For Now, It Is Night, page 1
Kashmiri language copyright © Hari Krishna Kaul, 2024
English translation copyright © Kalpana Raina, Tanveer Ajsi, Gowhar Yaqoob, and Gowhar Fazili, 2024
First Archipelago Books Edition, 2024
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request.
ISBN: 9781953861788
Ebook ISBN 9781953861795
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Cover art by Nilima Sheikh
This work is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. Funding for the publication of this book was provided by a grant from the Carl Lesnor Family Foundation.
This publication was made possible with support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Nimick Forbesway Foundation, and the Yali Project of Sangham House.
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Who knows who will still be here tomorrow
For now, it is night; for now, we wait
—Dina Nath Nadim
Contents
Introduction
from Pata Laraan Parbat (1972)
Sunshine
The Saint and the Witch
Complicit
Twins
Tomorrow – A Never-Ending Story
Curfew
from Haalas Chhu Rotul (1985)
One Sahib and the Other
For Now, It Is Night
The Mourners
A Song of Despair
The Tongue and the Egg
A Late Winter
That Which We Cannot Speak Of
from Yeth Raazdanay (1996)
The News
Dogs
from Zool Apaerim (2001)
The Lights on the Other Side
A Moment of Madness
To Rage or to Endure
Glossary
Translators’ Notes
Introduction
Growing up I was aware that my uncle, Hari Krishna Kaul, was a short story writer, a playwright, and somewhat of a celebrity in his hometown of Srinagar. That was enough for me and I never attempted to actually read anything he had written. I lived abroad and could not read Kashmiri, the language in which he wrote, although I spoke it quite fluently. It was only in 2009, after Kaul’s passing and after I had spent more time in India, that I started to get a sense of his literary achievements. I heard him described, more than once, as one of the best modern short story writers in Kashmiri. I finally persuaded my father to read some of the stories out aloud to me. I knew Kashmiri well enough to immediately understand that Kaul had an impressive eye for detail, a superb command and ease with the language, and a biting wit that both mocked and conveyed empathy for his characters and their situations. Through his work, he examined the minutest details of a very circumscribed Kashmiri Hindu way of life in the last few decades of the twentieth century in old-town Srinagar. This was the world he had grown up in and his ambivalent relationship with it is quite clear in the forewords to his four collections of short stories. There are no grand themes in Kaul’s work, but an exploration and ultimately an acceptance of human limitations. He used his personal experiences to explore universal themes of isolation, individual and collective alienation, and the shifting circumstances of a community that went on to experience a significant loss of homeland, culture, and ultimately language.
Hari Krishna Kaul was born in 1934 in Srinagar. He spent his youth and most of his adulthood there, teaching at various academic institutions and leaving only in 1990 in the now well-documented exodus of Hindus from the city. Srinagar and the lives of its citizens are both the focus and the backdrop of Kaul’s works, particularly the short stories that span over forty years. The first two collections, Pata Laraan Parbat (1972) and Haalas Chhu Rotul (1985) include some of his best known and popular works. The last two collections, Yeth Raazdanay (1996) and Zool Apaerim (2001) were published after Kaul left the Kashmir Valley. The selection of stories in the present Archipelago compilation represents a broad range of both popular and critically acclaimed works from these volumes. The minute observations of a beloved city, the detailed unfolding of ordinary lives lived there, uneasy accommodations between neighbors and communities that eventually end in departures and tenuous adjustments to a new life that was in no way desired; all is catalogued and dissected. Never overtly dogmatic or biased, the simmering political and social conflicts that have dogged Kashmir lurk below the surface of these stories. Kaul’s characters, Hindu and Muslim, navigate a common landscape and language but warily, always conscious of the divisions that class and religious identity create.
His characters experience a slow dissolution of personhood as their circumstances, personal and professional, are peeled apart and reveal the void in their lives and the world they inhabit. Time and again, the bulwarks provided by family, jobs, social standing and religion crumble and the individual is left on their own. All this against a backdrop of a festering political and social instability in Kashmir which represents the here and now for these characters. Through humor, compromise and conciliation, they negotiate their ordinary lives in a Kashmir rendered extraordinary by political compulsions. The world outside of Kashmir is alien, rarely named and always represented as “out there” in both a physical and an emotional sense. Mirroring Kaul’s own life, the numerous journeys back and forth between these two worlds ultimately end in exile.
