POETÈ MAUDIT — A Short Story by Muzaffar Karim

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In this short story that commences at “the holy steps” of the Makhdoom Sahib shrine in Srinagar, a disgruntled character surprises the author of what he considers to be an unfinished tale. The narration descends one step at a time from what is objectively a dialogue between an ‘author-as-first-person-narrator-and-protagonist’ and his disappointed fictional character—the poète maudit of the story that said author-protagonist has written—to a form of dialogue that could as easily be considered a monologue—given the disappearance of inverted commas within the text. If Miguel de Unamuno’s “Niebla” (1914, translated “Fog”) marks one of the most memorable moments in metaliterary fiction when a fictional character confronts an author, Muzaffar Karim’s short story takes such uses further with the apparition of the ghost of the said fictional character—where both are one and the same and separate manifestations of ‘one being’.

In this way, Karim adds a layer of depth and blurring of lines between the reality within fiction, and the fiction within a reality that has as of yet not been seen in Kashmiri literature written in the English language—on account of the complex use of metaliterary devices and narrative techniques to break from far more conventional forms of narration and literary production. The result is a short story that ventures into a literary terrain that succeeds in blurring the set identities of the literary subject—be it the author, narrator, protagonist, antagonist, character or a ‘Hamletian’ phantasmagorical figure.

An articulate patchwork of allusions, and literary, philosophical and cultural references within the story extend the notions of “narrative event” and “narrative time” to give way to an expansion and a density in the short fiction form found commonly in the stories by Jorge Luis Borges (footnotes and endnotes included). How the story accommodates both metaliterary and metareferential devices so cohesively and consistently is far beyond the scope of this lengthy introduction that leaves out the writer’s use of dark humor, sarcasm, and satire.

In this mode, and perhaps inadvertently and unintentionally, Karim’s fictional story adds to the genre of “World Literature” written from Kashmir, while quirkily mocking the “European sensibilities” that characterize certain Kashmiri intellectual interests. Here, the story could effortlessly open up a literary debate on postcolonial literature and its critique, adding further to the complexity found in its textual elaborations. Questions of knowledge, territory, thought and place, location and culture, emerge as the narration progresses and as multiple ghosts of old and new manifest. The greatest and most endearing of them all, perhaps, is Ash’ar Ali, who in refusing to be a Kashmiri poète maudit materializes like “ash” to remind the first-person narrator-author-protagonist of a(n) (im)pending task.

Disclaimer: any resemblance to reality is purely fictional in this short story. For more, readers are advised to check the Editorial Disclaimer.

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Our highest dignity lies in our significance as works of art – for only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified.

Friedrich Nietzsche

[dropcap]I[/dropcap] smell of cigarettes and sin, that’s what he whispered to me as I was climbing down the holy steps of Makhdoom Sahib[1]. It has been my ritual since childhood to visit the shrine whenever something important is about to happen in my life. In the beginning, the requests were strictly academic but as time improved, so did the requests. Last time I visited the place for Tehniyat and now we’re proud parents of two lovely kids. No, I’m not a religious person but the ritual of visiting the shrine has become more religious for me than the practice of religion itself. Some losers can’t find their fill even here but the place has never left me empty-handed. The climbing of stairs from Kalai[2] is always wistful while the descent from Kathi Drawaza[3] blissful—except that day when someone whispered in my ear an odorous mixture of cigarettes and sin. The familiarity of the sentence made me uneasy. I looked for the person in the darkness that wraps Srinagar after Isha.[4]

I reached Kathi Darwaza when I heard the voices and cries of the patients from the mental asylum. The cries were surprisingly so loud that I remembered Toba Tek Singh[5] who metamorphosed into Gogol’s Poprishchin[6] who feigned Hamlet’s madness[7].

“What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba[8]…”

I restrained myself before going into Priam’s world through Homer’s reed pen by reminding myself that tomorrow was the most important day in my life. To block the cries and whispers I began rehearsing the speech.

“. . .oopad di guddud di Hecuba di Priam di Hamlet te Homer di never mind, never mind, silence. . .”

The sky rumbled with a creaking sound.

“Honourable…” Should I start with ‘honourable’ before naming some politicians and bureaucrats? Will it not betray the cause of my writing, my resistance? I should anyway be informal in a place... My cerebral exercise was cut short by the loud echo of my footsteps. The dark road was lit only by a fluorescent yellow lamppost that seemed to shiver with light in the cold night. The change in weather from the moment I climbed down the warm old stone steps of Makhdoom Sahib to the shivering lamppost was climactic. I had travelled seasons in few hours.  My footsteps were echoing loudly as if someone was trying to match my walking pace. Someone was following me, I was sure about that. Tomorrow was the book release and the Indian agencies couldn’t be silent. It was not easy to raise a voice about the atrocities in Kashmir even through fiction. When I reached Zindshah Masjid[9] I deliberately turned right to confuse the agent spying on me. I regretted the decision later when I found myself walking right through the Malkha[10]; it was Kafkaesque.

