The essence of greatness

The wide divide between those who read in Urdu and those who have not had the pleasure of knowing Urdu are perhaps at their sharpest with a writer like Naiyer Masud

The photograph shows a boy, about five, lying on a richly caparisoned couch against a backdrop of redoubtable carved wooden almirahs, a finely embroidered curtain breaking the gloom of the dark wood. The boy faces the photographer, Lucknow's Mirza Mughal Beg; he clutches his favourite plaything, a ball.

This photograph of Naiyer Masud was the preface for a classic translation of The Essence of Camphor; it had been taken when he was ill with typhoid. He told his translator, Muhammad Umar Memon, that after he had gone through 40 days of fever, his parents feared he would not survive and commissioned this as a future keepsake.

In this short anecdote, you have many of the qualities of Masud's Urdu stories: the unexpected depth behind the rich, detailed surface, a touch of the macabre, a sense of being taken unawares by life's surprises.

The wide divide between those who read in Urdu and those who have not had the pleasure of knowing Urdu are perhaps at their sharpest with a writer like Masud. For readers familiar with Urdu, Masud's short stories - 35, written slowly over a period of decades, typically about one or two a year - are part of their emotional and imaginative landscape.

I had never taught myself Urdu, and part of the punishment was to read like a scavenger, grabbing Masud's now-classic stories in fragmentary pieces - Sheesha Ghat, The Essence of Camphor - then looking for Memon's translations in The Journal Of Urdu Studies and other places.

It took the skills of R Sivapriya, something of a legend herself as an expert translations editor, as well as Muhammad Umar Memon's thoughtful work over years to produce a volume as monumental and definitive as this one - Naiyer Masud: Collected Stories (Penguin Books). Masud has always had a following as a writer (and a scholar) in the Urdu world, but this collection should make him visible to readers in India and outside the country as one of our greatest living practitioners.

All the short stories from Seemiya (The Occult), Essence of Camphor, The Myna From Peacock Garden and Ganjefa are included here, plus a few miscellaneous, uncollected stories - Dustland, Whirlwind, The Aster. An interview is included; at one point, Asif Farrukhi, the interviewer, says to the writer: "People don't work nearly so hard on revealing as you do on concealing."

In response, Masud explains that he tries not to refer to specific times and places - a habit that gives his stories some of their uncanny, dislocated, time-transcending atmosphere - because of an exaggerated sense of responsibility, a fear of getting place and time wrong in even the smallest of details. He denies that his stories are "fantasies", even though they are often claimed as such, and this is true - he is just a better fisherman of reality than most.

I would not recommend reading Collected Stories at one sitting, any more than you would watch all of Bela Tarr or Wong Kar-Wai's films in one weekend. But at present, two of Masud's stories are bringing me some comfort. Dustland, a brief tale set in a city prone to duststorms, where an "earth-coloured haze had begun spreading", is perfect for winter this year, when the pollution is so intense that you can taste the yellow smog on your tongue as you walk around Delhi.

And I am growing as obsessed with Custody as I once was with Masud's The Essence of Camphor. Custody is less well-known, and so is less well-worn. The narrator, Saasan, who lives above Nauroz's shop explains that there has always been a Nauroz, some of whom go mad in time.

Then the present Nauroz disappears, leaving behind two tiny girls. The narrator finds Nauroz, briefly, and asks him, "What are the girls to you?" "Merchandise," Nauroz says. What was their mother to him? Merchandise, Nauroz says again, before leaving. But Nauroz's Shop must always have a Nauroz; and some of the Naurozes grow mad in time. This much would be enough for many short story writers; it is Masud's genius that he keeps the reader as interested in everything that happens before the ending as in the ending itself.

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