Hardcover: 108 pages
Publisher: Ushba Publications (2018)
Language: English

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In Hermitage, ‘The Wounded Swan’, in an elegant translation by Shahbano Alvi that gives the story new nuances, draws on an Urdu legend but it is set in London and revolves around Maya, a young woman whose family migrated to Britain from Central Europe. Hussein’s tale of betrayal and friendship captures a complexity of emotions, including a migrant’s sense of limbo, and employs metaphor to great advantage, including Maya’s fascination for a black swan which inhabits a lake in a nearby park and which she names Silkie. In Hussein’s fiction, startlingly beautiful images of natural life are both a panacea and a foil to human suffering. He captures this with remarkable deftness in ‘Lake’ as well, which tells of a university student haunted by the trauma of childhood bullying.

The quietness with which Hussein portrays turmoil and self-doubt adds to the power of his stories such as the tight, intricate and moving ‘Lady of the Lotus’. This multi-layered tale vividly recreates Karachi in the 1950s: its elegant parties, cultural evenings and soirees. Hussein interweaves brief jottings from the diaries of his gifted mother, Sabiha Ahmed Hussein, capturing her profound love for classical music and her singing lessons by famous maestros. The narrative is skilfully constructed through a series of vignettes in the first- and third-person, which weld past and present to great effect, to tell of creativity, self-expression, self-doubt and loss. A brief reference to her longing for rain — so rare in Karachi but so abundant in her native Malwa, India — imbues the story with a myriad of metaphors, including an intertextual engagement with the famous Malwa folk legend which gives Hussein’s story its name. Music as an innate expression of the human experience also runs through ‘The Hermitage’. Here, the loud joyful singing of a nun and the painful soaring voice of a monk, juxtaposed against the disciplined, traditional chanting of their colleagues at a monastery, release the abbott Siddhant’s suppressed memories.

Hermitage is the first book in Pakistani English literature to incorporate black and white photographs alongside fiction. The book includes a photograph of Hussein’s mother with her sitar; there are stunning images of natural life such as a swan, a dove, a lake, a flower and glimpses of historical architecture with its arches and spires; every one of these pictures highlights the mood of the specific story it illustrates. This is a technique frequently seen today in the novels of W.G. Sebald and Jonathan Tel, for example, though it was also used almost a century ago in Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando.

Hussein continues his exploration of migration and exile in ‘Bridges’, which was originally written in Urdu. Translated by his mother (its earlier version ‘37 Bridges’ gave its title to his Karachi Literature Festival award-winning book) the story tells of Nermin, a writer of Turkish-Cypriot origin who left her strife-riven homeland as a child, has travelled the world over, lived in America and Turkey and finally relocated to Paris. Her experience of dislocation and her encounter with European attitudes towards Muslim migrants have resonances with that of the London-based narrator, a man of subcontinental origin, who has come to Paris to meet her. There she constantly visits each of the city’s 37 bridges, looking for answers to her inner conflicts, the links between past and present, illusion and reality, homeland and adopted land.

Hussein’s ability to traverse languages adds to the richness of his poetic fiction. He engages with the legend of Laila and Majnun in two different stories. The first, ‘The Man Who Stood Still’, consists of letters written by the nameless narrator to a woman called L, interspersed between his narrative in which he recalls M, the lover who betrayed her — or so she believes. The second story, titled ‘The Name’, captures an elderly, ailing Laila taunted by her husband for her ugliness and for the shame of a “madman” who sings songs to her and claims to ‘be’ her, but her answer silences her husband. Hussein’s reconstruction of the story was inspired by a line from the Persian poet Attar; he underpins it with an extract from Attar, translated by Hussein from the original Persian. This taut, two-page tale encapsulates entire worlds and a multitude of passions in a few understated paragraphs.

The collection includes brief, timeless and symbolic fables in ‘Tales from Attar’ and ‘Three Tales after Rumi’, which Hussein explains “are very slightly altered renditions of the original” and influenced by the “austere and lucid French prose translations of Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch.”

There are also four tales that tell of literary figures, literature and writing. ‘Dove’, a brief story of migration, creativity and change, draws on the autobiography of the late Urdu poet Ada Jafri. ‘The Life and Death of a Poet’ revolves around Mustafa Khan Bangash, best known as the poet Shefta. ‘Uncle Rafi’ is about the author’s discovery of a posthumously published story collection, Kehkashan, by his maternal grand-uncle Shaikh Rafiuddin Siddiqi who wrote under the name of Rafi Ajmeri and died at the age of 33. Hermitage culminates with a particularly fine creative memoir, ‘Annie’, which vividly captures the novelist Qurratulain Hyder, a family friend and her influence on Hussein’s gestation as a writer. Hussein called her “Annie Khala”. He first met her in Bombay [Mumbai] in 1968 and later in Delhi and London on numerous occasions. He refers to the literary magazines and books to which she introduced him. He describes his discovery of her Urdu fiction, the many memorable conversations with her and his participation in the 1998 London launch of The River of Fire, her famous translation of her novel Aag Ka Darya. She remains a pervasive influence on him throughout, a source of strength and encouragement, as he gradually finds his own distinct voice as a writer.

Aamer Hussein
He describes himself as a Karachi born Londoner, has recently published his fifth story collection Insomnia, reviews books for The Independent and the Times Literary Supplement and is contributing editor the literary journals Wasafiri. He teaches Urdu and English literature and translates contemporary Urdu fiction. Also, he is probably the first writer of Pakistani origin to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In a traditionally British ceremony attended by many literary friends and luminaries, he was asked to sign either with Byron’s pen or Dickens’ quill. ‘I chose the latter, possibly because Dickens was a great story teller,’ Aamer Hussein said the art of storytelling, of conjuring up a myriad of cross-cultural images and compressing his words into tight, nuanced tales is intrinsic to Aamer’s writing. The books that enthralled him as a boy, were not by Dickens, but English translations of French classics by Flaubert, Zola, Gautier, Merimee, Anatole France in the library of his phupi, Mujibunissa Akram, editor of Woman’s World. ‘I always thought of English literature as something to study in class,’ Aamer said. ‘I loved Hardy but I never opened him after I left school.’