modern Classics.
