Hats and Doctors: Stories Read online

  Upendranath Ashk

  HATS AND DOCTORS

  Translated from the Hindi

  With an Introduction by Daisy Rockwell

  Contents

  About the Author

  Introduction

  Who Can Trust a Man?

  Brown Sahibs

  Hats and Doctors

  The Ambassador

  The Bed

  The Dal Eaters

  The Cartoon Hero

  Mr Ghatpande

  Formalities

  Some Suds and a Smile

  The Aubergine Plant

  Furlough

  In the Insane Asylum

  A Listless Evening

  My First Letter of Resignation

  Dying and Dying

  Footnote

  Introduction

  Sources

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright Page

  PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

  Hats and Doctors

  Upendranath Ashk, 1910–1996, was one of Hindi literature’s best-known and most controversial authors. Ashk was born in Jalandhar and spent the early part of his writing career as an Urdu author in Lahore. Encouraged by Premchand, he switched to Hindi, and a few years before Partition, moved to Bombay, Delhi and finally Allahabad in 1948, where he spent the rest of his life. By the time of his death, Ashk’s phenomenally large oeuvre spanned over a hundred volumes of fiction, poetry, memoir, criticism and translation. Ashk is perhaps best known for his six-volume novel cycle, Girti Divarein, or ‘Falling walls’—an intensely detailed chronicle of the travails of a young Punjabi man attempting to become a writer—which has earned the author comparisons to Marcel Proust. Ashk was the recipient of numerous prizes and awards during his lifetime for his masterful portrayal, by turns humorous and remarkably profound, of the everyday lives of ordinary people.

  Daisy Rockwell is an artist and writer living in northern New England. She paints under the takhallus, or alias, Lapata (Urdu for ‘missing’), and has shown her artwork widely.

  Rockwell holds a PhD in Hindi literature and has taught Hindi–Urdu and South Asian literature at a number of US universities. Apart from her essays on literature and art, she has written Upendranath Ashk: A Critical Biography and The Little Book of Terror, a new book of paintings and essays on the global war on terror. She is currently working on a translation of Ashk’s 1947 novel Girti Divarein.

  Introduction

  On sunny days in his last autumn, the Hindi writer Upendranath Ashk used to be brought out to the courtyard of his Allahabad bungalow, where he would lie on a charpoy with a black umbrella fixed to a nearby chair to shade his eyes. He had broken a hip, and had contracted bedsores during his recovery. His eyes, milky with cataracts, could no longer see well enough to read, and his hands were too arthritic to type or hold a pen. Despite his deteriorating condition, his mind was sharp and his entire household revolved around him. He continued to write, dictating in Hindi to a daughter-in-law and in Urdu to a man who had been hired from the neighbourhood. In the fall of 1995, he was kind enough to receive me—an American Ph.D. student in Allahabad conducting research on Ashk and on progressivism in Hindi literature—despite the fact that he found my research methods inadequate, my preparation woefully lacking and my preoccupation with the Progressive Writers’ Association annoying.

  Ashk was moody, irascible, imperious and always very interesting. During those days when I visited him daily against the wishes of his family, who felt, quite rightly, that he needed to rest, I lived in terror of him. Though I was always received, I was never sure if I would continue to be in favour from one day to the next. Some days he would be full of interesting anecdotes and, on others, he would ask me roughly how many questions I had, expecting that there was a numbered list we would plough through. Later, I learnt that he used to charge Indian graduate students a certain price per question. I was fortunate, my source told me, that I had been allowed to chat with him for free.

  It was during this time that I was presented one day with a large sheaf of papers, translations of his short stories, he explained to me—some by himself, others by various people—which he feared were not good enough. He asked me to edit them and send them on to a publisher. Up until that point, I had been trying to convince him to give me permission to translate his six-volume novel cycle, Girti Divarein (‘Falling walls’, 1947), but in the world of Hindi letters, especially during the Independence era, the short story was the premier genre and, for Ashk, getting his short stories translated was a more pressing task than working on the novel. This, despite the fact that he felt that his novel was his most important work.

