A Promised Land

  KHADIJA MASTUR

  A Promised Land

  Translated from the Urdu by Daisy Rockwell

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Preface

  Translator’s Note

  A Promised Land

  Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  Further Reading: Partition Literature in Translation

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright

  Praise for The Women’s Courtyard

  ‘One of the iconic modern Urdu novels. Basically about the Partition—and about how people observed it in the prospect, and what actually happened to them—it is a highly symbolic narrative of fractured lives and peoples. Poignant, and in many ways somehow prophetic of the events that happened much later after Partition, it is a novel that deserves much greater notice than it has received so far. It is a good thing that Daisy Rockwell, a knowledgeable and committed translator from Urdu and Hindi, has chosen to bring this truly great novel—and not just by a woman, but great by any standards—novel before the wider world through her English translation.’

  SHAMSUR RAHMAN FARUQI

  ‘Beyond the astute, masterful exercise of a translator’s art, her sensitive choices in diction and idiom, Daisy Rockwell’s translations are rendered with a subtle brilliance that transports our master writers’ original framework of sensibilities with great delicacy into a new language. We are fortunate to have, in Rockwell, a meticulous, virtuoso translator working on our literature.’

  MUSHARRAF ALI FAROOQI

  ‘[The Women’s Courtyard] is at its core an indictment of patriarchy—one of the most moving and powerful in all our fiction . . . Mastur gives us a narrative on the epic scale, ranging across four generations, the life-arcs of dozens of characters—births, marriages, suicides, imprisonments, sexual assault, divorce—and taking in Gandhi’s leadership of the national movement, the rise of the Muslim League, and the birth of Pakistan. The narrative is always gripping . . . Rockwell’s translation is superbly judged. Her English renders the spareness of Mastur’s Urdu, the efficiency of her physical descriptions, and the devastating concision with which she handles tragedy.’

  KESHAVA GUHA, THE HINDU

  ‘I picked up this 400-page novel and devoured it in two sittings. Powerful storylines fluently told in a deceptively simple and colloquial style, strong, outspoken characters and plenty of action kept the pages turning. Woe betide you if you skip a chapter—you will miss another key twist in the plot . . . Daisy Rockwell is experienced and highly accomplished and it’s no surprise that her [translation] is such a joy . . . Mastur is an expert at indicating her characters’ thoughts and feelings in a brief phrase, a description of a detail, often just in a gesture.’

  GILLIAN WRIGHT, OPEN

  ‘Khadija Mastur’s classic novel Aangan receives a superb and nuanced new translation that is likely to garner even more admirers for the book . . . Rockwell’s highly readable version makes me approach the novel with as much excitement as did reading it for the first time many years ago . . . Rockwell’s version makes me want to rush back to the original and this is her real success as a translator.’

  ASIF FARRUKHI, DAWN

  ‘An unrelentingly bleak portrayal of poverty, deprivation and the needless cruelties of time and circumstance. However, there is plenty here for those interested in a nuanced reading of patriarchy . . . Daisy Rockwell’s immaculate translation of Khadija Mastur’s Aangan is welcome not only for bringing the work to English readers, but also as a feminist tract that questions love, marriage and the need for happy endings.’

  RAKHSHANDA JALIL, INDIA TODAY

  ‘The novel is as much an indictment of a patriarchal system as it is a comment on the fragmenting of nations. . . The continually shifting equation of the friction and solidarity between the women layers the novel with complexities—there are no easy character evaluations, no sure stances on the choice between India and Pakistan, or between wanting a liberated lifestyle and a secure family. Aliya, the focal character . . . asserts her own will . . . The pitfalls of marriage, the obscuring of sexual violence within the family, the muting of sexual agency, and the uncertainty of political movements, all play out through [Aliya’s] observations of the world. The personal rings with the political in every way . . . The story doesn’t fail to captivate, feigning the smallness of a domestic portrait while quietly writing the saga of a family, its women and its nations.’

