For this week’s Translation Tuesday, a slice of rural life frames decades of a family’s history in this excerpt from Ali Akbar Natiq’s acclaimed novel, Naulakhi Kothi. We’re treated to an abridged biography of Maulvi Karamat, an imam at a small village mosque. Maulvi Karamat is heir to his patriarchs’ accumulated knowledge, which he bestows upon his dutiful (but much abused) son, Fazal Din. An arduous errand to collect food (and consequently, money) unfolds into a lively character study of a mother, a father, and a street savvy son. Natiq deftly contextualises the present by manipulating narrative time, weaving generations into concise pockets of exposition.
“Maulvi Karamat”
When Maulvi Karamat left home, he could barely walk straight. Every few minutes, he would lean his full weight on his staff, and had a sharp headache. He had developed a slight fever because of being on an empty stomach for long. At intervals, he felt a renewed bout of anger against Fazal Din, who had still not returned with the rotis. Maulvi Karamat was afraid he might fall while leading the prayer. It was hard to sustain oneself till Zuhar on the glass of sweet buttermilk he had had at Fajr. As a result, he wasn’t too sure of what he had recited during prayer. In fact, at one point, he had said one verse out of place. It was a good thing that Zuhar prayers were not recited aloud, otherwise, he would have suffered a lot of humiliation, and the attendees would have begun to doubt his sanity. Performing the motions of sujood, ruqooh, and qayaam, he swore at Fazal Din countless times, and also thought ill of the attendees behind him, who were content to line up in prayer behind him, but could not tell whether he was hungry or not. In this state, he thought of the hadith that said, ‘If the time for prayer conflicts with the time for a meal, take your meal first, for one cannot pray on an empty stomach.’
For the past thirty years, Maulvi Karamat was the head imam of this small mosque. More than a village, it was a small cluster of around fifty to a hundred houses. Maulvi Karamat’s great grandfather, Khudayaar, had come here first, seeking alms from people who lived here. At that time, this mosque was an empty and unmarked spot. He was the first to mark the precincts as his own by throwing his patched quilt of rags on the floor here, and started saying a prayer. At first, the villagers would give him two square meals out of pity. Then slowly, some more people, seeing the earlier ones, began to join him there for prayers. Khudayaar had spent a year attending religious lectures in an institution. As a result of that experience, he had memorised some verses of the Quran, and also knew how to pray. On the basis of this knowledge, he started performing his duties as imam, and declared himself the maulvi of the village. Little by little, the functions of the mosque began to shape up around this. After his death, Maulvi Karamat’s father, Ahmed Din, succeeded him. Since that day, from generation to generation, they had remained here. Showing great foresight, Ahmed Deen had taught Karamat a few initial books of the Quran, and sent him off to attend religious lectures in Qasoor. Maulvi Karamat spent six years here. By the time he was fifteen, he was fairly fluent in Urdu, Arabic, and Persian. During this time, Maulvi Karamat’s father, Ahmed Din, passed away at the age of sixty. After his father’s death, instead of going elsewhere, he had preferred to stay in this humble mosque at Chak Rahra. He was sixty-five years of age now.
The entire population of the village was in fact descended from a single ancestor, and had split into different families over time. They were all simple and illiterate folk. They did not inherit land worth more than two or four acres. On these small portions of land, they grew vegetables and some other things of basic need, then carried them across eight kilometers by foot, or on two-wheeled carts, donkeys, and bullock-carts to the city of Qasoor to sell. The entire population was comprised of poor people, who could barely make ends meet, let alone afford to pay Maulvi Karamat a salary. As a result, while his pockets were often empty, he was paid in kind—on Eid, the hides of sacrificed animals, the clothes of the deceased in the village, beddings and charpoys, a token fee for saying the nikah at weddings, and every year, a portion of harvested wheat at harvest time. Maulvi Karamat would sell this wheat in the city, and get some money in return. Besides this, every morning and every evening, Karamat’s son, Fazal Din, who was around fourteen years old now, would collect rotis from the whole village. Every house had taken it upon itself to give at least one roti to Fazal Din every day. This way, every day, Maulvi Karamat would collect thirty or forty rotis per day. Obviously, they couldn’t eat all of these, for there were only three people in the house, Maulvi Karamat, his wife Shareefan, and his son, Fazal Din. So, the rest of the rotis were left to dry in the sun. After a month, he would gather these in a large sack, and sell them at the cottonseed shop in the city. This would give them enough cash to live by for a month.
