Intizar Husain is the finest writer
of Urdu prose and the most brilliant story-teller of the post-partition
generation. The two novellas, Day and Dastan (Din Aur Dastan), his favourite texts, show his versatility
and fictional inventiveness. Day, a realistic story, is a meditation on the
cruellest of events to have scarred our times – migrations. When people are
forced to move to new homes or new geographies, they only recall a mix of
uncanny facts, streets lost in sad nostalgias, fantasies of lovers, parables of
simple things, or an unending romance about a possible life and a world. When
physical geographies are redrawn, moral landscapes become so bewildering as to
leave one emotionally paralysed. As in Intizar Husain’s other work, India’s
partition haunts the tale like an inexplicable shadow. In contrast, Dastan is a
traditional tale of wonder. Its language is lyrical and exaggerated; its
narrative, obsessed with action, weaves dreams and adventure, heroism and
mercy, beauty and love, magic and grace. It is located in another time of
turmoil and uncertainty when mysterious forces cause havoc in nature and
societies rise up suddenly to avenge old wrongs. The 1857 war of independence
is prophesied by a mysterious faqir;
rivers suddenly break their banks; an old haveli is left desolate; a princess
weeps beside a fountain; a parrot shows a soldier the road to take; and hope of
political change is fatally lost. Intizar Husain is neither a social critic nor
a preacher; he is a story-teller – a supreme one.