  POORNA SWAMI, MINT

  Preface

  A Promised Land was Khadija Mastur’s second novel, first published four years after her death in 1987. Though it was not technically a sequel to her first novel, The Women’s Courtyard, it begins at the same time period that the first one left off (1947, after the Partition of India and Pakistan), and in the same place—Lahore, at the Walton Camp, the refugee camp where Aliya, of The Women’s Courtyard, was volunteering. This time, the protagonist, Sajidah, is a refugee living in the camp. She comes from more humble beginnings than Aliya (though Aliya was living in poverty before the Partition, hers had been an illustrious land-owning family), but otherwise the two share many similarities: each is smart, educated, independent in her thinking, but constrained by her gender and role in society. A Promised Land can thus be considered a sequel in terms of Mastur’s philosophical trajectory, if not in the strict sense of a continued narrative thread.

  While The Women’s Courtyard was an exploration of women’s roles within the family space delineated by the inner courtyard, or aangan (which is the original Urdu title), Mastur focuses on a feminist critique of the patriarchal underpinnings of territorialism and feudalism in A Promised Land. The original title of the novel is Zameen, another common two-syllable word (like aangan) that contains multitudes. Zameen means land, earth, property, territory, and is the essential unit of ownership in a feudal society—landowners are called zamindars. Zameen also refers to the newly formed country—Pakistan—a new homeland, a promised land, for Muslims. Zameen is that little bit of earth that Sajidah and her father lived on in Delhi before the Partition, and the tiny ‘home’ they created with sheets and cots in the refugee camp.

  A Promised Land is a much shorter book than The Women’s Courtyard, but it has a powerful philosophical sweep. Here, Mastur takes on the promises made and broken within the state of Pakistan after its creation and offers a scathing feminist critique of the neo-feudalism that takes hold of the society post-Partition. What does the thirst for ownership of land and counting one’s acres mean for women in this new country? How can the promise of Pakistan as a place of safety for all Indian Muslims maintain that egalitarian ideal in the face of greed for territory? And what provisions are there for the safety and independence of women in a patriarchal system that views women as possessions less valuable than parcels of land?

  Daisy Rockwell

  1

  ‘My daughter, my daughter! Where is my daughter?’ the old man screamed as he tore at his hair. Then he bowed his head, as though he’d found peace in screaming. He sat in the same position for hours after that. Everyone tiptoed by him. No one spoke to him. No one responded to him. Perhaps no one had the strength, or they were all wrapped up in themselves, but his every scream pierced Sajidah’s heart. She wished she could go and comfort him, but she couldn’t stir from her spot. What could she say after all? What words could she speak to show sympathy to a father whose daughter must have been abducted? She was tired of hearing words like patience. She could not speak of patience to the old man. Whenever he screamed, Sajidah searched anxiously for the right words. She had no idea why words had not yet been invented for comforting victims of violence.

  To calm herself, she avoided looking at him, but then her eyes darted about: all the women and men around her
had an impoverished look. Everyone had found themselves a niche, whether in the long, discoloured, deserted army barracks, or under the shade of trees and makeshift roofs made of durries, or in the darkness of tents: they had found some shelter on that bit of land that had enfolded their exhausted feet in its bosom. Her father had also created walls beneath a dense tree using thick sheets and ushered her inside. There, she had sighed with relief for the first time after the horror of the journey.

  This was their third evening at Walton Camp. The aid committees had distributed split chickpea dal and soft warm rotis right before sunset amid enthusiastic slogans in praise of God, and now bands of hookah-smokers sat about small campfires. At every hookah puff, a tiny cloud of smoke rose and disappeared into the air. People spoke loudly to one another, attempting to cheat the weight of their own hardships on the scales of distress. Groups of women sat apart. The filthy, wrinkled borders of their saris flapped in the cool breeze, and their faces bore the traces of deprivation from the protection of their former homes. The girls looked traumatized; nevertheless, they still covered their faces up to their foreheads when they saw young men walking by. It was only the children who were unmoved by worldly cares. They jumped and leapt about, as though it were Eid or Bakr Eid, and they were at home, in their own galis. November was half gone, and it grew chilly the moment evening fell, but Sajidah couldn’t tell it was winter from the look of things.

