In Mohammad Khalid Akhtar’s short story “The ‘Monthly Ulloo’”, translated by writer Bilal Tanweer, an uncle-nephew pair, long enamoured of writers and conscious of the need to do something for literature, resolve to start a magazine. Ulloo, in the Urdu and Hindustani context, has a negative connotation, denoting a person particularly gullible, and in this story, as a key sample of Akhtar’s satire, there are several of them. These include not just the government officials whom the uncle manages to convince to issue licences to publish the said magazine, and the nephew roped into the scheme (and other ones too), but also the uncle, Abdul Baqi, himself, a Don Quixote-like figure with magnificent ambitions bound to fail.
Iqbal Husain Changezi, the narrator of Love in Chakiwara and other Misadventures, has the same predilection for literary figures. He collects them as friends and acquaintances; he is an avid reader (albeit self-proclaimed), and his autograph book is replete with signatures of writers he admires. This short novel details his friendship with one of them, Qurban Ali Kattar.
Mohammad Khalid Akhtar, born in 1920, wrote Chakiwara mein wisaal in 1964; Faiz Ahmed Faiz called it a great work of Urdu literature. A compliment richly deserved, despite its inherent irony, since Akhtar was torn about writing in Urdu. In 1967, Akhtar won the Adamjee award for Khoya Huya Ufaq – a collection of his satirical pieces (including the title short story that Saadat Hasan Manto had published in his magazine Sawaira in 1953). In 2011, Oxford University Press, Pakistan, published the original Urdu version of Love in Chakiwara and Other Misadventures and three other long short stories; five years later, Bilal Tanweer brings the world of Chakiwara to more readers with this translation in English.
Life in Chakiwara
Iqbal Husain Changezi runs a bakery. In another life, in another story, he had been a doctor and other things too. He is always willing to lend his friends a hand, and, for their travails, his shoulder – as seen in his interactions with the down-and-out writer, Shedad Pashmi; the lonely Chinese dentist, Ah Fung; the inventive doctor Ghareeb Muhammad. He is even willing to give up his watch and clothes, as in the instance of Qurban Ali Kattar (he of the “interesting company” and the “unliterary conversation”) to aid the latter’s quest for love. Changezi is a gentle soul; afraid of letting friends down and unable to stand up to bullies such as Seth Tanwari.
They all live in Chakiwara, a nukkad of Karachi, by the Lyari river. A rather colourful, even if decrepit part of Karachi. It’s a place where anyone can be what they imagine themselves to be, or even make themselves anew, giving themselves a new life. There are hardly any “Victorias”, and the lamp-posts are barely functional. But Chakiwara has its bakery, a dentist, an inventive doctor, mysterious beauties, and a curious assortment of other characters. All of which make it unique. In Akhtar’s depiction, through this accessible translation, it appears a vibrant and lively place, with never a dull moment.
Misadventures in love
In Love in Chakiwara and Other Misadventures, the short titular novel, Kattar embarks on a mission to win his lady love, but the mission is fraught with several complications. Among them are her father’s possible objections to this alliance, and Kattar’s own status as an impoverished writer – after a prolific early career penning lurid love novels, he is now afflicted with a bad case of writer’s block. Enter Changezi, who not only pitches in with timely loans, meals from his bakery, clothes, including his treasured convocation gown, but also with timely writerly inputs; only, Changezi refuses to play the “vengeful villain”.
The novel follows the tradition of other Hindi-Urdu novels of the period. The digressions are numerous, but it’s really these digressions that make the novel. Changezi recounts how he came by a family name that is not quite in character. He reveals his fascination for writers and their writing styles (he knows how Kattar writes his novels; the plot never changes, the names do). On a visit to Kattar’s flat, Changezi describes the road (named Middleway Street), the signboards, – most of them dated – that hang on his friend’s building. He talks of Kattar’s disdain for fellow writers, and there is also a short treatise on “balcony love”, and why it has not, and perhaps never will be, dealt with adequately as a subject.
“The only kind of love that’s possible in certain parts of Chakiwara and all parts of Karachi is balcony love….The techniques of this mode of love are different and more difficult than all other kinds of love and it’s quite unfortunate that no expert of this art has bothered to write a book on it till now. American experts have penned many useful and convenient books for amateur lovers such as Do You Have a Beau?, Success in Love: Some Golden Rules, The Girl Standing at The End of the Alley Could Be Yours!, The Shortcut to Love. Someone even told me that a number of institutes even offer distance-learning courses on this valuable subject and even guarantee a refund in case of failure.”
Kattar, and some of the other characters, share space in the other long stories as well. Changezi is a deceptive narrator. His gullibility and his unwillingness to directly confront anyone, mask a certain resoluteness, an ability to see through people, especially when friends must be saved, often against their will. His suspicions about Chakori, a down-at-heel actor who on a whim decides to learn dentistry from Ah Fung, appear correct. To Changezi, it has all the makings of a diabolical murder plot.
Objects of promise
The stories have another thing in common: objects that are sinister, or promise love and/or the successful overcoming of other obstacles. “The Smiling Buddha” is a statuette that Changezi has always taken a dislike to, and yet it exposes evil at a vital moment. “The Love Meter” is a fascinating instrument invented by Ghareeb Muhammed, who had once been a doctor of a more traditional kind, preferring frogs and lizards to more conventional medicine, but is forced to turn to the latter to please the more modern of his patients. But the love meter is Ghareeb Muhammed’s pièce de résistance, though Changezi has his doubts again. It works, especially in his case, in strange ways: registering a positive signal as a camel catches his eye. It also proves to be Ghareeb Mohammad’s downfall when his love is not reciprocated.
Another of Ghareeb Muhammed’s inventions, left unfinished, proves fatal for Seth Tanwari, who has diabolically occupied Muhammed’s office after the latter’s death. This object, known to summon djinns but still not configured for sending these creatures back, acts in mysterious ways: Tanwari’s long exploited workers suddenly show spine and go on strike, but its powers strike the Seth in an uncanny way.
Djinns and other strange beings
The djinns however appear to be at the beck and call of Professor Shahsawar, a man whom Changezi develops an automatic aversion to, though he remains unfailingly polite to the professor and his companions. There are also a dancing monkey, a too-silent bear, and a bearded goat with a fondness for milky tea. Kattar, however, seems convinced of the professor’s genius; summoning djinns to do one’s bidding is a matter of practice. It merely takes some days of looking at a ring. Shahsawar disappears just when he is needed most, yet his powers manifest themselves long-distance.
Shahsawar – he of the expansive girth and gestures, long henna-dyed, lice infested hair, and troupe of animals – is one of Akhtar’s most memorable creations. But the others in these stories (mainly the men, for the women, apart from Razia’s aunt, only make fleeting balcony appearances) are memorable too: Razm Hinai, a writer, once a conservative who called himself Chirag Din Cheema, but who has now consciously remade himself as a progressive by literally wearing red; Shehad Pashmi, a writer who, unlike Kattar, is willing to do anything – wash dishes and dig graves, for instance – since writing isn’t a paying profession. Men like Changezi, whose heart bleeds for writers, truly understand this, for in the end, it is publishers who make the money – a fact that Akhtar states with gentle self-flagellation and supreme writerly irony.
Love in Chakiwara and Other Misadventures, Muhammad Khalid Akhtar, translated from the Urdu by Bilal Tanweer, Picador India.