Luis Buñuel’s[11] razor blade cuts through Gregor Samsa’s eye…

Someone was definitely following me as I could clearly hear the-out-of-sync footsteps nearing me. Surrounded by the dead on both sides of the road, not a single living soul passed through. Even if someone walks through, the person should be considered a ghost in the present ambience, I thought. And what if I was a ghost to someone walking through the road? Only the characters from The Arabian Nights[12] walk through a space like this.

Once upon a time there lived a jinn…

Or maybe characters from Russian novels written under the Soviet regime:

Once upon a time there lived Stalin’s jinn…

Or maybe someone from dystopian fiction:

Once upon a time there lived Stalin’s jinn in a wasteland…

Or maybe real people like me walking the streets of Srinagar:

Once upon a time there lived Stalin’s jinn in a wasteland called Kashmir…

Or maybe someone whose existence was nothing but a mixture of cigarette-breath and sin, a face blows the same sentence right into my face. I am startled and lose my balance. Suddenly, I am sweating and panting. I take out my phone and somehow manage to turn on the flashlight and throw the light in every direction, like a hand-held strobe light peering out of a miniscule watchtower on a beach looking for enemy threat in the cold of the night.

Once upon a time there lived Stalin’s jinn in a wasteland called Kashmir

“…oopad di guddud di Hecuba di Priam di Hamlet te Homer di never mind, never mind, silence…”

The sky roared loudly.

With a mobile phone in my hand, I immediately thought of calling Tehniyat. In all this mess I forgot her number. I went through the log of all the previously dialled numbers when someone’s hand blocked the screen in an instant. It is a human hand, I comforted myself before I resolved to see the face. I was about to lift my head when he, in a silken voice said, “Don’t escape into love, fear a little, suffer a bit”.

“Who are you and what do you want?” I howled.

A proper ending, he said calmly.

“What do you mean by a proper ending? Who are you?”

Don’t I still smell of cigarettes and sin? How could you not recognize me?

I realized he had been holding my collar only when he let go of it.

I never thought I was such a minor character in your story, he kept on saying as he sat beside a grave. I started repeating my speech to distract myself from this bizarre, mad world. I ran and ran trying hard to see the shrine of Naqshband Sahib.[13] After running for about ten minutes or so I found myself still walking on Malkha Road. He was sitting by some grave looking up into the stars.

The only perspective to all this I realized after several unsuccessful attempts to escape was to see it through his eyes. I went up to him.

“Please tell me who you are and what’s happening? I really want to go home.”

He looked at me with those dreamy eyes made visible by the moonlight.

Do you remember your story “The Poetic Resistance”?

“Yes. How can I not!” I replied with authority.

With that authority you should have remembered me. I am the minor poet in that story whom you gave a European sensibility and a Kashmiri death.

“You mean you’re Ash’ar Ali, the poète maudit of that story.”

I couldn’t help but laugh; my laugh though had a tone of mysteriousness to it.

How else could I know the details of the story? He added to my mysteriousness.

He was right, the story would be in the public tomorrow and without my editor and publisher no one else knew the details of that story, not even Tehniyat. It took me quite a few slices of surrealism to accept the fact that he was a character from my own story. I definitely was inside a nightmare or hurt my head while climbing down the Makhdoom Sahib shrine. I might quite possibly be inside an operation room with a team of amateur surgeons operating on my literary mind—confusing nerve wirings, mixing connections, letting Hamlet collide with Poprishchin, Shakespeare drinking with Manto, Dali sleeping on the bestial belly of Samsa…

You’re perfectly alright, he assured me knowing exactly my thoughts. Nothing has happened to you. You will walk out of my world as soon as you give me a proper ending and let this goddamn smell disappear from my character.

I was about to say my speech when he shouted. And yes, he continued in a loud voice, you will be able to give your prestigious speech tomorrow without worrying about whether to use honourable or not.

What do you want? I asked demandingly to end this nightmare.

Are you as deaf as the system against which you write? What does Palestine want? What does Kashmir want? What does every relation and every person want?—A proper ending.

Are you not satisfied with the ending that I gave you within that story, I asked in a commanding voice as if I had accepted the rules of this metafictional universe.