  Embarrassingly, though I had read thousands of pages of his writing, I had never read any of his short stories. Authors of Ashk’s generation, who began writing during the Independence movement, were hugely productive, writing assiduously in every genre as they sought to forge a body of literature in a wide variety of Indian languages. To measure the output of Ashk or Yashpal one would find a yardstick more useful than a simple ruler and, if truth be told, I had been concentrating on his novels and autobiographical writings. To this day, I have not done more than skim the surface of his plays, for which he is also very well known.

  And so it was that when Ashk presented me with the collection of short stories and requested that I do something with them, I was wholly unfamiliar with the works in question. Murmuring that I would look at them and hoping that the stories would not need that much help from me, I took home several volumes of short-story collections on my one-speed Hero bicycle and began to comb through the package. Unfortunately, he had been correct in his assessment that the stories had not been well translated. On top of this, I came to realize that a number of them had already been translated and published in literary journals over the years. This made the project more complicated. Was I to edit the translations published by other people? I brought this question back to him and delicately broached the issue of copyright.

  ‘None of them asked my permission to do these translations! So we don’t need to ask their permission either.’ He was irate at the thought that anyone needed to be consulted. Further investigation revealed that stories which had appeared to be translated by Ashk had in fact been translated by other people; Ashk had edited and retyped them himself. In cases where he himself had translated the stories, he would more often than not partially rewrite the actual story. As a young scholar, I was petrified at the thought of wading through those muddied waters of altered texts. Which would be the originals? Whose permission would need to be sought? Some of the translators were well known and I was not convinced that all his translators had brazenly published his stories without his permission.

  In all likelihood, I might have ended the matter there, and refused, renewing at a later date my request to translate Ashk’s novels. But, as fate would have it, this request would prove to be Ashk’s last to me, as he passed away in January of 1996. Deeply saddened by Ashk’s death and at a loss as to where to take my research without my subject, I felt obligated to honour his final request of me. Thus, I began to work on the project in earnest, often in consultation with Ashk’s son, the poet and translator Neelabh, who finally suggested that I do my own translations if I was so unhappy with the state of the manuscript I had been given. With Neelabh’s permission to carry out the spirit—but not the letter—of Ashk’s request, I began to explore Ashk’s short-story oeuvre on my own.

  The resulting volume should be viewed not as a scholarly compendium of representative works, nor as anything close to a complete collection. Instead, it is a selection of stories that I personally enjoyed and wanted to share with others. One story—‘Brown Sahibs’—is in fact an
edited version of a translation by Edith Irwin, from the original manuscript Ashk gave to me. ‘Mr Ghatpande’ is adapted from Ashk’s own translation of his story and, with Neelabh’s permission, I have reverted to the original text and not used Ashk’s additional English passages, though I have kept his glossary of terms related to the treatment of tuberculosis, updated from the footnotes that had appeared in the original text. Ashk himself had suffered from the disease and was concerned that a newer generation of readers would not know as much about TB and its earlier forms of treatment. For the rest of the selections, I was faced with some difficult choices. For instance, I have not included some stories from the original collection of which Ashk was very proud and for which he had received much acclaim at the time of their publication. On the other hand, I have included some excellent stories that are less known. I can’t say if Ashk would have talked me out of my choices, but in compiling this collection, I have tried to select those tales that, to my mind, epitomize Ashk’s wicked sense of humour and sharp eye for human frailty.

  In fact, my decisions to exclude or include stories have mainly revolved around an organizing principle of humour. Ashk was an immensely funny author and even some of his most pathos-inflected passages in Girti Divarein are tinged with a sense of irony and dotted with acute observations of absurd human behaviour. Two stories in this collection—‘Furlough’ and ‘In the Insane Asylum’—in fact later made it into volumes in the Girti Divarein series; in each of these, one sees Ashk’s skill in showing that humour and despair can go hand in hand. There are also many stories in this volume that are just plain side-splitting, such as ‘Formalities’, in which a film writer ruins his household by being overly hospitable towards a director he wishes to impress (who, in turn, has recently ruined his own household by behaving with excessive hospitality towards a starlet); or ‘The Dal Eaters,’ a story about cheapskates on holiday in Kashmir.

