Review: For Now it is Night by Hari Krishna Kaul
A collection of 17 stories on family and friendship published between 1972 and 2001 that captures, with subtlety, the erosion of Kashmiriyat
In 2009, Kalpana Raina, a financier from New York, asked her father to read out some of her late uncle Hari Krishna Kaul’s stories in Kashmiri. She spoke the language fluently but could not read the Nastaliq script it is written in. Raina knew that Kaul had been one of the finest modern Kashmiri writers, and listening to her father read, she could see why. The stories depict Kashmiri Hindu life in the second half of the 20th century, and Raina particularly enjoyed the “biting wit that both mocked and conveyed empathy for his characters and their situations.” She decided then that she had to bring his work to a wider audience in English. She collaborated with three young Kashmiri scholars — Tanveer Ajsi, Gowhar Fazili, and Gowhar Yaquoob — to translate.
The result, For Now it is Night, is a collection of 17 ingenious, often delightful, stories published between 1972 and 2001, a period that covered decades of social and political crisis that led to the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits in 1990 and its aftermath. Many of the stories are about family — bickering, sulking, throwing tantrums — and friendships. Kaul also captures, with subtlety, the erosion of Kashmiriyat, the centuries-old religious syncretism of the valley, a time when Hindus and Muslims still lived together with ease even as communal tensions rose. Despair, sometimes a crushing sense of loneliness, runs through the book. But it’s almost never the mood. The atmosphere of the stories is usually light, there’s a playfulness even in grave situations, the characters are always, always colourful.
In Sunshine, Poshkuj is relieved to have moved to Delhi because, she thinks “everything else be damned, at least there are no Muslims,” and that she is away from “that fishwife, her older daughter-in-law.” But new discontents set in. Her younger daughter-in-law hangs her bra to dry on the clothesline in the balcony, spends time with a diverse group of non-Kashmiri friends, may even get a job, and, Poshkuj realizes, there are Muslims in the city after all. She’s left then, lounging in Delhi’s winter sun, longing for home. Kaul is a master of the many faces of isolation. He writes about the weight of grief, incomprehensible conflicts between fathers and sons and the ensuing feelings of aloneness, empty streets, icy cold winters. In an unsettling surrealist story about being silenced, about losing one’s voice, a character talks about the void — “The same void that is inside you, inside me, inside him, inside this room, in the heavens and the depths of hell.”
Kashmir shines through these stories. And not just in curfews, fear and feelings of loss. There are localities and landmarks of Srinagar, life around its historical bridges, the Jhelum river. Windowpanes glisten in the sun, soft muslin curtain flow like waterfalls. Whiskey is served with walnuts and apples. A writer recalls the medieval Kashmiri mystic poet Lal Ded — the story goes, he recounts, that Lal could spin wool into fine threads, but angered by her mother-in-law’s unappreciation, she threw it all into the lake and lotus stalks sprang from it. In To Rage or to Endure, another surreal story and the last in this collection, published a decade after Kaul had to leave Kashmir almost overnight during the troubles in 1990, every year a grandmother makes garlands of dried sliced gourd and aubergine to welcome or guard herself against Shenĕ-Buddĕ, the Kashmiri Old Man Winter.
When Raina decided to bring out a book of Kaul’s stories in English, she knew she wanted to work with young Kashmiris who had, like Kaul, grown up and lived in Srinagar. Some previous translations of his work by her peers, she had found, tended to sanitize the colourfulness of the Kashmiri language. Young people, she felt, could bring out the authentic Kashmiri nature of the stories. Her choice of translators is both well thought out and kind of subversive. A successful literary translation is one that retains the originality and intentionality of the text, but also revitalizes it. Raina decided to pick Ajsi, Fazili, and Yaquoob because they had lived through the troubles in Kashmir over the last few decades and could bring in some of their own experiences into the work.
Most of Kaul’s work was out of print, but they found all four collections of his short stories in the Kashmir University library. The pages were in shambles, the ink had faded, entire sentences were missing. But they photocopied the text and, with the help of a few of Kaul’s contemporaries and some younger students and writers selected stories.
While Ajsi, Fazili and Yaquoob were translating from the Nastaliq script, Raina asked them to also record audio readings of the stories for Kashmiris like her who could not read the language but understood it. She was so absorbed by the recordings, she decided to join in by translating while listening. All four listened to the recordings as they worked, Raina writes, to help capture the “orality” of Kaul’s voice in their translations. They worked separately but over two years “interrogated initial assumptions and suggested alternatives that were sometimes accepted and sometimes discarded.” The conversations, writes Yaqoob, a Kashmiri literature researcher, “expanded the context of the stories. Listening to each other’s readings allowed us to follow the continuous and uninterrupted thoughts of the author, permitting a strong sense of interaction with the stories that generated more diverse meanings in phrases, expressions and clauses.”
It takes a village to make a book — and this sharp, slim collection of stories is impeccably put together. Its stunning ethereal cover is an artwork by the artist Nilima Sheikh from her ongoing series on Kashmir. A shikara becomes a houseboat carrying across the river, entire homes, a mountain and a river of its own. A flesh-coloured corpse on a green funeral pyre drawn with Kashmiri motifs floats along. On one side of the river, a house is on fire. On the other is a bloody body, and a woman in mourning in a hut. Most of it, like tragedy, in muted colours. The title of the book — For Now It Is Night — is suspended on the cover. It reflects the dreamlike quality of these stories about loss, and almost directly the title story, in which a character asks another, “What was he saying to you? That all this is a dream... You should have asked him who is having this dream. Him? You? Or are all of us dreaming the same dream together?”
Saudamini Jain is an independent journalist. She lives in New Delhi.