I died without publishing a book, lost and defeated in your story. You could have at least killed me like Khalil Hawi[14] or made me disappear like Rimbaud[15]. That could have been justice to your poète maudit. “One day Ash’ar was killed in a grenade blast with all his teeming brain spilled over the power cables and macadam road…” this is what you wrote instead.

This was the proper ending I could have given you within the limits of that story. Your character…

My character is the most clichéd of all your characters, admit it. “He smelled of cigarettes and sin!” he quoted from my story with an angry grin.

Now what do you want? I was about to ask when I remembered Palestine and Kashmir. I changed my question. How do you want me to write you a proper ending?

How do you write, he guffawed sarcastically. He definitely was the Ash’ar that I created.

I mean I don’t have a pen or paper or my laptop with me.

Most of the time, he replied promptly, you write on your phone. So please do that and release me.

In that moment, I realized how much our characters know us and the next moment I asked myself what the hell I was talking about. I took my phone and started to type what I didn’t know. How can I know what you want? I have already killed you in the story.

Give me a damn funeral and a few feet of land for burial, he shouted in anger. This character was now out of my authorial gaze. Why’re you saying a few feet of land when I have properly given you a resting place here in Malkha?

You never gave me a resting place, you only gave my dead body a direction. “They took him towards Malkha to be buried…” Isn’t that what you wrote?

He was correct and I felt guilty.

You never cared to look if I was buried or not, he continued. When you left me off those pages, I wandered throughout Malkha. I searched for my ancestral graveyard, thanks to the unique caste that you gave me, only to find that the plot had been sold illegally to Syed Sahib from another story that you wrote. Your anti-caste stories at least have proper Syed burial, he retorted critically to my blank face.

I’m really sorry, I responded immediately. I realize my literary fault and I have a good solution. As you beautifully analysed your own character, of having a European sensibility, I’m giving you a choice that no character can claim to have been given. You can have a piece of land here in Malkha or you can rest peacefully in Père Lachaise Cemetery[16] with your European masters.

I could see him smile perfectly the way I authored his smile. He was about to leave when I asked him, Why now?

He was in no hurry and came back to me holding my hands as literally as a character would the hands of his author and said, Because tomorrow our private lives will be public and then you will have no control over the stories or their endings.

The sky above us crumpled.

I was irritated and took my hands back as authorly as a character could be shrugged off the pages. What happened?, he enquired. You’ve no authority to interrogate me, I retorted angrily. Please make a choice.

Please wait here, he pleaded, I don’t want to haunt you like a character from a fictional world.

He disappeared leaving me in that pitch darkness, among millions of dead graves howling in silence. The cries whispered again…

“…oopad di guddud di Hecuba di Priam di Hamlet te Homer di te malkha di pere Lachaise di europe di hindustan never mind, never mind, silence…”

I was about to contemplate the literariness of the world around me, the unusual sky above me and the changing seasons when Ash’ar appeared sad and solemn and sat on the grave next to me. What’ve you decided?, I gathered the courage to ask.

With woeful eyes he looked up and declared as literally as a character can to his author; you’ve not written me well.

You’re crossing your limits Ash’ar, I’m still your author. You’re one of the best characters I’ve ever created and…

Please save this for your speech tomorrow, he rubbed me off with his words. A few pages ago you didn’t even remember me. Save this flattery for your bureaucrats, officials, journalists and great Kashmiri artists and intellectuals. Spare me this writerly diligence and accept the clichéd character of my being.

Why’re you saying this? What happened?

Cigarettes and sin, and you could never give me a sentence or two to define what my sins were. I left the Parisian metro and from the rear gate of Père Lachaise reached Oscar Wilde’s[17] tomb. I praised him for “The Nightingale and the Rose”, that’s one among the few of his stories that you gave my character, and described my situation to him. He was glad to take me in and asked me about the smell of my character. I told him that I smell of cigarettes and sin upon which he was happy. He then asked me what my sins were and I was not able to tell him. I told him that I will return to tell him what my sins were and I left him with that Wildean smile glistening on his face. Do you know the catacombs of Père Lachaise? One runs directly from Wilde’s grave to Chopin’s[18]. I met Chopin but he couldn’t sympathise with me as his heart is somewhere in Poland. I was reminded of Wilde’s “The Happy Prince” and wanted to gift Chopin the precious heart. I wept by the graves of Abelard and Heloise[19], and it was there when I remembered your poor characterization. You made a poète maudit but at least you could have given me a love story.

Even if I gave you a love interest, I replied as seriously as he asked, I would have to end it miserably. You were not the type of character who would be in an everlasting relationship. The very relation would have betrayed your character.