  Many of the stories also include a bit of biting social commentary—a reflection, one might surmise, on the dominant aesthetic of progressivism in mid-twentieth-century Hindi literature. ‘The Aubergine Plant’, for example, is a progressivist story that clearly contrasts the resources of the rich and the poor, and even ‘The Dal Eaters’, for all its comedic effect, offers a sly critique of the ill effects of stingy tourists on the lives of poor Kashmiris. Though Ashk liked to protest vehemently that he had no part in the progressivist movement and never belonged to the PWA—the Progressive Writers’ Association—the historical record suggests otherwise. Indeed, the PWA was an important part of the movement for Indian Independence; and, after 1947, it gained steam, becoming a national body with local-language branches that were engaged in creating a new idiom for the new nation. It would be difficult to find a writer in any Indian language during the forties, fifties and sixties who was untouched by the organization and its aesthetic, whether or not he or she wanted anything to do with it. The PWA in those days could be harshly prescriptivist, and authors, such as Ashk, who did not wish to be told which themes they could and could not address, certainly bridled at progressivist criticism.

  Since Kaushalya, Ashk’s wife, started a publishing company, Neelabh Prakashan, in Allahabad, after they moved there in 1948, Ashk did not, in fact, have to kowtow to anyone’s rules and, as a result, his work is highly idiosyncratic and wonderfully original. One outcome of self-publishing was Ashk’s unedited introductions to his work, in which he took on all comers and answered even minute bits of criticism in increasingly lengthy and personal essays. He was known to complain about the behaviour of particular people, even going so far as to describe at length his disappointment with the revered Allahabadi poetess Mahadevi Varma for her unwillingness to help his family find a good home to rent when they first arrived in Allahabad. And it was perhaps because of this public criticism of his colleagues that Ashk, by the time of his death, was decidedly not the most popular author in the world of Hindi letters, though he himself always attributed the hostility towards his work to be widespread anti-Punjabi prejudice in the literary community centred in Uttar Pradesh.

  Ashk’s unpopularity within his milieu was a state of affairs that he was keenly aware of and there is ample evidence that his disgruntlement with his colleagues only drove him to further fan the flames. In his five-volume memoir, Chehere: Anek (‘Faces: Many’, 1975–85), Ashk wrote painfully funny satires on virtually every contemporary he had, skewering just about everyone but Urdu short-story writer Rajinder Singh Bedi (1915–1984), whose friendship he treasured to the last. In his most blanket condemnation of his literary world, Ashk dubs his adopted city of Allahabad ‘the city of sadists’:

  … Ashk thinks—and he has been involved with life in Allahabad for the last thirty years—that Allahabad should be called ‘The City of Sadists’. Actually, the kind of literary people who live in Allahabad are incapable of getting any work done. They do not even write much. But since there has to be some dirt to chat about if they are not writing, they enjoy making their friends prey to sadistic pranks and then they can talk about it for days and weeks afterwards to entertain others. They have often wasted time in this hobby, as well as money, and sometimes they even go to a good deal of trouble too. By making fun of other people, they spread joy—albeit, a somewhat cruel joy—in the slow life of this city. What Ashk is trying to say is that sadism is Allahabad’s specialty.1

  It was because of Ashk’s antagonism towards the world of writers and critics that he felt quite sure that I would have trouble publishing translations of his work in India, warning me that even in the English publishing world, everyone was against him. He may have been correct. Readers will notice that I began the project in 1995 and that the volume is being published only now in 2013.

