Literary Reflections: Stories from India and Pakistan in THE OTHER IN THE MIRROR
Seventy-five years after the subcontinent was lacerated and partitioned, the anthology The Other in The Mirror attempts to bind the fractured reflections of Indians and Pakistanis, using the balm of literature.
Seventy-five years have passed since the subcontinent was divided, lacerated across its landmass, a birth by partition. The Partition left India and Pakistan with the original sin of migration, trauma, and violence. The two nations have since survived with an uneasy coexistence, where the personal brotherhood of their communities have been overshadowed by political animosities.
A number of South Asian writers—from both sides of the border—tackle the complications of the subcontinent’s identity crises and these uneasy coexistences in the recent anthology The Other in the Mirror: Stories from India and Pakistan (Yoda Press, 2022), edited by Sehyr Mirza, with illustrations by Priya Kuriyan.
Even as both countries memorialize the diamond jubilee of Independence with much pomp and fanfare, the very first story in this anthology—penned by celebrated Indian poet, author, and screenwriter Gulzar—doubles down on the Partition’s original sins. In “Crossing the Raavi”, members of a Sikh community in Lyallpur (now in Pakistan known as Faisalabad) short of provisions during the uncertain period of Partition, decide to board a train packed with refugees, where “people seemed to grow like grass on its roof” (4) to cross the new border into India. Among these refugees is Darshan Singh and his wife Shahni, who has recently given birth to twin boys. Even as the passengers wait with bated breath for India, chanting “Har Har Mahadev!” or “Jo Bole So Nihaal!” with each approaching city, tragedy strikes one of Shahni and Darshan’s twins. And just after Lahore, before the train makes its final crossing across into India, a devastating debacle by Darshan doubles the tragic consequence.
But the true horror of the story isn’t just this moment of Darshan’s blunder—an image that is likely to be stuck in my memory for a long time—but its immediate aftermath. As Darshan and Shahni are suddenly left childless, other passengers in the train break out into a celebration at the sight of the border. “Wagah! Wagah!” they chant. “Hindustaan Zindabaad!” they say, as the last words in the story. Long live India!
It’s a celebration of a new life, but born at the cost of the innocent twins: one starved to dead, one killed by a casual act of violence. The chants assure us that the two twin countries will go on, but their souls will forever be haunted by the trauma of their inception.
Not every story in this collection is as dark as Gulzar’s opener, but the theme of twins—or mirror opposites—between India and Pakistan threads the disparate narratives together. Whether the tale is set in 1947 or the 2000s, whether it’s placed in India, Pakistan, or abroad, whether the characters have experienced Partition first-hand or are the descendants of Partition’s legacy, they continue to see each other through the imaginary mirror placed upon our borderlands.
It’s a celebration of a new life, but born at the cost of the innocent twins: one starved to dead, one killed by a casual act of violence. The chants assure us that the two twin countries will go on, but their souls will forever be haunted by the trauma of their inception.
The sense of duality continues throughout, as the identical twins echo each other, and despite the circumstances of their separation and the way they’ve been separately nurtured, something about their common nurture keeps them in parallel lanes, close enough to understand each other like no two nations ever can. The human lives in these stories—Indian and Pakistani—are like magnets of equal attributes being twirled around: sometimes, the sides repel; sometimes, they attract.
An example of this mirroring is “The Ghost” by Sehyr Mirza. Here, a border-town is haunted by what is perceived to be a ghostly presence. But if man makes god in his image, then he makes ghost in the image of his enemy. And in this case, the Muslim residents imagine it to be a Hindu ghost; the Hindu residents proclaim that the ghost must be Muslim. The residents have an equal and opposite reaction to this menace, not realizing the similarities that actually bind them closer together.
Described as Manto-esque—in honour of the great Saadat Hasan Manto—the collection features twenty originally pieces written by a diverse range of celebrated contemporary authors from both countries, including Gulzar, Anushka Ravishankar, Shazaf Fatima Haider, Farrukh Nadeem and Ranjit Lal, and more, and many translated from Urdu, Hindu, or Punjabi. Kuriyan’s illustrations add a creative dash of visual complication to each story in the anthology.
The best of these stories are those where the larger narrative of partition and borders is left in the background, with subtext that allows the readers themselves to fill in the tensions around the plot. Particularly adept at this are the narratives featuring the tense bonhomie of soldiers stationed across border lines, like Naeem Baig’s “Boundary Line” or Shazaf Haider’s “Saathi”, where ordinary men seek peace under the command of nations thirsting for war.
