Casting light on a fading world: For Now, It Is Night by Hari Krishna Kaul

It was so cold! I felt as if I were sleeping on ice. It was a large room and there were three of us in it. The windows were shut but they were without panes. Outside, it was raining heavily and the strong winds from the Pir Panjal came in gusts. The wind, this biting cold of Banihal, blew strongly through the room of the tourist hostel. Despite being indoors, it was as if we were sleeping outside.

Thus opens the title story of For Now, It Is Night, a collection of short stories drawn from across the career of Kashmiri writer Hari Krishna Kaul. In less than six pages, this tale of three travellers, strangers before they find themselves sharing a room on a stormy night after their bus driver decided it was too late and, perhaps, too dangerous to attempt to cross the Banipal Pass of the Pir Panjal range of the lower Himalya. One man is decidedly unhappy with the delay, the other almost mystically inured to the biting cold, while the restless protagonist finds himself questioning reality as the night drags on. It is a simple story that deftly conveys the cold, the discomfort, and the loneliness of three stranded souls unable to find even the slightest comfort in one another’s company. It is the perfect distillation of Kaul’s ability to capture the complicated dynamics that bind and divide individuals, on both an intimate and a wider community level.

Born in Kashmir in 1934, Kaul spent most of his life in his homeland where he taught Hindi literature until 1990, when he was forced to join the exodus of Hindu Kashmiris from the region. He settled in Delhi where he lived, in exile, until his death in 2009. His work captures the details of Hindu Kashmiri life in old-town Srinagar during the last decades of the twentieth century, as well as the shifting socio-political tensions of the time. Over his lifetime, he published short stories, a novel and many plays for radio and television. For Now, It Is Night draws from all of his story collections, the first two published in 1972 and 1985, respectively and the latter published in 1996 and 2001, following his relocation to Delhi. However, what makes this selection of his work especially valuable and unique, lies in the combined effort of a team of translators.

As his niece, Kalpana Raina, describes in her Introduction, she had long heard of her uncle’s importance in modern Kashmiri literature, but until she had her father read some his stories to her—she could speak the language but not read it—she did not appreciate his eye for detail or empathy for his characters, their settings and their predicaments:

This was the world he had grown up in and his ambivalent relationship with it is quite clear in the forewords he wrote to his four collections of short stories. The are no grand themes in Kaul’s work, but an exploration and ultimately an acceptance of human limitations. He used his personal experiences to explore universal themes of isolation, individual and collective alienation, and the shifting circumstances of a community that went on to experience a significant loss of homeland, culture, and ultimately language.

Raina hoped that fresh new translations of her uncle’s stories might bring renewed attention to his work, and to that end, she recruited three young scholars and writers who could read Kashmiri and the Nastaliq script to collaborate with her on this project. They encountered unexpected challenges, first tracking down original manuscripts which were often not in the best condition, and then later with the more recent political upheavals in Kashmir and the pandemic. Despite the roadblocks, the final product is the result of a close engagement between four translators, “all native Kashmiri speakers, but representing a diversity of gender, age, experiences, and religious identity,” each bringing an important perspective and background.

The stories gathered in For Now, It Is Night, vary from domestic dramas, to surreal fables, to explorations of the uneasy relationships between Hindus and Muslims and between those of differing social standing. The narrators and protagonists often reveal much through their bluster and denial than what they openly admit to. In the opening story, “Sunshine,” for instance, the only one with a strong female character at its centre, Poshkuj arrives in Delhi to stay with younger son and his wife, certain that she has finally entered warmth and civilization. She has nothing good to say about her other son and “that fishwife,” but her bitter asides also reveal that she is put out and disturbed by her young daughter-in-law’s open-mindedness and rejection of Kashmiri social niceties. She is unable to comprehend the size of the city, its strangely quiet neighbourhoods, or the shocking mention of “Pakistan.” In fact the only thing she fully embraces is the sunshine, the glorious sunshine:

One could die for this sunshine. This is truly the only worthwhile thing in Delhi. She raised her sari slightly and scratched her right leg. She looked at her chapped skin and cursed the cold of Kashmir that was so hard on one’s hands and feet. Reflecting on the weather, she remembered her grandson, Bittĕ. Poor boy! How miserable he is, with his chilblains. How many times I told that monster mother of his that her son’s feet needed attention. Make sure he wears socks and fur-lined shoes, I said. But would that woman listen to me? Of course, fur-lined shoes are expensive and Gasha barely manages to get by. He doesn’t even have an overcoat for himself and shivers in the cold. She sighed. It’s all a matter of one’s fate.

The eighteen stories that comprise this collection demonstrate Kaul’s ability to craft a moving tale with vivid characters, caught up in events or circumstances that continually surprise and engage his reader. Some fall on the side of the fantastic like “Tomorrow—A Never-Ending Story” about two school boys who shirk their commitment to learning their times tables with such determination that they end up trapped in time, endlessly repeating Class IV while the rest of their classmates and peers grow up and move on with their lives, or “The Tongue and the Egg,” a bizarre fable in which two officers are charged with facilitating the collection of six million eggs, searching and even torturing or killing those thought to be hiding eggs, all for a bizarre purpose. Others begin on an eccentric note before taking a sharp emotional turn, such as “The Mourners” wherein two whimsically named young men, Tarzan and Doctor are called to assist with the funeral rites of their friend Pedro whose mother has just died. The subtle dynamics that bind fathers and sons, husbands and wives, and grandmothers and grandsons are teased out in stories that, more often than not, speak to the loneliness and isolation within families, heightened when distance pulls generations apart.

Kalpana Raina tells us that the selection of the stories in this collection was made with input from a small group of Kaul’s contemporaries and some younger students. The stories were then recorded in an effort to engage members of her family and the extended diaspora who could not read the script. That, together with the involvement of four translators, two of whom have contributed additional Notes, gives this volume a range and depth that truly honours Kaul’s contribution to Kashmiri literature and makes it accessible to a new generation of English language readers.

For Now, It Is Night by Hari Krishna Kaul is translated from the Kashmiri by Kalpana Raina, Tanveer Ajsi, Gowhar Fazili, and Gowhar Yaqoob, and published by Archipelago Books.

Author: roughghosts

Literary blog of Joseph Schreiber. Writer. Reader. Editor. Photographer. View all posts by roughghosts