You could make me love a whore, or some damn marginal character in society. But you won’t, because you used me in that story as a prop to make my antagonist successful. The beloved poet of Kashmir, the great Sikander Habib[20], the charming young talent with writing as beautiful as his face. As successful as Alexander, and as beloved as Habib, you could have been less pretentious with that name. How could he be successful?

He had to be because he had a purpose.

No! He had an agenda not a purpose.

Okay! Agenda, I answered to end the discussion, but I was also playing beyond my authorial intentions when I added, It’s good to have an agenda. You were wasting your talents online, writing about stuff that never mattered.

At least I was being truthful and writing about things that I really felt. What else did you want? I had no hidden agenda like Sikander.

Truth is no agenda, I retorted angrily, if it gives you a sense of reality…

Yeah, but agenda is no truth. Even if it smells of truth, it’s the truth of propaganda, a trick of the market…

I’m talking about the perspective here…

What you are calling the perspective can easily be called ideology in another language.

Reality is reality, period.

Reality! He gave a hearty laugh. You’re talking to your damn character, he shoved his words into my face with great emergency, and talking about reality. Get a perspective, man!

The sky roared as angrily as our moods.

I was confused, angry and frightened. I just wanted to end this damn nightmare because I was beginning to speak in the words of my character. He was still angry and wandered a few graves away from me. I knew if I had to end this story and give it a proper ending, I might have to lure him to the end of the page. I went up to him and explained that Sikander had a purpose, that’s why he was successful in the story.

He was infuriated by the word ‘purpose’ and burst out with a question. And what was the artistic and poetic, ah sorry, the aesthetic purpose of Sikander?

His art was a medium to highlight the painful plight of the Kashmiris.

A purpose that even a lawyer has, and a doctor and a social worker, and a journalist and the whole of damn civil society has. Quite a unique purpose to make your character successful. Give these reasons to the damn audience in that restaurant tomorrow when they will be sipping coffee worrying about the proportion of sugar to coffee bean in their hot brew. I’m a part of that story, you can’t lure me with this to the end of that keyboard. You’ve no paper, you idiot.

I’m not luring you, I am just explaining to you why you were the way you are in that story. You had no purpose…

Maybe not everything should have a purpose.

Everything has a purpose, I affirmed like an author. If God is the author of this world, then the world should have a purpose.

Maybe not, he replied softly. Thousands of people in this world live their lives without a purpose and yet the world exists. Maybe we’re the minor characters in God’s enormous novel like I was in yours. Maybe we’re his stock characters that he writes to polish his skills and we are never meant to be a part of his godly purpose, never meant to be a part of his favourite novel. Maybe somewhere in that novel there are perfect ideal characters fighting for a purpose.

I didn’t know what to say.

Have you considered how fictional our lives are? He picked up an arm bone from the ground and poetically asked me while looking at the bone. Have you ever considered from what perspective you are narrating this story? Your stable past tense or past perfect tense is residing in some perfectibility from where you’re narrating these events.

The sky thundered with lightning and in that moment, I could see what he was saying.

Do you know what actually hit me while talking to Wilde? Do you know why I left him immediately? I was as blank as this story where the character had more insight than the author. I preferred silence. Not that I couldn’t define my character or the sins that characterized me but the aesthetic rue that I couldn’t die for art. All those people there in Père Lachaise destroyed their lives dangerously for an aesthetic purpose whereas I smelled of cigarettes and sin and died in a blast.

I was gazing blankly as upon the white sheet of paper before one has written anything. Say something, he cried. The word limit of this short story is running out and if you can’t resolve the story, we will both be lured off the pages. He tried to tickle me with the ulna and suggested how the bone was a metaphor in the story. He appealed to the god in the skies and the dead inside the ground to give me the sensibility for a proper end. After a very long time and exhausting all the literary tropes of short story writing he irritatingly took my phone away from me and began to write:

Imagine five centuries ago, Shah e Hamdan’s son, visiting Kashmir, buying this 1000-kanal land and dedicating it as a cemetery. He, from the very beginning, knew that these people will require more land for death than for life. Common people, not great ones with purpose, not great artists dying for an aesthetic purpose but simple ordinary people living their life for each other and dying. These people will have no Epstein or Holden working out on their graves and no muse will cry over their grave. These are the people crucified on the cross of life. They’re martyred by life. I would happily lose eternity collecting their bones and making a huge sepulchre out of them. A sepulchre of life.

He handed me the phone and asked me to leave. I remained there as a confused character in some unpublished story.

Once upon a time there lived Stalin’s jinn in a wasteland called Kashmir looking for ghosts among the unfinished unpolished stories of the world…

He urged me to leave with these words:

Go now and leave me with the dead for life’s sake. I think I will always be a poète maudit. Even you can’t write that off your page of my story. So leave me to wander and be lost. This world is in need of many Sikanders and many warriors of truth and life. Let me live with the dead.

