Introduction

THE STORIES OF Zubair Ahmad invite us into a world of remembrance. That world is defined by the sights and sounds of Pakistan in the 1970s, yet it is also inescapably entangled with the trauma of the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan, which shattered the Punjab region into two, and with the memories that persist beyond it. The stories move back and forth between the yearnings of a young man for a life still to begin and the recollections of an older man struggling to come to terms with the past and its hold upon him. The constant slippage between past and present reminds us that time knows no boundaries, no lines that divide.

The stories are narrated in intimate terms, in the first person. Perhaps inevitably we wonder, are the narrator and the author one and the same? We cannot tell. There are, in fact, strong parallels between Ahmad’s own history and that of the narrator who speaks directly to us in the stories. Yet those parallels are invisible to us, as readers. In another form of slippage, the line between story and autobiography remains blurry and enigmatic. As in a dream, it is not clear how much is real and how much is imagined.

Ahmad was born in Lahore in 1958, the child of Partition refugees from what was now the Indian side of Punjab. After finishing his high school studies, he felt restless, uncertain of the way forward. “A different kind of bird began to fly in me,” the narrator tells us in the story “Sweater.” That bird led the narrator—and the author—westward, to Italy. Several of the stories, “Dead Man’s Float” in particular, recollect the narrator’s experiences there, seeking a way to survive without documentation, living on the streets at times, among others who were also rendered as outsiders.

After a year in Italy, Ahmad returned to Lahore, drawn back by memories and the affective hold of the city upon him. There, he studied at the University of the Punjab, completing a master’s degree in English literature and subsequently teaching at Islamia College Lahore for several decades. These two westward movements, first to Italy and then into the domain of English literature, suggest the capacious scope of his imagination. Even as his work is deeply embedded in the social and physical landscapes of Lahore and in the experience of the Punjabi community on both sides of the Pakistan-India border, it reaches out to engage in broader literary conversations.

The city of Lahore is a tangible presence in Ahmad’s stories: its neighborhoods, its roads, its cafés, its landmarks, its histories. We thread our way through the narrow lanes of the old Anarkali market, thronged with people, we walk down the side of Mall Road, and we are introduced to Gol Bagh, a centrally located park (since renamed Nasir Bagh) and the site of important political protests and rallies. Above all, we return again and again to Krishan Nagar, the neighbourhood of the narrator’s (and author’s) youth—the old mohallah. It is revealed as a place of belonging but also of loss, of transition into adult life and the displacement of the familiar by something no longer recognizable. In much the same way, the city of Lahore emerges across the stories as a palimpsest, with contested layers of meaning overlaid on it by different times and peoples.

We can see this in the contestations over property ownership that emerge in the city, which gesture towards the violent disruption of Partition. We see this dynamic arise in “Walliullah is Lost,” and “Pigeons, Ledges, and Streets.” Such conflicts reflect the generally haphazard way in which refugees took up residence in houses available at the time. Such sites initially provided a safe haven but later became flashpoints for conflict, as competing parties sought to establish rights of occupancy. In this way, the violence of Partition echoes through Lahore’s neighbourhoods. With the exception of the final story in this collection, “Wall of Water,” Ahmad’s stories do not explicitly speak of that time. Yet in their treatment of time, trauma, and memory, they resonate with the lingering effects of Partition—a theme that I have taken up elsewhere (Murphy 2018).

THE LEGACY of Partition—the recursion of violence and the sense of alienation that we see in the stories—is acted out alongside ongoing political tumult in Pakistan, particularly protests against the government of General Ayub Khan, who ruled the country from 1958 to 1969. Prominent in a number of the stories is the narrator’s developing commitment to the progressive political ideas circulating within the coffee houses and tea stands of the city. “This was a time,” he tells us in “The Estranged City,” “when so many were caught up in the idea of revolution.” In “Pigeons, Ledges, and Streets,” we are introduced to a young man immersed in the politics of protest. A vocal supporter of the democratically elected People’s Party government led by Zulfikar Bhutto, he had been imprisoned when that government was overthrown by a military coup in 1977. After his release from prison, his mother sorrowfully sends him to England so that he will be safe until freedom is restored. “How much time would it take for the country to get freedom?” the narrator wonders. “We’d been through all this before.”

Underlying the hope that buoys the political aspirations and actions described in the stories is a sense of lost promise, of betrayal. These betrayals are not only political but personal, and they are presented as individual losses, even as they speak forcefully about the pressing problems of the day. We encounter the theme of betrayal again in “Unstory,” which tells the tale of the tireless Bali, humbly serving the People’s Party—“an unpaid worker who helped other people to gain office.” As the narrator reflects, “The People’s Party did come to power, but what was there in it for him? He was neither literate nor educated. Though his influence was everywhere, his place was the same.” We thus see the promise of social change, as well as its infinite postponement, as possibility repeatedly dissolves into impossibility.