In “Saathi”, soldiers across enemy lines find common solace as they suffer the same freezing cold weather, and share opinions on cricket and food. But, when the Indian side runs out of butter, an ingenious plot is devised for Pakistan to send cans of butter across the Himalayan ridge. The Pakistani side sees it as an opportunity to shame India over their scarce supplies; the Indian side twists the narrative to convey that the peace offering was a way for Pakistan to appease India.
Nevertheless, relations improve… before they worsen again. Peace is broken when there is violence elsewhere in the country. Eventually, it reaches our buttery borders, too. Eventually, it ends with heartbreak.
Heartbreak, in its varying degrees, returns often, in interfaith friendships and relationships lost and found and lost again, often through the lens of the innocence of youth being poisoned by the vengeful nature of adults. These stories include Ranjit Lal’s “Hearts and Minds”—a simple narrative about the playfulness (and some seriousness) of youth in the foreground of larger disturbance—or “Shanti of Guru Mandir” by Amra Alam, a tale of childhood friendships threatened by the rigidity of grown-ups.
Innocence of youth also interplays with nostalgia, which tinges a number of stories in the monochromatic hues of nostalgia. Saaz Agarwal’s “Tears from the River” presents a yearning for the supposed simpler times, of being a child before the poisonous hate of adulthood. Agarwal evokes nostalgia with Tom and Jerry cartoons and old Japanese projectors. Elsewhere, there are stories of Shimla in the 1970s, of friends making sport out of pebbles outside their home, of a time when everyone in the neighbourhood knew the business of everyone else.
The elicitation of childhood is also why many of these stories feel like targeted towards a young-adult audience. Often, the narratives meander, less focused on plot and more on emotion and memory.
Shahbano Bilgrami’s “Un-Sistered” is one such story that encapsulates many of the themes mentioned above: Laila and Maahi are neighbours and inseparable friends somewhere in upstate New York. It is only with age that they learn that—despite having the same skin colour—they are divided somewhat by identity: Laila’s family is originally from the India side of the border, before migrating to Pakistan, and then to the United States; Maahi’s family is from the Pakistan side of the border, before heading to India, and then to the U.S.
But an argument by the grown-ups over politics pulls the two families and young friends away from one another. Bilgrami writes in the story’s climactic dinner scene: “Laila felt Maahi’s hand reach out to hold hers under the table. The taste of spice burned Laila’s tongue as she watched words—simple words—tear a decade of friendship apart.” (203).
And then, like a number of the stories in the collection, the conflict is resolved—or concluded—haphazardly, as if the story has run out of steam too quickly, without allowing readers the satisfaction of a patient, worthy conclusion.
Similarly, Kausar Jamal’s “Genes” describes the friendship of two young students—one Pakistani, one Indian—in China. While the initiating set-up is described in great detail, the author seems to flinch from the prickly specifics at what eventually causes the conflict between her two characters; before a just-as-sudden, amicable resolution.
Stories like “Genes” succeed in placing the descendants of Partition in the one place where they truly find themselves in equal footing: far abroad, away from the subcontinent itself. The setting plays a crucial plot point in the natural friendships of “Un-Sistered”, as well as Ashok Pande’s serendipitous tale, “Mehdi Hassan in Vienna.” Here, the reader is transported to an immigrant-filled neighbourhood in Austria’s capital city which resembles “old world pictures of Kabul or Istanbul” (67). The narrator and Hassan Bhai bond over ghazals, biryani, and the Pahadi region in India which is their shared ancestral home. They sit and chat and let time fly by, and find a little bit of home—a pre-Partition home—in a new country. This encounter is representative of so many South Asians who meet each other outside of South Asia, far from the daily pressure of animosity; and instead, revel in the common humanism between each other. Nevertheless, they are left with a sense of loss and hiraeth, when Hassan Bhai says, “It’s good to have one's own home. Better still to have one’s own nation.” (75)
One of the most amusing and creative stories is “Love During Armistice” by Anirudh Kala, about a young man in Shimla, Brij, in the early 70s, who claims to have fallen in love with a Muslim girl, Benazir. It turns out that this Benazir is young Benazir Bhutto, who had accompanied her father’s visit to the hill station (her father being Pakistan’s president Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto) to sign the Shimla Agreement, a peace treaty to end the 1971 war. Brij’s one-sided love affair becomes a running joke, bringing amusement to the local community in Shimla and embarrassment to his father. Brij claims Benazir visits him in his dreams at night, sometimes to talk, sometimes to argue about the Kashmir issue. Despite the element of fantasy, Kala never allows this story to lose its charm of adolescent infatuation, where interpersonal relationships matter far more than political power moves.