In the first story of this collection, “Sunshine,” we witness this with the feisty Poshkuj, Kaul’s only significant female protagonist. Like the unnamed narrators of many of the later stories, Poshkuj’s unravelling of identity and the discomposure this leads to happen subtly. Through bursts of self-reflection peppered with comic descriptions and rendered in biting colloquial prose, we see her brash façade crumble as she struggles to find relevance in her new surroundings. Even on the first reading it becomes obvious why this remains one of Kaul’s most iconic stories. The loss of community and the search for meaning that is hinted at in the earlier stories becomes a more direct quest later. Each story builds on this to culminate in “To Rage or To Endure,” the last story in this collection. This is a work of astonishingly deft and spare language relying strongly on myth and metaphorical allusions. Here the narrator, unnamed again, stops mining his memories of Kashmir to make that final leap to an existence in exile where relationships and the past are extinguished in order to survive.
After leaving Kashmir in 1990, Kaul was acutely conscious that he had lost his Kashmiri-speaking audience for his television serials and plays. He took refuge in his stories, the stories that in the foreword to Pata Laraan Parbat he had called “the children that brought meaning to my meaningless life.” He produced two more volumes of stories in Kashmiri but also wrote extensively in Hindi in this period as he tried to carve out a new identity for himself and his writing. His only novel, Vyath Vyatha, was published in Hindi in 2005.
It was not initially my intent to translate any of the stories myself. My hope was to bring renewed attention to Kaul’s work through fresh contemporary translations and have a new and younger audience engage with them. To that end I enlisted the help of three young scholars and writers who collaborated extensively with me. We encountered significant roadblocks that I had not contemplated. Kaul’s own manuscripts and papers were not with his family. Having left Kashmir practically overnight in difficult circumstances these “offspring” were abandoned in the old family home. The magazines in which Kaul published and his books were mostly out of print and any digital archives were inaccessible. The radio and television plays are still unavailable but one of my collaborators was able to locate all four collections of the short stories in the library of Kashmir University. The physical state of these texts was less than ideal. They were in need of preservation. The ink of some pages had faded and entire sentences were sometimes erased, an undesired result of lithographic printing of the earlier volumes. But we managed to have them photocopied. These photocopies were circulated to a small group of Kaul’s contemporaries who, along with a handful of younger students and writers, helped us select stories from all four collections.
The three other translators on this project who could read Kashmiri in the Nastaliq script worked from these manuscripts. I had all the selected stories recorded in an attempt to engage members of my family and the extended diaspora who, like me, could not read the script Kaul wrote in. As we were going through our selections, I listened to these stories incessantly. They had a strong dramatic quality, and Kaul’s fluid use of the language made them perfect for the audio medium. This was not surprising given the author’s copious output of radio and television plays. The stories drew me in and, inspired by the voice recordings, I succumbed to the temptation to translate.
The journey toward an English-language translation was accomplished with multiple translators, all native Kashmiri speakers, but representing a diversity of gender, age, experiences, and religious identity. My knowledge of Kaul,
Despite our initial obstacles, the significant disruptions from recent political events in Kashmir and the global pandemic, this project found its way to completion. All these translations are ultimately the result of a collaborative and detailed engagement on the part of the four translators. We allowed each other to work on our separate drafts, but then, over two years of in-person and virtual meetings, interrogated initial assumptions and suggested alternatives that were sometimes accepted and sometimes discarded. This was truly a collective undertaking. We listened, debated, and challenged each other’s understanding of the works. We took the process of translation a few levels deeper to bridge and create meaning for ourselves and for a culture and a language that still struggle to find their place in the world.
Kalpana Raina
2022
Sunshine
Now that she had arrived in Delhi, Poshkuj felt like she was in a completely different world. She heaved a sigh of relief. Everything else be damned, at least there are no Muslims here. All around me are my own Hindu people. The vegetable man, the baker, the milkman are all Hindus. And what a huge relief it was to be away from that fishwife, her older daughter-in-law. Just the thought of her sent a shiver down Poshkuj’s spine. She recalled how often her daughter-in-law would torment her. There was a time when people did not even know Poshkuj’s name, and now this shrew had dragged it through the mud. But God has not spared that woman entirely, Poshkuj thought to herself. Gasha and Saiba are born from the same womb. Look how well Saiba is doing here in Delhi, but Gasha can barely feed his family there in Srinagar. And it is all because of the bad luck that shrew brought with her. Poshkuj had already decided that she would not go back to Kashmir, not even in the summer.
It was around ten o’clock in the morning, and Poshkuj went out to the backyard to soak in the sun. Half the yard was paved with bricks, and the other half was a lawn ringed with flowerbeds. The paved area had plants arranged in pots, and creepers and other flowering plants hung like clusters of grapes from the façade of the house.
Saiba or Surendarnath, Poshkuj’s younger son, had been allocated a good D-type house in Delhi’s Sarojini Nagar. There was a drawing room, a kitchen, and a storeroom on the ground floor. The space in front of the kitchen, furnished with a table and a few chairs, was used as a dining room. Upstairs, there was a bathroom, a toilet and two bedrooms. Saiba and his wife occupied one bedroom; the second room, newly fitted with a bed, was now Poshkuj’s. On the top floor was a terrace, with a small room adjoining it.