  To be perfectly truthful, Ashk’s request that I edit his volume of short stories was actually his penultimate request to me. He also made a final request—that I attend his grandson Anurag’s wedding in December of that year. This, I told him I could not do, as I had to fetch my mother from the airport on approximately the same date. He was enraged.

  ‘You Americans!’ he hissed. ‘You’re all the same—all business! Go, go, leave me alone. I won’t speak with you again,’ he added, waving his hand for me to leave.

  Devastated, I mounted my Hero bicycle and rode home to contemplate my state of banishment, and to wonder if I would need to change my dissertation topic. A few days later, Ashk sent another grandson, Sukant, to fetch me on a motorcycle. When I entered the courtyard, I saw that Ashk was seated in the sun, his umbrella attached to his chair.

  ‘He wants to talk to you,’ said his grandson as he wandered away, showing no inclination to protect me from any possible choleric outbursts. I approached Ashk fearfully. A chair had been set next to him. He greeted me and then he said he had a special request to make. I asked him what that was.

  ‘My grandson is getting married in December,’ he began, thoughtfully. ‘You and your husband are invited.’

  I blanched.

  ‘That is very kind,’ I said, ‘but I have to pick up my mother from the airport at that time …’

  ‘Go! Go!’ he cried. ‘Leave me,’ he waved me away again. Aghast and now without my bicycle, I walked across the courtyard in search of a ride. It was arranged that the grandson would take me back again, when Ashk called him over and spoke to him. Sukant returned to me and said that his grandfather wished to speak to me again. I approached him, worrying that the conversation would be a repeat of the previous two times.

  ‘You may send a telegram,’ he said distantly, looking away from me. ‘If you send a telegram, that will be fine.’

  ‘I will,’ I said, ‘I will send a telegram. I promise to send one.’

  When I returned to Allahabad shortly after his grandson’s wedding, Ashk had been hospitalized with acute protein deficiency, from which he never recovered. Though he was largely incoherent on his deathbed, I was sure I heard him cry out accusingly in English as I stood by his bedside, ‘You are a very difficult woman
to work with!’ No one else seemed to have heard it. Was it my imagination?

  Seventeen years have passed since I first met Ashk. When I returned to Allahabad a few years ago, Ashk’s sprawling bungalow had been split into smaller homes and the wide-open yard where he used to receive me under his black umbrella is no more. In the past weeks, while preparing the manuscript for this collection, I decided to add one final story, ‘Dying and Dying’, a tale about a middle-aged man’s proud memories of his own virility on his honeymoon twenty-five years ago. By the time I reached the story’s ending, the slim volume in which it had been published nearly disintegrated in my hands.

  The most financially fruitful effort to build a national literature since Independence in 1947 has been that of Indian writing in English and, in the simple terms of such economic indicators as paper quality and bindings, that fact is painfully apparent. There are many readers in India today who will read Ashk for the first time in this collection. Though they could easily read his work in the original Hindi, they would never think of doing so. This could be for many reasons, not the least of which is the much poorer distribution of non-English books. Hindi bookstores, for example, tend to arrange their books alphabetically by title (works by a single author could be all over the store), as such stores are not built for browsers and casual customers; they function primarily as shipping warehouses that fill orders for textbooks and school curricula.

  Perhaps a translator should hope that her readers will develop a taste for the author in English, so that she can bring out more of the author’s works in translation in the future. My hope, however, is the opposite: that some of these stories will induce a few readers—even just one or two will do—to turn their feet towards a Hindi bookshop one day. Out shopping in Old Delhi, they might stroll into Hindi Book Centre on Asaf Ali Road, and say to one of the booksellers, ‘Yaar, do you have anything zabardast in stock by that amazing author, Upendranath Ashk?’ They will be handed a few thick volumes which they will weigh in their hands, wondering if they dare attempt one of his long novels or if they should just go with some short stories instead. They will, no doubt, notice that the paper is already curling at the edges of the dust jacket, but they will decide to buy one of those books, long or short, and take it home.