  A child ran right by her, stepping on her foot. Perhaps the children were playing hide-and-seek. She stood up, rubbed her foot, and pulled the blanket they’d received in alms around her shoulders. Dinner was still laid out on the trunk. Abba wasn’t feeling hungry, and she wasn’t about to eat without him. She took a salvaged fourth-year course book from the trunk and went and sat cross-legged on the ground by the electric streetlight. She’d read only one line when a woman came and stood by her. She’d been pacing for a long time, patting her baby to sleep.

  ‘Are you reading English or Urdu?’ she asked.

  ‘English.’

  ‘What good will that do you?’

  ‘No good,’ she said apathetically, hoping to get rid of her.

  ‘Where is your mother?’

  ‘She passed away,’ she said sadly.

  ‘She passed away, tsk tsk! Are you married?’

  ‘No!’

  She bent over her book feigning deep concentration to avoid the woman, but every letter in the book became an S . . . Salahuddin, Salahuddin, Sallu.

  She closed the book. The woman had gone away, perhaps thinking her arrogant.

  2

  Such memories had filled her heart with longing ever since her arrival. Separation refreshes the memory; a slight reminder can be traumatic. She recalled the first time she’d met Salahuddin, when he’d told her, ‘My name is Salahuddin, but Amma calls me Sallu—everyone does. You can call me that too.’

  ‘All right,’ she’d agreed dutifully. This had made him happy, and he’d told her his entire life’s story.

  ‘We’ve come from a village, we have land there, and many trees—mango trees—when they blossom, the cuckoos sing, and when they eat the unripe fruit, I kill them with my slingshot.’

  ‘How can you kill them?’ she asked, alarmed.

  ‘Ha! Killing isn’t all that hard. It’s just a cuckoo; people kill other people too. Come, meet my Amma. So, yes, I came here to study. My Abba made my Amma come with me. She doesn’t like it here.’

  Then he flipped his hair self-importantly and went away.

  Two nurses walked quickly by, carrying some packages. They set them down by her for a moment.

  ‘The population of our country has already grown,’ said one.

  Then they continued on their way. Sajidah burst out laughing. Had they just stopped to announce this good news?

  In the morning, she’d gone to the maternity centre for a little while. The new mothers lay moaning on bare rope beds, their newborns beside them, swaddled in their dupattas. Perhaps the baby clothes they’d sewn had been stolen somewhere along the way, or they’d forgotten about the coming birth of these small lives as they endeavoured to save their own. How could they have known that death and birth would jockey for attention with such momentous changes?

  She stood where she was and scanned the groups of hookah-smokers in search of Abba.

  The old man began to scream again: ‘Where is my daughter? Where is my daughter? Bastards! Bring me my daughter!’

  People looked up and around and then turned back to their hookahs. Sajidah felt restless and started walking towards him. But what could she say? What could he tell her? At that moment, she had nothing in mind. She was only a few steps away, when a man came up and placed his hands on the old man’s shoulders.

  ‘Baba! Who is this daughter you cry for? That was no daughter, Baba! That was the most valuable of looted goods. Your screaming won’t bring her back. Your voice cannot reach her.’

  The old man stared at him vacantly. Sajidah wished she could go up and slap the evil man across the face. She’d tell him that those who call women the spoils of looting, who are sarcastic about such things, do themselves no credit. But instead, she just stood by with silent restraint.

  ‘You’re lying,’ the old man shrieked again. ‘She was my daughter! She wasn’t spoils or treasure. My daughter, my daughter!’

  ‘Baba! Revenge has already been taken for the abduction of your daughter. Many fathers must be weeping like you on the other side too. If the looted goods are returned, the revenge won’t be complete.’

  ‘Aha,’ said the old man, rolling up his sleeves. ‘So, you’ve stolen daughters too?’ He shoved the younger man so hard he nearly fell over. The younger man glanced at Sajidah and snickered.

  ‘Baba! I can’t comfort you. I can’t reassure you,’ he said, as though speaking to Sajidah. ‘How can I make you understand . . . people are just spontaneously taking revenge. This is an ancient game, Baba! You have no idea how many blameless people have been destroyed by this game for centuries.’

  What did the old man hear? How much had he understood? Now he shook his fists at the younger man in rage. The younger man walked away, head down, and disappeared into a group of hookah-smokers.

  ‘Baba!’ Sajidah called out softly as she approached him.

  The old man looked at her as one might a stranger and then turned his back and sat down as though he didn’t wish to speak to anyone now.

  Sajidah set out for her spot, her heart filled with regret at not being able to say anything useful. When she passed a group of hookah-smokers she heard Abba’s voice and stopped.

  ‘Why are you wandering around over here, daughter?’ he asked, taking a long puff on his hookah. He stood, wiping off his clothing. Now Sajidah saw that Abba was warmly shaking the hand of the young man who had been trying to console the old man by calling his daughter ‘valuable spoils’.

  She returned to their home with walls of sheets, sat down comfortably against the trunk and stretched out her legs. She was feeling exceptionally hungry now. Perhaps Abba is sitting with his hookah again, she thought. I fear for his failing health if he keeps smoking his hookah on an empty stomach like this!

  She heard the last prayer of the night; voices grew softer, but the gramophone records continued to play after namaz, until ten or eleven at night. Night was when people spoke most exuberantly about their safe arrival in Pakistan. A few boys with good voices began to sing melodies. Sajidah didn’t like any of this. She wanted privacy to think. She wanted to awaken her memories and feel embraced by fresh joy. But hearing the worn-out records every day, thousands of times, troubled the sweetness of her memories. At that moment, she felt as though even her own memories were just a worn-out record with a stuck needle.

  When Abba returned with his small hookah, the younger man was with him.

  ‘All right then, we’ll meet again tomorrow, Nazim Sahib!’

  ‘Goodnight,’ said the man, and he left.

  ‘Who is that, Abba? Is he from the galis
of Delhi?’ she asked.

  ‘No, Sajjo, my daughter! Nazim Sahib is from Kanpur. An excellent man. The government here has hired him to work for the Department of Rehabilitation. What to say, he’s wonderful—a very refined man.’

  Abba seemed quite pleased.

  ‘Have some roti, Abba!’

  It made her sad to see Abba praising such a vulgar individual. Abba took an instant liking to anyone who spoke kindly to him.

  Sajidah placed the dish of roti and dal before her father and took the hookah from his hand. Abba burst out laughing.

  ‘My daughter has declared war on my hookah.’

  ‘Please eat some roti, your stomach won’t fill up on smoke alone.’

  ‘I swear, daughter! I’m not hungry at all, I haven’t even digested my afternoon roti yet. You eat now—if I get hungry in the middle of the night, I’ll eat then.’

  He rolled out his bedding and lay down. Eating alone was as bitter as poison to Sajidah.

  ‘Abba! What village will we settle in? Where must Sargodha be? Let’s move somewhere near Sargodha at least. What do you think, Abba? I’ll teach children there at a school.’

  ‘A village? And Sargodha! What on earth is there, crazy girl? What is there for us in a village?’

  ‘Peace!’

  Abba stared at his daughter in the dingy lantern light.

  ‘My daughter feels tired; she’s sad without a home. Eat your bread, then have a nice sleep. It just takes a while to get out of the camp. Once my daughter has started studying again, she’ll be happy. I’ll have you study up to the MA level. What could possibly go wrong now? You’ve arrived in your own country.’

  She looked sadly at Abba. He’d spent his entire life keeping accounts at a large shop for a low wage. What more could he dream of than having her study all the way to an MA degree? After that, he’d find a worthy son-in-law and that would be that. There were no numbers in the account book for hearts or emotions. How would she tell Abba why she wanted to settle in a village now?