Parasite

Photo by Marcel Ardivan on Unsplash

“Parasite” follows the arc of a man’s paranoia as it develops into a death trap. The story’s two main characters, Mahmud and Maqbul, are both confined in their respective prisons and are eager to suspend disbelief in their desperation for escape. The text ripples with dark humor as it braids notions of masculinity with the theme of class-based power struggles that often erupt in violence. Set in the suburbs of Lahore, Pakistan, and written by Bilal Hasan Minto, this short story first appeared on Scroll.in as a co-winner of the 2021 The Jawad Memorial Prize for Urdu-English Translation.

Urdu literature has a rich tradition of reflecting on social complexities. As a reader who hails from Lahore and whose first language is Urdu, I met this text in translation with a heightened awareness of my proximity to its cultural and linguistic contexts. My mind translated the English words back into Urdu as I read on, pleasantly surprised by how close to home the story and its cadence fell.

— Raaza Jamshed for Guernica Global Spotlights

No one can say if Mahmud really had a worm in his gut but Mahmud was convinced he did. At first — before speaking to his office friend Umar — no such thought had ever crossed his mind. But now, after listening to Umar’s discussion on the subject, he was certain that a worm did indeed live inside him. A long, healthy, ravenous worm that devoured everything Mahmud ate. It also became clear to him that since he had always been gaunt and skinny, the worm had been in residence for a long, long time, growing up on Mahmud’s diet — especially spinach. Mahmud relished spinach and often had it cooked at home.

He had heard that children who ate mud got worms. After speaking to Umar that day, he called his mother, who confirmed that he did often eat mud as a child. Mahmud was dismayed to hear this, especially because she had no explanation for why she let it happen.

She merely said that since many children eat mud, she didn’t think it was something so terrible that she should have run after him to stop him or thrashed him out of the habit. “I wasn’t with you all the time,” she added irritably. “If you sneaked out to eat mud, what could I have done? Kept you tied up?”

Mahmud had always strived to gain weight; he longed to have a ruddy face, a blossoming body, and a shapely frame to adorn the clothes he so fondly bought. Sometimes, he took to eating like a glutton, ferreting out foods that would put folds of fat over his body. But nothing he did — no trick or technique — worked, and everything he ate simply disappeared somewhere.

After speaking with Umar now, he suddenly felt convinced that everything he’d ever eaten had become food for the worm that lived inside him. And maybe the only purpose of his own existence so far had been to provide prosperity and happiness to this creature living inside his innards.

He was born and raised in Sahiwal. His father ran a sanitary-fittings store and remained so engrossed in all matters faucets and commodes that he never expressed an opinion on why Mahmud’s face looked like sucked-up candy or his body resembled a bar of worn-down soap. His father had three other children of whom Mahmud was the eldest.

The children had to be provided an education, which wasn’t cheap; then they had to be married off, which too required money. His father sometimes expressed displeasure over Mahmud’s special requests for food. He was a man of calculations and didn’t like the idea of Mahmud growing larger because that would mean having to spend money on new clothes.

Perhaps he was just being stingy, but still, he should not have said all those things to Mahmud especially because he wasn’t poor and ran a pretty good business. The mother, on the other hand, sympathized with Mahmud and compensated for his father’s disapproval by cheering him on and helping him in his efforts to gain weight.

When everything failed, she consoled him in other ways. “There is nothing wrong in being skinny,” she said. “Obesity itself is a disease! Root of a hundred other diseases. If you start putting on weight, who knows, you may never be able to stop!”

But how long could such consolations work? Truth was, Mahmud looked anemic and washed out. On him, smart, brand new clothes looked like they had been hung on a hanger. Dejected, he tried to turn away from his situation to attend to matters that would help him forget his misery and while this effort did get him high positions in his FA and BA exams, the frustration about his physical appearance did not leave him.

It worsened when he came to Lahore