The Splinters

By Qamar Sabzwari

A collection of 10 short stories by Qamar Sabzwari. 

Translated by Munir Fayyaz.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Qamar Sabzwari
• Release date: Dec 25, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386080732

Book preview

Translated By

Munir Fayyaz

Phanay (Translated as Splinters)

PHANAY IS THE MAIDEN short stories collection of Qamar Sabzwari, UAE based Pakistani Urdu short story writer. Qamar Sabzwari is a relatively new and unfamiliar name in the domain of the short story yet his stories vigorously mark his latent creative potential as we read through the pages of his book.

Qamar Sabzwari sees the prototype of society in the streets where he was brought up and takes characters and plots of his stories from everyday life activities. He has a strong grip on the use of irony. This irony he uses as his major tool for unveiling the hypocrisy of human behaviors. His stories and characters appear very familiar but he gives them a cutting edge to make the common, sometimes mundane, appear as very novel and unique. All his main characters show some eccentricity and that is where the story comes out.

Sex is one of the dominant themes of his stories. He shows different shades of sex spread from the domestic to the tabooed. His characters get tired of the routine nuptial agreements and mechanical movements. He disgusts the parochial authority guiding the instinctive life of human beings. He introspects the human behaviors both individually and generically and comes to the conclusion that social and religious bondages serve as marginalizing factors to the human nature; over generalization of norms and values only suffocates the individuals. That is where the protagonist of The Hormone is led to homosexuality.

Women hold a niche in his stories though it be a common housewife like Shazia of The Whore or the prostitute of Billo Rani. The ailing wife of Yusa symbolizes all the suffering housewives of the third world where Yusa himself becomes the symbol of chauvinism in the same cadre. Najma shows the metamorphosis of another housewife subsequenting from the religious narrow-mindedness of her husband forcing her to adopt hypocrisy as a defense mechanism.

Qamar Sabzwari points to the other issues like social envy and old aged parents.

He has a strong empathy for his characters but unlike the tradition, he makes it come like a surprise to the reader somewhere near the end of the story and the reader is taken aback by the twist. These ten short stories of The Phaanay (translated as The Splinters) present a cross section of the society where human nature is suffering under the intrinsic and extrinsic bondages creating a distortion in what we know as the human and degenerating it in many ways.

Munir Fayyaz

The Translator

The Unusual Short Stories of Qamar Sabzwari

QAMAR SABZWARI HAS taken the plots of nearly all his stories from the society around us. This is the life that we live and that’s why no story appears alien or odd to us. However, the characters of these stories are unable to lead a straight and ‘clean’ life and come with an eccentricity and flaw. The story ‘The Guard’ for instance is about Rasheedan whose husband is abroad and she is bound to live the life of a widow. The husband of thirty six year old Shahida died two years ago and she has to bring up her two sons with a blind mother-in-law and a mad sister-in-law. All the female characters of this story are helpless as they have to take care of the kids, mothers or sisters of their husbands and have to live by suppressing their sexual urge in their suffocating bodies. One cannot live by ignoring the demands of body because sex burns in the body as fire in oven. Such women end on murder in our society and in this story the murderer is the one who is born of her own womb.

‘The Hormone’ is the story of a man who couldn’t be a man. The defect in his hormone let him neither be a man nor a woman. He got torn apart between the triangle of his father, mother and tutor. Such characters become a sign of humiliation and disgrace in our society. He has to leave his home, city and country and has to settle in America where he lives with his partner. No one has any objection on such a relation in that country but he still remembers his mother there while looking at her picture on the wall of his living room.

The writer also tells us that sex is not merely a thing of pleasure. This is such an emotion that needs nourishing, catering and spending as well. The story ‘Yusa’ is about such a miser character who doesn’t take care of his wife nor does he spend on her health and draws sexual pleasure by eying on other women.

The story ‘Najma’ is about the metamorphosis in the relation of a happily married couple destroyed due to the religious narrow-mindedness. Everything appears O.K. at the end of the story but the fact is that the things which seem the source of satisfaction to the husband are the real causes of defect.

The reasons for social deformity are normally the social elite that we don’t consider to be so rather than the persons we usually blame. The story ‘Rani’ points to such characters in the society. The Rani of this story is a potent proof of Qamar Sabzwari’s expertise in his art of characterization.

Qamar Sabzwari does not limit himself to creating characters or molding them sophisticatedly in the story but has also creates symbols from the ecology of the story with deep meanings. The story ‘The Threads’ weaves the colorful threads in a tailor’s shop with the story to create manifoldness of symbolism in the narrative.

The different levels of man-woman relationship appear in this collection in such a sophisticated way that despite being very old and used theme in literature they look quite novel and attractive to the reader. I reckon that writing on woman and sex has always been very dear to the fiction writers but it has equally been very rare that the writers complete a story without being awkward in these topics or succeed in making the reader comprehend their subject matter without adding the sweetener of relish. After Ismat and Manto this subject became so worn out that whoever enters this street comes out exhausted. It is indeed a success for Qamar Sabzwari that he knows the art of molding his characters and moving them in the text as per his own will, dissociating his favorite subject in the story, dividing his story into smaller segments, changing the chronology slightly to keep the suspense of the reader, and creating the pure narrative of fiction in a very neat language. This is due to all these capacities that he has triumphed in the fiction street.

Muhammad Hamid Shahid

Splinters

THIS IS AN ORDINARY looking house, the type of house that you normally find in the suburbs. A man sitting alone on the roof top of this four roomed house is lost in some deep thought amidst the smoke of hash at this late hour of the night. His mother is sitting quietly in her room below and his wife and sister are in another room talking with a couple of other related women in the family.

This man sitting on the roof top that I have just mentioned is Rasheed whose father died this morning at the age of 58.

His wife entered the room of her mother-in-law Mother! Isn’t Rasheed here with you?

She looked at her for an instance, then going back to her thoughts, replied, No. He came here some time ago but returned after throwing a glance from the door.

Ok. I don’t know where he went. Let me see in the drawing room. He might be sitting there.

While Rasheed’s wife was getting out of the room, she caught sight of Rasheed coming down the stairs.

You...on roof??  What were you doing there? It’s too late and too cold.

Her lisping showed of her becoming conscious of her inapt question so she abruptly broke it into three segments.

Instead of replying to her question, Rasheed only threw a glance on her and said in a flat tone, I’m going in the drawing room to get some rest. Don’t disturb me!

She wanted to ask him to rest in the bedroom, and she wanted to ask him for a cup of tea but became quiet looking at his grim face and situation of the house.

Rasheed paced slowly and down headedly towards the drawing room and after closing the door, without turning the tube light on, went to the sofa and laid down on it closing his eyes.

He wanted to understand his mental and emotional state, wanted to give some name to his shock but he was still unable to understand what was going on inside him.

There was only a vague fear of stumbling or falling as two persons tugging a rope at its ends and one of them abruptly leaves his end. Or as two persons trying to save a worn out wall from falling by pushing it on each side and one of them suddenly draws back.

His body was extremely tired due to all day’s exertion and fatigue. The words of condolence and cries of women heard all day long were still echoing in his ears and there was a mob of faces of people on the screen of his mind that came to see him for offering their condolences.

All these voices and images were compelling him to seek refuge in the lap of sleep. But the unrest at his heart and metamorphosis happening in some corner of his mind was still surprising to him. As he went down on the sofa, this stream of thought and surprise halted, and he fell asleep of tiredness. While getting up on his bed in the morning, he recalled that he had fallen asleep in the drawing room sofa last night and was in a strange fix.

Rasheed spent most of his time sitting