The stories here are from the perspective of the subcontinent itself, looking inward and examining itself, instead of from an outsider’s gaze. Instead of the struggle to shake oneself free, this collection focuses on the pain and burdens of freedom, of unshackled hands spreading out in opposing directions.
Another standout is Farrukh Nadeem’s “'A Spy! A Spy!'”, a discomforting read that again finds characters staring at both sides of the mirror—and finding darkness on each end.
While The Other in the Mirror encapsulates the many complications of Indian and Pakistani lives, a glaring omission from this collection is the story of the third and youngest brother of the subcontinent: Bangladesh. Born at Partition as East Pakistan, the stories of displacement, refugees, cultures shared and cultures lost on the Bengal/Bangladesh borderlands are unfortunately amiss here. While the subtitle of the anthology does suggest only stories from India and Pakistan, Bangladesh was once a part of colonial India and independent Pakistan, too, and the voices of its descendants deserve to be included.
There is one lurking presence, however, that is refreshingly absent from The Other in the Mirror: that of the colonizers themselves. There is no looking back at the Raj here, no British angrez tormenting the local characters, and no white saviours either. The stories here are from the perspective of the subcontinent itself, looking inward and examining itself, instead of from an outsider’s gaze. Instead of the struggle to shake oneself free, this collection focuses on the pain and burdens of freedom, of unshackled hands spreading out in opposing directions.
In her preface to the collection, Mirza writes about her desire—as a child growing up in Lahore—to visit her grandmother’s place of birth, which now lies across the border in India. I couldn’t help but pause and reflect on my own unfulfilled desire here; my own great-grandfather was from Gujranwala and my grandfather was born in Lahore, before they travelled in the opposite direction to Mirza’s family, making India their home. Partition has created millions of such mirror opposites, where the migration patterns of our ancestors ravel into complex knots, making the two sides tied closely together, making them eke out in pain.
In her essay, Mirza recalls her grandmother’s story of migration, a trip down memory lane with details that will likely resonate with a million other displaced families: how they travelled in under the threat of imminent violence, how her great-grandfather melted the family gold heirlooms, remodelled and wrapped it in freshly-kneaded dough balls, and how the men and women of her Muslim family disguised themselves as Hindus (bindis and saris, turbans instead of white caps) for the long train journey from Bombay to Karachi in 1947.
And despite the original sins at the birth of the nations, Mirza writes that her grandmother left her with positive nostalgia and loving memories, instead of the ugly hate and nationalism that has since been conditioned into many on both sides of the border. This collection, then, has been a way to counter that hate with stories celebrating togetherness and diversity.
In Dushyant’s story “Mind Your Language”, a pertinent question rules over an absurd court case: How can a man be a product of two different cultures through language? The story is about Pankaj Singh, who, despite being a Hindu, claims Urdu as his mother tongue. An interesting debate follows, as a number of witnesses are brought to the stand, expanding ultimately to a whole potpourri of linguistic and religious identities that intermingle in modern-day South Asia.
In Pankaj Singh’s defence on language, another story is used—Shivpujan Sahay’s “Kahani Ka Plot”—leaving the prosecutor, Sikandar Sahil, in shock. “How can a piece of literature be presented as a witness?” (160) Sahil asks.
But, if The Other in the Mirror is any proof, perhaps literature can be an answer, too. It can act not only as a witness, but as a preserver of memory—and as a silver lining of hope for the future.
***
Karan Madhok is a writer, journalist, and editor of The Chakkar, whose creative work has appeared in Epiphany, Gargoyle, The Literary Review, The Bombay Review, The Lantern Review, F(r)iction, and more. He is the founder of the Indian basketball blog Hoopistani and has contributed to NBA India, SLAM Magazine, Fifty Two, FirstPost, and more. Karan’s debut novel A Beautiful Decay will be published by the Aleph Book Company in 2022. You can find him on Twitter: @karanmadhok1 and Instagram: @karanmadhok.