Collecting rotis from the village people was Fazal Din’s duty. Maulvi Karamat would instruct him to go to as many houses as possible, so he could collect a large amount. Still, a hundred houses was no modest count. He was barely able to do forty or fifty houses in one round. On top of this, there was an added problem for Fazal Din. Every time he would go to collect rotis, people would start allocating small chores and errands to him to run around the house. One woman would ask him to leave the sack of rotis at her house, and send him off to market to get some things. Another would tell him to feed fodder to the cows. As a result, he would reach home very late. When he reached home, Maulvi Karamat would be furious and ask him why he had returned so late. Sometimes, he would give him a few whacks in anger. So from both sides, the ire landed on poor Fazal Din, but this was a ritual now. Fazal Din did not find this harsh; in fact, because of his daily visits to the homes, he also got to taste an exquisite range and variety of meals from all houses, which few were lucky enough to have access to. The second advantage of these daily rounds was that Fazal Din’s intimate knowledge about the village was richer than anyone else’s. He would be fully in the know about everything that happened in the village from minute to minute. Subconsciously, he was aware of the happenings inside all houses. Whenever anyone wanted to ask something about anyone else in the village, they would call upon Fazal Din. Who was visiting whom? Who had accused whom of what? He had an intimate knowledge of trivia like this. Maulvi Karamat was also benefitting directly from Fazal Din’s sharpening knowledge. He would know when was a good time to get some garlic from Ahmed Bakhsh’s house, when there was an excess of basmati rice in Sher Muhammad’s house, and when he was also in a good enough mood to give some, and would oblige if asked. In addition to this, he would also know when Kher Din had grabbed his wife by the braids, and beaten her to a pulp. Had a thief received the same beating, he would have been dead by now. All these matters aside, with the exception of his father, Fazal Din was more educated than any other man in the village. At this young age, he had learnt many verses and Surahs of the Quran, and words of spells and chants. The full text of the prayers, taraweeh, even the prayer of death, which most maulvis do not know, he not only knew those by heart, but was learning new ones to boot.
The reason why Fazal Din was able to gain so much knowledge was that no one in the village had bothered to send their children to Maulvi Karamat to study, nor did the maulvi wish to encourage any such heresy. As a result, his entire wealth of knowledge and learning was only being transferred in a single direction, towards Fazal Din. Kareeman, Bostan, Gulistan, Deewan-e-Hafiz, tales of Urfi and Khakani, and besides these, books of beginner Arabic, its grammar and its tenses, all this was slowly being transferred towards Fazal Din. Slaughtering a hen, praying in a newborn’s ear at the time of birth, these acts were a breeze for him. Bathing a corpse, digging a grave, preparing a funeral shroud, and the rituals of a funeral, none of these were new to him any longer. Whatever Maulvi Karamat had learnt from his father, Ahmed Din, and even that which he didn’t fully know, the jumbled up, half-formed knowledge, he was transferring it all to Fazal Din, for the survival of their family rested with him. In any case, Maulvi Karamat’s father was less educated than him, his grandfather was less educated than his father, and every newcomer to the line added to this bank of knowledge according to his might.
After a lot of hardship, when Maulvi Karamat returned home after the Zuhar prayer, Fazal Din had returned after his rounds with the rotis. The maulvi’s anger was at its peak by then. He quickly grabbed a staff, and brought it down upon Fazal Din. When Fazal Din saw him raise the staff, he leapt forward and broke into a run to dodge the blow.
‘You rascal, where were you off to? Curse upon you, you’ve been gone since six in the morning, and you return at Zuhar time! May God wreck you. A devil like you hasn’t walked the earth yet.’ Maulvi Karamat was running, trembling with anger. ‘Did it even occur to you that there was nothing to eat back home? You return only when I’m about to die of hunger.’
Seeing the fury of his father, Fazal Din shrank up against a wall, shaking with fear. He was still thinking of what to answer, when the staff landed on his buttocks with a whack. When Shareefan saw her son taking a beating, she quickly hauled herself between the staff and Fazal Din for protection. Grabbing the staff from her husband’s hand, she said, ‘You cursed old man, may your hands break. May you die of leprosy! Why are you hell-bent on killing the poor boy? All day, he spends doing your infernal rounds in the heat, and you’re still not content. I know that if it wasn’t for this boy, you would starve to death.’