He got up and left. Thunder rustled like paper crumpling. He looked directly at me as if someone’s finger poking right into my eyes blinding my vision. I remained there like a character in some amateur writer’s story not knowing in what tense or from what perspective to end it.

“…oopad di guddud di Hecuba di Priam di Hamlet te Homer di te malkha di pere Lachaise di europe di hindustan never mind, never mind, silence…”

The phone screen went blank. The stage lights went off. The curtain fell. The pen stopped.

Muzaffar Karim
20 January, 2019

Glossary

[1] Makhdoom Sahib: The holy shrine of Sheikh Hamza Makhdoom is located along the southern side of the hill known as Hari Parbat or Koh e Maraan, Srinagar. The sacred shrine sits atop the hill overlooking Srinagar and can be reached only after climbing a steep upward movement facilitated by concrete stone steps. It is believed that if a person has some wish and climbs these steps, the wish is fulfilled.

[2] Kalai: Kalai is a reference to the wall build around the Kalai area during the reign of Emperor Akbar. The narrator is here referring to the Sangeen Darwaza, the entrance towards the shrine of Makhdoom Sahib from Hawal part of Srinagar.

[3] Kathi Darwaza: Kathi Darwaza is another entrance to the Makhdoom Sahib shrine from Rainawari area of Srinagar. A few meters away from this entrance is also located the Psychiatric Hospital, Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences.

[4] Isha: Isha is the late night mandatory prayer offered by muslims among the total of five for the day.

[5] Toba Tek Singh: Toba Tek Singh is a famous short story by Saadat Hasan Manto set in Lahore mental asylum. It deals with the inmates of the asylum and how they respond to the news of the partition of India and Pakistan. The Protagonist, Bishan Singh, becomes Toba Tek Singh as the story evolves and at significant plot intervals, he blabbers, “oopad di gudgud di . . .”.

[6] Poprishchin: Aksenty Ivanovich Poprishchin is the protagonist of Nikolai Gogol’s short story ‘The Diary of a Madman’. As the title indicates, the story is Poprishchin’s monologue as he descents into madness. Like Manto’s Toba Tek Singh, Poprishchin keeps on repeating, “never mind, never mind, silence”.

[7] Hamlet: Hamlet is the protagonist of Shakespeare’s famous tragedy Hamlet in which he feigns madness in order to expose the lies of the people around him.

[8] Hecuba: Hecuba was the wife of slain Trojan king Priam as recorded by Homer in The Illiad. The reference here is to Hamlet’s reaction to one of the player’s acting who weeps while expressing Hecuba’s grief. Hamlet here is morally self-flagellating himself that an actor with no relation to Hecuba is able to cry real tears while he is not able to avenge the death of his real father. There is also a relation between Hecuba and Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother, who for Hamlet is unlike Hecuba.

[9] Zindshah Masjid: It is a mosque named after the Sufi saint Zinda Shah located at Rainawari.

[10] Malkha: Malkha is the largest cemetery/graveyard of Kashmir located below the Hari Parbat hill.

[11] Luis Buñuel: Buñuel was a famous Spanish director who along with Salvador Dali directed a silent surrealist short film titled Un Chien Andalou. The reference here is to the famous scene where the razor cuts across an eye.

[12] The Arabian Nights: The Arabian Nights or One Thousand and One Nights is a famous Arabic collection of folktales and stories dealing with ghosts, jinns and magicians.

[13] Naqshband Sahib: Naqshband Sahib is a famous shrine and mausoleum located in Srinagar. It is named after the Sufi saint Syed Baha-ud-din Naqshband Bukhari of Naqshbandi order.

[14] Khalil Hawi: Khalil Hawi was a famous Lebanese poet who committed suicide after the Israeli invasion of Beirut.

[15] Rimbaund: Arthur Rimbaund was a famous French poet who abandoned his literary career at age 20 and vanished into anonymity thereafter.

[16] Père Lachaise Cemetery: Père Lachaise Cemetery is the largest cemetery in Paris and is the resting place of many literary artists and musicians.

[17] Oscar Wilde: Oscar Wilde was an Irish poet, playwright and short story writer. Wilde lies buried inside the Père Lachaise Cemetery within the tomb sculpted by Sir Jacob Epstein along with Charles Holden.

[18] Chopin: Frédéric Chopin, Polish musician and composer also lies buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery.

[19] Abelard and Héloïse: Héloïse, a French nun and intellectual, was in a romantic relationship with French polymath Peter Abelard. Their remains lie buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery.