‘Darkness and Other Stories’: A collection of Razia Sajjad Zaheer’s politically conscious fiction
· Scroll
In the short story “Darkness,” from the collection Darkness and Other Stories – translated from the Urdu by Saba Mahmood Bashir – Razia Sajjad Zaheer describes a train journey whose anxieties are all too familiar to Muslims today. The protagonist is Zaheer herself, who has boarded her train at the Old Delhi Railway Station and is headed for Amritsar.
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We are reminded of Rasheed Jahan, another fiery progressive writer, whose “Dilli ki Sair” had chalked out a different struggle – a woman who must idly wait at the Delhi railway station amidst strange men, a stand-by object like the luggage itself, while her husband struts about with an old friend. But Zaheer is not bound to any consort. She is a university graduate, she is a progressive writer of Urdu fiction; she also happens to be a Muslim woman.
As the story progresses, there is a feverish fear that slowly grips her; there is no other woman in her First-Class coach, and Zaheer’s Muslim name is hanging on the coupe, a bright red mark of her vulnerability. The train is going to pass through Punjab where people’s memories of the horrors of Partition are still raw. After all, train journeys at the time had been spectres of exceptional violence. The sight...