Who will listen to the tale of my woeful heart?
Far and wide have I wandered on the face of this earth
And I have much to impart

It is not a coincidence that the earliest novels of the Subcontinent dealt with the intense and memorable characters of ‘nautch girls’. Essentially a colonial construct, a nautch girl referred to the popular entertainer, a belle beau who would sing, dance and, when required, also provide the services of a sex worker. The accounts on the marginalised women from the ‘dishonourable’ profession are nuanced, concurrently representing the duality of exploitation and empowerment.

Long before feminist discourse explored and located the intricacies of sex workers’ lives and work, male novelists during the 18th and 19th centuries were portraying the strong characters of women in the oldest profession. Stereotypes of the hapless and suffering prostitute rarely find mention in texts from that time, but one early novel, written in Urdu, is Mirza Muhammad Hadi Ruswa’s Umrao Jan Ada. While the Lucknow-based poet Ruswa is said to have persuaded Umrao to reveal her life history, many critics have surmised that the narrative was authored by Umrao herself. The tone and candour of the story suggests that Umrao played a significant role in drafting this semi-documentary piece. (more…)

I am sharing a message from Suhayl Saadi here: The website associated with my forthcoming novel, Joseph’s Box has been launched. There are stories – fables, one might say – tangential to, and drawing from, the main narrative of the book as well as other information. The site will develop over time. If you pre-order the books now from the site, you will get them early. Happy reading!

About the novel: Recently bereaved Zuleikha Chashm Framareza MacBeth wades into the Clyde one morning and recovers a large box, with which she becomes obsessed. The discovery brings her together with Alex, a lute-playing clerk, and they manage to open the box – only to find six more boxes inside, each of which can be opened only by following a cryptic clue. The clues lead Zulie and Alex on a physical and emotional journey, modulated through music, across Glasgow, Argyllshire, Lincolnshire, Sicily, Lahore, and finally the frozen peaks of the ‘Roof of the World’. Meanwhile Zulie, a troubled doctor, has been sucked into the vortex of the terminally ill Archie MacPherson, an ambivalent, visionary Second World War airman and Glasgow shipyard worker. In the manner of a lord of misrule, Archie’s dying consciousness begins to shape and ultimately define Zuleikha and Alex’s quest as they progress through the seven Sufi stations of sacrifice, truth, power, obedience, life, memory and beauty. Drawing on a wide framework of cultural and spiritual reference, uniquely blending contemporary Western literature and traditional Arabo-Persian storytelling, this is an extraordinary and ambitious novel with a visceral sensuality and subtle touches of magical realism, in the vein of Okri, Murakami and Pamuk.

ISBN 9781906120443; trade pbk 216x138mm (with coloured endpapers); 688 pages.Joseph’s Box will be available on publication date as an e-book via this website and the publishers’ website only.

Found a great excerpt from Mohammed Hani’s novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes where he recounts on his time at the Pakistani military academy during General Zia’s regime.

ONCE UPON a time, when I was 18, I found myself locked up in Pakistan’s military academy’s cell along with my friend and partner-in-crime, Khalid. We had thought we were doing charity work but the Academy officers obviously didn’t share our ideals. We had been caught trying to help out another classmate pass his chemistry exam, something he had failed to do twice already and this was his last chance to save himself from being expelled. The logistics of our rescue effort involved a wireless set improvised in the Sunday Hobbies Club, a microphone concealed in a crepe bandage around the left elbow of our academically challenged friend, and a Sanyo FM radio receiver. We were running our operation from the rooftop of a building next to the examination hall. We were caught red-handed, whispering a reversible chemical equation into the transistor. We were in breach of every single standard operating procedure in the Academy rule book, and faced certain expulsion. We had just started our glorious careers and now we faced the prospect of being sent home and having to explain to our parents how, instead of training to become gentlemen-officers, we were running an exam-cheatingmafia from the rooftop of the most well-disciplined training institute in the country.

For two days, while we waited in that cell to find out about our fate, we planned our future. Khalid, always the worldly-wise one in this outfit, immediately decided that he was going to join the merchant navy and travel the world. I tried hard to think what I would do. I came from a farming family where even the most adventurous members of our clan had only managed to branch out into planting sugarcane instead of potatoes. Education, jobs, careers were absolutely alien concepts. The Academy was supposed to be my escape from a lifetime that revolved around wildly fluctuating potato crop cycles. And here I was, already a prisoner of sorts, facing a journey back to a life I thought I”d left behind. Maybe I’ll become a teacher, I said vaguely. The farmers in my village used to show some vague respect to teachers in the primary school I attended.Or a mechanic. I was a member of the car-maintenance club in the Hobbies Club, after all. It was considered an elite club since there was no car to maintain. It was basically a Hobbies Club for people who hated hobbies.I can’t even change a bloody tyre, Khalid reminded me. We managed to stave off the impending expulsion through a combination of confession and denial: we lied (we were listening to cricket commentary on the transistor radio), we grovelled (we were ashamed, ashamed, ashamed of our un-officer like behaviour) and we pleaded our undying passion for defending the borders of our motherland. They looked at our relatively clean records, our sterling academic achievements, let us off the hook and awarded us a (more…)

By Vidya Rao

The streets of some cities, they say, are paved with gold. This city’s streets are paved with stories. Doubtless, they were also paved with gold once, but this would have been before the British pounced upon it and shook its pagoda tree. Which was how they referred to the looting of India that each ‘nabob’ of the East India Company systematically carried out. Though, to give the devil his due, it was the British that are considered to have founded the city. (more…)