The novel was Basti, Husain’s first, a work central to his oeuvre, in which the complications of historical perspective and the mixture of fabulous and realistic styles that he had tried out in Din aur Dastaan are fused into a new unity. Husain has always been inclined to see the present in the past and the past in the present, but nowhere else in his work is this tendency articulated as dramatically as in Basti. This fuels the sense of urgency and emergency that marks the book, the appalled prophetic fervor it takes on as its proceeds, but also its dreamy passages, those moments when time seems suspended.
The novel begins lyrically, describing a pre-partition world in which Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim traditions and visions both peacefully coexist and transform each other. We hear a child wondering innocently about first and last things, and the stories he is told by the Hindu priest and the Muslim mullah in response to his questions:
“Maulana, when will Doomsday come?”
“When the mosquito dies, and the cow is free of fear.”
“When will the mosquito die, and when will the cow be free of fear?”
“When the sun rises in the west.”
“When will the sun rise in the west?”
“When the hen crows, and the rooster is mute.”
“When will the hen crow, and when will the rooster be mute?”
“When those who can speak fall silent, and shoelaces speak.”
“When will those who can speak fall silent, and when will shoelaces speak?”
“When the rulers grow cruel, and the people lick the dust.”
After one “when” a second “when,” after a second “when” a third “when.” A strange maze of “whens”! The “whens” that had passed away, the “whens” that were yet to come.
This questioning child is the hero of the book, Zakir (a common Islamic name meaning “he who remembers” and sometimes carrying an additional sense of “he who narrates or recites”), who lives in the fictional town of Rupnagar, literally “beautiful place.” The boy Zakir forms an attachment to his cousin Sabirah (meaning “patient” or “enduring”), the nature of which remains alluringly ambiguous. They play together as children, digging a hole in the ground which they then call their grave, though Sabirah is taken aback when Zakir suggests they follow up by playing wedding. After drifting apart, they meet again when Sabirah is a nubile young woman and Zakir a student in Meerut. Sabirah asks Zakir if he will check out a book from the library for her, and as they chat shyly he inquires if she has read the nineteenth-century historical romance Paradise on Earth (Firdaus-e-Bareen, which has also been translated as Paradise of the Assassins), an enormously popular tale about a youth so devoted to his beloved that in order to please her he joins the dreaded sect of the Assassins. Thus longing and foreboding and literature are linked in these tentative exchanges. They come to an end with come with partition, however, since Sabirah remains in India. Later in the book, Zakir will receive news of her from a Hindu friend, and his father will even urge him to write to her, a proposal that he mulls over. She remains for all that inaccessible, a memory that haunts the pages of the book.
The novel now jumps forward to the early seventies and the intensifying conflict between West and East Pakistan (while also counterpointing this with passages that evoke the euphoric sense of possibility that people felt in the first days of the newly founded Pakistan). Zakir lives with his parents in Lahore, where he teaches history. His mother is worried about family members in the east and asks worriedly about the news from Dhaka, news that either doesn’t come or is not to be relied on. Much of the book’s action takes place in tea shops (not unlike the Cairo coffeehouses, or maqhas, described by Naguib Mahfouz), where Zakir meets a group of friends who argue and tease each other and try to make sense of the violence outside. The critic Muhammad Umar Memon has described Zakir’s friends as “shorn of physical traits and particularizing details,” and it is true they are a collective presence, a kind of chorus commenting on events, themselves “swathed in an eerie half-light,” that they are hard put to understand and helpless to control. All they can do is talk, a reflection of the powerlessness of intellectuals but also of the people as a whole.
Things spin out of control, the news becomes even more intermittent and unreliable, and the sense of isolation at the center of the book grows ever greater. Passages from Zakir’s diary (a private forum by definition) describe the slide into war, while interior monologue plays an increasing role in the book, and a note of delirious, perhaps prophetic, fervor enters in. As the gunfire and sloganeering continue, as everything is falling part, Zakir’s father dies. Wandering aimlessly, Zakir finds himself in the cemetery:
He sat down beside the grave, thinking that when he came to himself he would say the Fatihah. He was still unable to catch his breath, and his body was trembling. The sound of firing could be heard. The sound of slogans too, but they were hardly slogans any more. Now they were a torrent of ferocious, inhuman yelling. And why was there this smoke?… So much had already burned, so much was burning. So many buildings had already been destroyed, so many were about to collapse. He crawled and crawled, trying to come out from under the rubble. He felt that he was not all in one piece. Am I myself or the rubble of myself? “What a building has sorrow destroyed!” Am I in pieces? Everything around me is in pieces. Time too… I’m wandering, broken up — through what times?
With his mind moving in anguish between present and past, Zakir tries to view the convulsions of modern Pakistan in light of the Shiite experience of defeat, persecution, and endurance, but it is only to envision the city around him as Kufa, the city which betrayed Imam Husain. (That nowadays Shiites are targeted for killing in Pakistan only adds to the ironies of this passage.) He keeps wandering through desolate lanes, offers prayers in a mosque devoid of other worshippers, and is warned: “Don’t speak, for fear you might be recognized.”
When a man can do nothing, what is his responsibility? Zakir and his friends wait in the café, defeated, it seems, before defeat. And yet defeat is not total, and introspection can perhaps lead to true self-reckoning and even hope. As Zakir explains:
It’s like this, Irfan: defeat too is a trust. But today in this country they’re all putting the blame on each other, and they’ll do it even more as time goes on. Everyone’s trying, and will keep on trying, to prove that he’s not responsible. I thought that someone ought to take up this trust.
Husain worked on Basti for a number of years, and the novel finally came out in 1979. Widely read and greatly admired in Pakistan, it also caused a good deal of controversy. In particular, critics attached to a politically activist concept of literature were disappointed at Zakir’s ineffectuality, objecting that the book offered no clear political perspective or resolution, though that of course was the point. Husain is averse to making prophecies or giving marching orders or filling out prescriptions. Other critics of the book, as Husain’s excellent translator Frances W. Pritchett has noted, complained that the novel offered “a ‘negative impression’ of their culture, a mood of ‘nostalgia.’” But then as Pritchett sensibly remarks, “surely no intelligent reader will expect [the book] to be… a definitive, complete picture of modern Pakistan.” Finally, the novel’s unconventional form led some aesthetically conservative critics to wonder if it was a novel at all. The challenge of Basti to readers in Pakistan, and indeed everywhere, is to read it not as a handmaid to history or the valet of ideology, whether political or aesthetic, but precisely as a novel, one that mixes different narrative modes with extraordinary skill to describe a crisis that is as spiritual and universal as it is national. Mahfouz combined the influence of the European novel with that of indigenous traditions, like the Arabic maqama, creating what he called “a mold of his own,” and Husain has done something similar. His vision of the novel is also close to that of Milan Kundera, for whom the novel “puts itself exclusively at the service of ‘what only the novel can say.’”