The press of the political is closely intertwined with an active engagement in reading and writing. Just after speaking, in “The Estranged City,” of those caught up in the idea of revolution, the narrator comments, “But those who gathered at the YMCA and the tea stalls mostly wanted to be writers. There was an unbridled passion for reading and writing.” We see this association of the political and the literary throughout the stories. Waliullah, from “Waliullah Is Lost,” has a book-binding shop, and it is a place where people gather to talk politics and share stories. In “Unstory,” we hear of the narrator reading books all night long and, in “Pigeons, Ledges, and Streets,” of books that “brought me awareness of the idea of sharing wealth for the sake of all, and understanding of the pain of the dispossessed.” Reading emerges as a refuge, a place for exploration and growth, and as a kind of journey—a way for the narrator (and perhaps also the author) to reach out from his life to a larger world.

Throughout these stories, the narrator seems to seek out something that is lost. What is lost, however, changes: it could be a home, a neighborhood, or a person. Memory joins these losses in a latticework, in which the disparate points can be illusive and sometimes unexpected. Sometimes, it seems it is memory itself that is lost and the narrator is searching for a past through the stories, which become a way of grasping that past and bringing it forward. Yet the narrator also seeks at times to move away from the past, to put it behind him, much as he drives away from his distant cousin, Munwar, homeless and addicted, at the end of “The Estranged City.” One senses, though, that the past is not so easily dismissed.

ZUBAIR AHMAD—the pen name of Muhammad Zubair—writes in Punjabi, in the modified Perso-Arabic script also used for Urdu, commonly known as the Shahmukhi script, which is used in the Pakistani Punjab. Like other members of the Punjabi language movement, he also publishes versions of his work in Gurmukhi script, which is used in the Indian Punjab, and in this way seeks to reach across the border that divides Punjab. He has published two books of poetry and three collections of short stories, as well as a volume of literary criticism. The second of his short-story collections, Kabūtar, banere, te galīāṅ (Pigeons, ledges, and streets), which appeared in 2013, was a finalist in the 2014 competition for the Dhahan Prize, as was his third, Pāni di kandh (Wall of water), in 2020. The Dhahan Prize was founded to celebrate literature written in Punjabi, both in Gurmukhi and Shahmukhi. During his October 2014 visit to Vancouver to receive the Dhahan Prize, Ahmad was warmly welcomed by Punjabi-language writers in the area and on several occasions was invited to read his work and speak to writers’ groups. He has also been an active supporter of the Dhahan Prize within Pakistan, helping to bring the award to the attention of Pakistan-based writers and organizers of literary events.

Such activities demonstrate Ahmad’s active commitment to the Punjabi-language movement in Pakistan, along with Punjabi cultural production transnationally. When Punjab was partitioned in 1947 and became part of two different nation states, its language and script were partitioned as well. Under colonial rule, the Punjabi language had thrived, despite the absence of formal state support. Indeed, historian Farina Mir (2010) has argued that Punjabi may have retained its vitality precisely because it was marginalized by the colonial government, with its preference for Urdu. This lack of state patronage allowed Punjabi literature to remain rooted in traditional vernacular genres long popular among both writers and audiences, as well as in local social and cultural formations that were largely non-sectarian. Thus, even after Urdu was designated the official language of the British Punjab province in 1854, Punjabi publications, written in either the Gurmukhi or the Shahmukhi script, continued to flourish.

At the time of independence, in 1947, the Punjab was partitioned along sectarian lines, with contiguous Muslim-majority areas allocated to Pakistan and non-Muslim-majority areas to India. The Punjabi language fared differently in the two new countries. In India, plans to redraw internal state boundaries along linguistic lines were delayed in the case of the Punjab region, and activism in support of a Punjabi-language state was widely viewed as a Sikh political project. It was only in 1966, after prolonged agitation, that a Punjabi-speaking state was finally established, while purportedly Hindi-speaking areas were incorporated into the newly created state of Haryana—although it is well known that Hindus were encouraged to list Hindi as their mother tongue on their census returns so as to influence the boundaries of the new state. As this controversy demonstrates, Punjabi, too, was imbricated in divisive politics related to religious identity, in this case involving Sikhs and Hindus.

In Pakistan, however, Urdu prevailed. Punjabi is the language of a significant proportion of the Pakistani population—roughly 40 percent—but Urdu is the official language at the provincial as well as national level. Again, the issue of language proved divisive in the early decades of Pakistan’s existence. The effort to impose Urdu in East Pakistan ultimately failed, triggering a conflict that ended with the formation of Bangladesh in 1971. In West Pakistan, however, advocates for Punjabi were active throughout this period and have remained so to this day.

Although, as Julien Columeau (2021) demonstrates, conservative and nationalist positions have been articulated within the larger movement in support of the Punjabi language in Pakistan, the voice of the Left has been particularly prominent. The relationship between the Punjabi-language movement and leftist programs and struggles has drawn the attention of scholars such as Virinder Kalra and Waqas Butt (2013) and Sara Kazmi (2017, 2018). “As the language of the uneducated—of the peasants and working class,” Kalra and Butt observe, Punjabi is “shunned by the nationalist elite. Yet it is precisely this status that provides the rationale for its appeal to Left-wing groups and parties” (2013, 539). Support for Punjabi is grounded in a commitment to addressing local and material needs and to restructuring the distribution of wealth in more equitable ways, so as to reduce disparities among social classes. To that end, early childhood education, along with the right of children to receive that education in their mother tongue, rather than in Urdu, has been a major focus of pro-Punjabi activism in Pakistan.

We can see connections to this larger Punjabi-language movement in the social and political commitments that animate the stories here, in which the narrator embraces leftist ideas and activism. But Ahmad’s commitment to the Punjabi language in Pakistan is expressed in other ways as well. He has revived a Punjabi-language book shop, Kitab Trinjan, formerly in operation from 1997 to 2009, and he was earlier active in the now-defunct Punjabi-language daily newspaper Sajjan (“Friend”), serving as assistant editor on a volunteer basis from 1988 to 1990. He seeks through such endeavours to enhance engagement with the work of Punjabi-language writers, as well as to raise the public profile of Punjabi in Pakistan.

In 2006, Ahmad visited India—a visit that informs his story “Wall of Water” (a story written considerably after the others in this collection). He set out partly to explore his ancestral places, but while he was there, he met with local writers, just as he meets with Indian writers who visit Pakistan—and just as he likewise met with Punjabi-language writers during his visit to Canada. This crossing not only of boundaries but also of cultural contexts is integral to the articulation of a contemporary Punjabi literary domain.

AHMAD’S STORIES position the post-colonial state of Pakistan within a framework of loss—the loss of a once-shared culture, of ties to places now out of reach. Yet they speak to the losses of our moment as well, when the neoliberal state and corporate values have prevailed, and our responses to them are constrained by our sheer powerlessness to resist. Perhaps memory is all we have, in the face of the relentless march of the current global economic and political order, in the path of which tens of millions have been forced to flee their homes, many of them now formally stateless. This sense of irretrievable loss—this constant slipping away of what was—accounts for Ahmad’s focus on deprivation, his embrace of memories of Lahore prior to Partition and the names that defined it, memories that both consume and evade him.

There is no easy recourse from both the bitterness and the sweetness of the past in Ahmad’s stories, no simple release from its hold upon us. Time flows forwards and backwards, as past and present merge in the narrative landscape. Perhaps the temporal flux that permeates his writing stands at the heart of what it means to write in Punjabi at all—to tap into memory that moves beyond separation and asserts itself from within, oblivious to distinctions between here and there, now and then. There is, in other words, something that does continue, something that remains whole. At the same time, the very fact of division—the impossibility of reunion, of erasing the border to form a single nation—imbues Punjabi writing with a peculiar power, freeing it, perhaps, to speak of something else. That something else is something human, something shared, that cannot be confined in a vessel as limiting as a nation.

By situating us in the past within our own present, Ahmad calls us to account for the harsh material and political circumstances of our time, implicitly asking us to confront the same state of division that Punjabis on both sides of the border daily inhabit. He also moves us beyond that physical border to those borders, and border crossings, that reside within ourselves, often floating just beyond the limits of language, in affects and perceptions that defy easy articulation. These broader realms of human experience transcend the intimacies and specificities of any one language, and it is in recognition of this that these stories are presented here in translation. We do so, however, with full acknowledgement of the degree to which their transposition into English leaves Punjabi behind. Punjabi, too, must remain as a memory here, a linguistic landscape in which these stories no longer dwell but that continues to shape them and give them birth.

THESE STORIES represent the end product of a professional friendship of almost a decade. I first met Zubair Ahmad in 2014. I had been active in helping to establish the Dhahan Prize for Punjabi Literature in 2013 and had learned of him and his work in that context. Although I had travelled to the Indian Punjab many times, I had never visited the Pakistan side of the border. So while I was on sabbatical in India in 2013–14, I decided to visit Lahore, for the very first time.

There is a saying in Punjabi: “Until one has seen Lahore, one has not been born.” This resonated with me: It seemed to me as if I had been waiting to arrive there my whole life, without knowing it. Zubair Ahmad played a pivotal role in that arrival, introducing me to people and places in that vibrant and beautiful city. One of the highlights of my week-long stay was my first visit to Sangat, a weekly poetry gathering at the home of Najm Hosain Syed, a prominent figure in the Punjabi-language movement in Pakistan. As Zubair had promised, this was a magical experience. At Sangat, attendees gathered in a circle—now, since Covid-19, it takes place over Zoom, but the general form of the meeting is the same. A poem is distributed, and each person in the circle reads the poem in turn. An in-depth conversation then follows. After a couple of hours, the poem is sung. Then, in its in-person form, the group shared naan bread and daal in a communal meal known as langar; now, over Zoom, participants share songs and further discussion. In person or over Zoom, it is a gathering where Punjabi literature truly comes to life.

The idea of translating these stories was born during that first visit in 2014, and the work progressed slowly and almost entirely virtually over the following years. It was a collaborative process. We used Skype, in those days before Zoom, and exchanged emails full of drafts, discussion, and redrafts. No piece of writing is ever really finished, and this seems especially true of translations. There is always one more small refinement to be made, one more way to convey an elusive image or idea. As with all writing, though, a translation reaches a point where it needs to be declared done and cast out into the world. It is in this spirit that we give you these stories, and we hope you enjoy them.