Surendarnath was back in Delhi after three years. He had gone to England on a scholarship to study, and had then found a job there with the Indian High Commission. Recently transferred to Delhi, he had a good position in the Ministry of External Affairs with a salary of approximately one thousand rupees. He had been married off before leaving for England. Truth be told, Poshkuj regretted that decision. If Saiba were single now, some well-to-do man would have been begging her for an alliance for his daughter. Anyway, what’s done is done, she mused. She never spoke of that disappointment to anyone.
Poshkuj lay back in the lawn chair and exposed her arms and legs to the sunshine. She felt the muscles in her back and shoulders relax, and all the accumulated stiffness of Kashmir’s winter melted away. She looked up at the sky and admired its deep blue color. Chhoti, her younger daughter-in-law, had hung the washing from the balcony on the second floor, and the clothes were sparkling in the sunlight. Really, these foreign washing machines are amazing. It took Chhoti a mere five minutes to wash all these clothes and look how clean they are. Suddenly, she noticed Chhoti’s bra amongst the drying clothes and blushed, wondering what the neighbors who saw this would say. Poshkuj rose from the chair and started to stroll around the yard. A thought suddenly occurred to her, and she started to pick flowers from the garden. She placed the flowers in the folds of her sari and decided that she would ask Chhoti to accompany her to a neighborhood temple. They say Birla Mandir is worth seeing, she thought. It wouldn’t take more than half an hour, and they could have lunch after they came back. She went inside, put the flowers on the dining table, and sat herself down in a chair. Who knows how long Chhoti will be? She must have been in that bathroom for over an hour. God knows what she is applying to her body. Now that she’s in Delhi, she seems to have shed her inhibitions and acquired a brazen new self. Anyway, she’s still a thousand times better than that fishwife.
A few minutes later, the door to the bathroom opened and Chhoti came down the stairs briskly. She was wearing a sari and a blouse. Her hair was not combed yet, but she looked so much better than when she had been prancing around in that dressing gown earlier.
“Oh dear! What have you done Mataji?” Chhoti exclaimed when she saw the plucked flowers on the dining table.
Poshkuj was petrified and realized instantly that she had done something terribly wrong.
“Why did you pick the flowers from the garden, particularly the hollyhocks?” Chhoti asked, half plaintive, half angry.
Poshkuj was stung by her daughter-in-law’s tone. After all, it was just a matter of a few flowers, she thought. And why was Chhoti being so pretentious? In Kashmir I was “Kakin”, and now in Delhi I am “Mataji”? What nonsense! But she swallowed her anger and replied softly.
“I thought we could go to the temple.”
“Well, you should have asked me first. There are no temples in this neighborhood, or even nearby. Ashoka Hotel and Chanakyapuri are close by, but no temples,” said Chhoti.
“What are those places?” Poshkuj asked.
“You wouldn’t understand,” said Chhoti. “Let’s go outside and sit in the sun.”
Poshkuj felt a wave of anger sweep over her body. This idiot’s daughter understands, and I don’t? I have to stand up for myself and talk back to her now, otherwise I won’t have the right to speak in the future.
“You think I’m stupid,” said Poshkuj. “I know that Birla Mandir, that one which people visit from all over the country, it’s in this city.”
“Birla Mandir? Why that’s very far, even further than Connaught Place and Gole Market,” said Chhoti.
This, too, sounded false to Poshkuj. From the terrace yesterday, in the direction of the setting sun, she had seen a temple-like building with blue domes in the distance, and had convinced herself that it was Birla Mandir. She stood her ground and confronted her daughter-in-law. “Then what is that temple with the blue domes? You know, the one that is visible from the terrace? Even the maid said it was Birla Mandir.”
“Mataji, what does the maid know?” countered Chhoti. “That building is neither a temple nor a mosque. It is the Pakistani Embassy. The office of Pakistan.”
Poshkuj could not stomach the condescension in Chhoti’s voice. What kind of a fool does this woman take me for? How brazenly she lies! In Kashmir, despite all the Muslims around, no one speaks of Pakistan openly. So how can there be an office of Pakistan here, in Delhi, where only Hindus live? What an outrageous lie! But I don’t like confrontations with people who curse or argue for no reason. What if she responds like that shrew, my other daughter-in-law? I won’t be able to defend myself. I should just stay quiet.
It was around noon, and Chhoti turned on the stove in the kitchen and made the rotis. She reheated the vegetables she had cooked earlier and put them on the dining table. She took out a few glasses for water, put some sliced onions in a small plate and squeezed lemon juice over them. Poshkuj understood that a meal was being prepared.
