“So, what did it mean to you, the singing?…Expression, she will reply, and release.”
Thus begins the first life story in the book, What is Saved, by writer, translator, essayist, and critic, Aamer Hussein. The concise collection is a fascinating combination of writing genres and styles – memoir, short essays, fiction pieces, and descriptions of cities ranging from London to Karachi, along with the writer’s experience of spending a few years in India and elsewhere.
What Is Saved (Batori Hui Khushiyan): Life Stories and Other Tales by Aamer Hussein (Red River Story, 2023)
The collection begins with Hussein remembering his mother’s singing in the essay, Lady of the Lotus, and how for her, “The poetry in the music is thought, and through singing, I expressed those thoughts.” He recounts her diary entries that focus on the ragas and compositions that she was learning from various ustads, and the challenges of presenting those. As an aside, he notes, “She notes her deadlines in the diary, but she doesn’t write about driving her children to school in the mornings, …she doesn’t record the passing of the seasons, the walks to the lake in the mild evening breeze…” Yet, through these understated entries, the reader realises the essence of a remarkable woman, for, as he writes, “Her children will remember the concerts in the garden on nights lit up by flares or by the moon, they remember the songs and remind her of them, when she sang what, and even the words and melodies…”
Like all of Hussein’s writing, this one also weaves in the inherent loneliness present in everyone’s life, and in this case, his mother’s nostalgia for the home she left behind, “Did the rain fall that year of 1963? None of them remembers now: they think it never came. They remember, though, all the years she longed for rain and missed her native Malwa, and how she exulted when it finally fell.”
Music as a metaphor continues in the next story appropriately titled Words and Music, which is about the stay of a yesteryear film star, Shamim Ara, who comes to live in a house near the childhood home of Hussein. The arc of the story spans the movies in which she acted, the writer and his sibling’s fascination with those movies, leading to admiring other singers/actors, and the origin of Hussein’s lifelong love for the Urdu writers whose work was often depicted by this actress. A classic example of this is the Himayat Ali Shair ghazal, “Har qadam par nit naye saanche men dhal jaate hain log/ Dekhte hi dekhte kitne badal jaate hain log.” These are words that typify the longing and melancholy of many of the autobiographical stories because, as he writes, the reality is that, “people who, at every step, change shape as we watch, and far from searching for a lost paradise, content themselves with clay toys.”
That this sense of uncertainty is running in parallel with constant change is a theme that continues with the other pieces in the book. In his essay about the writer Han Suyin, Hussein muses about how he was close to her at one point. Yet, when he went back to Pakistan after decades, he realises, “Suyin and I had very different experiences of leaving home…I was someone who had left behind a homeland and never found anything to replace the empty patch.” Inevitably therefore, due to life and personal losses, he lost touch with her. When he hears about her death, it is the memory of the past and later the silence between them that came to mind because as he muses, “I often thought of her and told myself I’d ring. Somehow, I never did.”
Similarly, in Waterline, the sudden lockdown in London and how the resulting isolation and change in social interactions strikes his life, along with the stories of people stuck in various cities and some of them managing to make it home are described vividly. Yet, this uncertainty and isolation are not new. As he discusses with a friend, even in 1857, Ghalib had lived through a time of change during the uprising, and Hussein remembers a ghazal written by the poet, and thinks, “(I) look for release from captivity, and its burden of longing, in the blank space between the rain cloud that bursts and dissolves in the sorrow of separation…”
In the short fiction, The Garden Spy: A Diptych, the pandemic experience sharpens the observation of the central character, Mehran. Mehran finds solace in the flowers blooming in the gardens nearby, and through the memories of his photographs and films of the trees in various seasons in the years past. While he meets and catches up with friends, he tries to focus on the beauty around him through the photographs he takes. In this he is like the photographer in Italo Calvino’s Difficult Loves which stated, “The line between the reality that is photographed because it seems beautiful to us and the reality that seems beautiful because it has been photographed is very narrow.” After all, as Mehran explains to a friend, “…people tear each other apart, why dwell on ugliness in my photographs?”
Hussein writes in the Afterword about how The Garden Spy (along with The Cusp) are “lived experience reimagined and belong in the realm of fiction.” The beauty of his writing is that the reader comes away thinking each story is a part of their lived experience reimagined through these pieces of writing, making them unforgettable as a result.
Jonaki Ray is a New Delhi-based poet, editor, and writer.
