Desi News Corp - Index

Desi News Corp - Desi News - Feb 09 - Index

bookWORM
We Are Not
in Pakistan
By Shauna Singh
Baldwin
This is a bold new
collection of stories
from Shauna
Singh Baldwin, whose previous
work includes English Lessons and
Other Stories, What the Body
Remembers and The Tiger Claw.
The 10 stories, set in Russia,
the US, South America and
Canada, are about a Ukranian
It’s a dog’s life
woman, a Mexican farm worker...and
fascinatingly, a dog!
In Only a Button, Viktor finds
things are not so free in the free
world. The action moves from
Moscow to Chicago in the
period following the Chernobyl
disaster, and Viktor comments,
“So many big lies. Even in America.
Nothing is free here – not health,
not good education, not housing.
Only they say you are free. I think
they mean you can buy blue jeans,
black jeans, white jeans – so long as
they are jeans – this is what they
call freedom.”
In Rendezvous, Carlos says,
“So this tomato grows faster and
stronger than the tomatoes when I
was small. Can you find one black
spot? No, not one. The spots are on
the hands of the sprayers – women
like my wife, my Rosa.”
In We Are Not In Pakistan,
Kathleen, the daughter of a
Pakistani Christian woman and
a black Irishman, strains against
the leash. She doesn’t want to be
different from the other girls at
school. But her grandmother will
not allow tankinis, tank tops or
spaghetti straps. And no Nikes.
“Nike has sweatshops,” grandma
said, during the back-to-school
sales, as she removed a pair of shoes
from Kathleen’s shopping cart.
“You have carpets made by
children in Lahore.”
“How else would children learn
28 Desi News February 2009
their family trade?” she said.
Entrapment, the fear of
being deported, of people
vanishing without a trace hover
over the fates of many of the
characters...and all this in good
old US of A, not some country
behind the iron curtain.
In The Distance Between Us,
Karanbir Singh debates whether
it is safe to even reply to
an e-mail purportedly sent by
a daughter he didn’t know he
had.
Could be entrapment: remember
“special registration” that turned out
to be a roundup? Twenty-four
hundred men were deported. And
remember the OSHA industrial safety
meeting that turned out to be a
Homeland Security roundup of
illegal Latinos?
I found it a bit hard to wrap
my head around Naina and
Night of the Leonids, but what
shines through in all the stories
is the love, laughter and
strength displaced men and
women employ to deal with a
changed reality.
As Karanbir Singh tells his
daughter after his house is
torched by racist youth, “This
is nothing! Nothing! My grandfather
– your great grandfather – survived
partition. And this is not as bad as
the Delhi riots in 1984 – fires
everywhere, then. Three thousand
Sikhs slaughtered.”
Cold comfort
The Quilt and Other Stories
By Ismat Chughtai
Translated by Tahira Naqvi
and Syeda Hameed
Tahira Naqvi has taught
Writing at Western
Connecticut State University
and is a well-known
translator of Urdu fiction.
Syeda Hameed has taught
English at the University of
Alberta and is also a wellknown
translator.
The two do an impeccable
job of translating Ismat
Chughtai’s bold, insightful,
and sometimes controversial
wri-ting.
In 1944, Chughtai successfully
defended herself against
a charge of obscenity for her
short story Lihaaf (The Quilt),
in which she wrote about a
lesbian relationship.
As Naqvi and Hameed say
in the introduction, Chughtai’s
work is populated by people
who are familiar to anyone who
knows the societal network on
the subcontinent. Chughtai was
a trailblazer, inspiring many
other women writers with her
bold themes and unapologetic
style.
But reading this collection
of short stories, I was left
saddened. Each story
is a gem, but read
together, there is no
escaping the sad,
lonely, confined world
of the women in her
stories. A world in
which women depend
on men, on the approval
of men, for their
very existence. And
even those that strike
a blow for independence,
have to sneak it
past the men in their
lives.
She writes about
Samina who runs away
with a Hindu boy in
Sacred Duty; about Uncle Shujaat
who brings home a child bride
and then resents her youhtful
beauty as he grows older in The
Eternal Vine; the servant Kallu
who is ill-treated by the family
he works for but grows up to
become the new deputy
collector in town, Mr Kalimuddin,
in Kallu; the handsome
and pitiable bhaiya who married
younger and younger women,
discarding one wife after another,
in The Rock; Kubra’s
mother struggling to make ends
meet but putting up a show for
a prospective son-in-law in The
Wedd-ing Shroud; and Sarlaben,
who fantasizes about a man she
sees every day on the bus in A
Morsel.
Seated on a divan covered with a
white sheet, her hair whiter than the
wings of a heron, grandma looked
like an awkward mass of marble;
it seemed as though there was not a
single drop of blood in her body.
White had crept up to the edges of
her gray eyes, which lustreless,
reminded one of casements that were
barred, of windows hiding fearfully
behind thick curtains. (From The
Veil).
The stories are sad because
they are a true reflection of our
society in Chughtai’s times.
And sadder, because for many
women, they reflect their
current reality.