Shareefan reached out for the petrified Fazal Din, and put her arm around him protectively. He was rubbing his buttocks with his hands for relief, as they were still smarting after the blows.
‘Yeah right, I would have starved without him. When you hadn’t given birth to him, did I survive on mud then? For a full fifty years, I collected rotis from this village, and if people give them willingly to him now, it is because of me. Had it not been for me, both of you both would be scavenging for scraps to eat in a garbage heap. And if you hadn’t found that, you would have gone mad with hunger like dogs.’ Muttering angrily to himself, Maulvi Karamat sat on the charpoy, whose weave had come undone on one side. The charpoy was woven out of thin reed string. In summers, this thin string brings so much comfort and coolness to the body. When she saw the maulvi settle peacefully at last, she turned towards Fazal Din, and scolding him, asked, ‘Why do you take so long? I do not approve of these ways of yours at all. Your useless ways will make beggars of us before long.’
‘Amman, people start asking me to do chores,’ Fazal Deen said with a frown. ‘What can I possibly do? If I refuse, they simply take off my sack of rotis and do not let me go. That leaves me with no choice.’
Patting his head sympathetically, she asked, ‘Tell me who does this?’
‘Amman, Malik Nizam’s wife keeps me doing chores for a full hour. This delay is largely because of her. She collects chores for around the house, and waits for me to come to perform them. As soon as I reach, she sets me off working. That is where I spend most of the time.’
‘Are you listening, Karamat? The labour for the whole village, and your thrashing to boot, all falls upon the poor boy’s neck. Do not dare to say anything to him again.’ Shareefan’s temper was rising steadily. ‘Tell Nizam clearly to let his wife know. We cannot do his labour for him. The amount of work he does for her for free, if he did that against wages, he would earn a full two rupees per day.’
Maulvi Karamat shrank like a wet cat to one side of the bed. Embarrassed, he stared into space and said, ‘Let it go, Shareefan. I will talk to Malik Nizam, but try to understand that he is a village elder, and everyone respects him. You have to assess the situation carefully, we take hundreds of things from his house. Anyway, forget these matters, and give me food quickly, my head is spinning.’ Then, looking towards Fazal Din, he said curtly, ‘Get up, Fazloo, tell me how many tenses there are in Surah Yasin. Sit here by my side, and tell me. If you cannot state those correctly today, watch how I skin you. It has been three months, and you are still stuck at fourteen. I covered all of them in two months only.’
After receiving his dose of scolding from Maulvi Karamat, Fazal Din arose, took some water for ablution in a pot, and performed his ablution. After that, he went to the room and took out a big Quran, a special edition with notes and commentary wrapped in a silken case, sat on the broken stool in front of Maulvi Karamat, and turned to Surah Yasin. Shortly afterwards, Shareefan placed the food before Maulvi Karamat. While eating his meal, Maulvi Karamat kept asking Fazal Din about the tenses and scolding him. In between, he kept sharing other knowledge with him as well. Whenever Fazal Din made a mistake, he would whack him lightly on the arm or leg with his staff.
Translated from the Urdu by Naima Rashid
Ali Akbar Natiq is a Pakistani novelist, poet, short story writer, and critic who is widely considered among the most masterful voices writing in Urdu today. He has published nine books across different genres, with others in progress. His collection of short stories has been translated in English, and selected poems have been translated in German. His work has been featured in The New York Times and Granta, and he writes a weekly column for Independent Urdu. In addition to being a writer, he is also a mason.
Naima Rashid is an author, poet, and literary translator. Her first book, Defiance of the Rose (Oxford University Press, 2019), was a translation of selected verses by late Pakistani poet Perveen Shakir. Her forthcoming works include a translation of the novel Naulakhi Kothi by Ali Akbar Natiq (Penguin India, 2022), as well as her own fiction and poetry. Her writings have appeared in The Aleph Review, Asymptote, The Scores, Poetry at Sangam, Newsline, and other places. She was long-listed for the National Poetry Competition in 2019.
*****
Read more from the Asymptote blog: