Qurratulain Hyder, Literature’s First Lady
Khalid Hasan

Let me explain to you Qurratulain Hyder once said to me. This was in the 1980s. How comfortable, she asked, was I with the 1960s? How distant did they appear in terms of years lapsing? "The 1960s feel like yesterday," I replied. "Well," she said, "That was a quarter century ago. So let's go back, taking the same unit of time you are comfortable with, another 25 years." To my surprise, if not horror, it struck me that we were in 1935. "And another leap into the past by the same measure," she said, "and we are in 1910, with the First World War still four years into the future. That is what time is. That is how time goes," she said.
She should have known, having written one of the greatest novels of the 20th century in any language on the same theme: time. I refer of course to Aag ka Darya. I always found it ironic that while, since the late 1970s no week has passed without some rubbishy and forgettable novel by an Indian writer writing in English (finding publication in Britain or the US), the work of a writer like Qurratulain Hyder, including her own superb translation of Aag ka Darya, has never been able to make the list.
In June 1982, she wrote to me from Bombay, "Tell me, how does one get published in Vilayat? How did this boy get such a massive novel published from London / New York? [I forget what novel by a desi it was that I had sent her.] This is the sort of thing which has always baffled me about the Indo-Anglicans - or do you call them Pak-Anglicans? This cousin of mine, Khalid Hussain Shah, and his American wife, Linda, wrote a huge novel (Refugee) about our family's migration to Pakistan. It was published from New York and also got rave reviews in the US press - 'Mesmerising,' etc."In another letter later that year, she wrote in that delightful Urdu that was hers alone to write, "Having watched books by 'unt-shunt' types finding publication in the West, I had handed over to you a collection of my stories [in her beautiful English translation]. Well, it is apparent that nothing came of it at your end. I am two-thirds done with my translation of Aakhir e Shab ke Hamsafar. How can it get published in the West? [It wasn't.] You try."
The first time I saw Annie, which is what I always called her, was in 1960 or 1961 in Karachi, but I could not muster the courage to speak to her. There used to be a street that linked Victoria Road and Elphinstone Street (I prefer to use the old names, which nobody had any business to change). On that road, there used to stand the Capital Cinema, which had a wonderful restaurant on its first floor called Flamingo, which was always dimly lit and which had black steel furniture with colourful cushions. There in that cool, calm place I saw Qurratulain Hyder sipping tea with a woman friend. She was wearing a yellow sari and a spring green blouse. That I have never forgotten. Another 21 years were to pass before I could meet her. Why? Because there is a preordained place and time for everything. The year was 1980, and I was in Bombay and determined to meet, not the movie stars of my dreams, but Qurratulain Hyder. And I did. From that day on, our contact did not flag and we kept a correspondence going until May 1997. Thereafter she did not write with her right hand because of a stroke, but she learned to write with her left. She sent me a copy of one of her books with the inscription written with her left hand that said "Bain haath ka khel," whose literal meaning may be "a trick with the left hand," but which means "executed with the least effort." Another book, her translations of some of her stories published in India-Street Singers of Lucknow - she inscribed to me in English in childlike lettering with her left hand. Can destiny come up with a greater irony than to divest a magical writer like her of the ability to write with her own hand?
People were always in awe of her because she refused to suffer fools and made it quite clear on the spot the reason why she did not. Some of my friends remain surprised to this day as to how I could even think of taking liberties with her. Everyone who was younger to her called her Annie Apa, but I called her Annie. And she let me call her Annie. When she asked me what I thought of her novel Gardish e Rang e Chaman, I told her I did not like it and told her why. I was forgiven, but also told that it was not necessary that I could understand everything. She also told me that there is a certain kind of spoken Urdu in UP that few Pakistanis would have the ear for now. Whenever I went to Delhi, which sadly was only three or four times, I always spent an evening with her. She would insist that I eat and eat gluttonously. She had moved to NOIDA, which is a relatively new settlement across the Jamuna River in Ghaziabad. She suffered one bout of ill health after another, but her sense of humour, her magnanimity and her lust for life never diminished. Her eyes gave her much trouble and in the end she used to read, what little she did, with a magnifying glass. One letter she wrote to me in May 1996 says, "My number is minus 18-19. All the best. The address on the letterhead [I had had some letterheads with her name and address printed and sent to her] is so fine that all I can read is my name. This letter I have written with the help of a magnifying glass." I was shattered when I read that.
The last time I spent an evening with her in Delhi, she said to me, "I have to hear now with the help of an outlandish hearing aid, but for God's sake don't go advertising that with the slogan: Annie behri ho gai, " or Annie has gone deaf. "You know me," I said.
Among her good friends in Pakistan, I would count Raja Tajummul Hussain, Dr Javaid Iqbal, the late Ijaz Batalvi and Zia Mohyeddin. But she knew everyone and always followed what was going on in Pakistan, on the literary scene no less than on the political front. She was very sad when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was executed. She told me that a poor woman had come up to her and said, "Bibi, ye Pakistani kaiasy log hain? Apnay Raja ko maar diya." (Bibi, what kind of people are these Pakistanis? They killed their Raja.) Annie was a great friend of Nargis. After her death, she wrote to me, "Yes, Nargis has left us all devastated. She was part of the times in which we were growing up times now in the realm of mythology -(like Pankhaj Malik's songs). Now when we watch those old movies on TV, they look primitive, but how magical they were in those days! But she - Nargis - died with great dignity and very gracefully. When she died she was a grand public figure. Extremely dignified she had become, but she never stopped swearing. This was a strange paradox of her personality. Once she told me that some exceedingly old people came up to her and said, 'I have been watching your movies since childhood,' (in the same way that some white-bearded elders inform me that they have been reading my stories since they were children). But in her we had a fascinating lady."
And even more fascinating was Annie, whom the world will forever remember as (in the words of my friend Sayyed Faizi of Vienna), "the Hazir Imam of Urdu fiction, Qurratulain Hyder). Rest in peace dear lady, for your like, we shall never see again. (TFT August 31- Sept 6, 2007)