Winner of The Mozhi Prize 2023
A short story by Fahmida Riaz
Translated from the Urdu original by Sana R. Chaudhry
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About the author
Fahmida Riaz (1945–2018) was a Progressive Pakistani Urdu poet, writer, translator, and human-rights activist. Born in Meerut in pre-Partition India, and raised in Karachi, Pakistan, Riaz established herself as a Marxist feminist activist, poet and truth-teller in a conservative and authoritarian landscape. As a fierce political activist, unflinching social critic and revolutionary feminist poet, Riaz was linked to the historic left-wing Progressive Writers Association, and her contributions to the Urdu intellectual tradition and aesthetic are unparalleled. Influenced by Sufi thought and Marxist class politics, her eclectic oeuvre—consisting of poetry collections, translations from Persian and English, and prose writings—is deeply concerned with social justice and global issues, ranging from articulating the female body to ideas of the self, from the Palestinian question to the Afghan civil war, from challenging orthodoxy to hate politics in India. This intention to resist, shock, and subvert was not new to Urdu literature. Following in Sa’adat Hasan Manto and Ismat Chughtai’s tradition of transgressing, Riaz defies stereotypes, critiques military statehood, resists patriarchal and religious nationalism, and speaks truth to power in prose and verse. Riaz was directly impacted by the afterlife of Partition through her migrations and movement patterns, and her works boldly assert her connection to the syncretic soul of an undivided India. Often perceived by some as a “mohajir” or migrant from India, as not ‘fully’ Pakistani, Riaz’s identity was always in question as fraught with the potential of an unpatriotic identification with India. During General Zia’s era, Riaz was accused of anti-national sentiment, charged with sedition and forced to go into exile. In 1981, she went into exile in India with the help of her friend Amrita Pritam, an Indian Punjabi feminist writer and poet. This sense of exile is a palpable presence in Riaz’s work. During her time in India, she learned Sanskrit. Riaz wrote that Pakistani writers expunged Hindi words from Urdu to give a religious colour to the language. She used Hindi, Persian, and Arabic words liberally in her work. When Zia died, Riaz returned to Karachi from exile in 1987. She also worked as a broadcaster for Radio Pakistan and with BBC Urdu radio service in London. She died in 2018 after battling a prolonged illness.
Translator’s note on طیراً ابابیل/ Tai’run Ababīl (Flights of Birds)
My discovery of Fahmida ji’s Tai’run Ababīl (طیراً ابابیل) is best described as a predestined encounter. I think of it as an act of fate because in all my years of reading Fahmida ji’s works, I had never come across this story until I chanced upon it recently during my research on translation. This curious tale—unknown and unheeded—demanded a global readership. The author’s choice of an Arabic title—an excerpt from a Qur’anic verse—was the first of many details to captivate my unequivocal attention. Arabic is an unusual choice which differentiates this work from Fahmida ji’s other prose writings. The story finds its anchor in the conflicting historical, scientific, and spiritual makings of the Arabic word “ababīl”. A strange account of an enterprising woman leading a team of men on a lexicography project, the narrative weaves textuality and violence into an extraordinary tale that revels in the mundane and—or as—the macabre. It is a story of the temporality and timelessness of language. With poetic flourish, the author conflates the loss of human life with the loss of the written word, eliciting an ineluctable sense of emptiness and meaninglessness that leaves the reader in a profoundly unsettled state. The written letter is elevated and revered, only to then be obliterated in an arbitrary gesture. The greatest challenge this story posed for translation was twofold: first, to capture this reverence, this willful lingering on the sinuous letters and mellifluous sounds of the Arabic and Urdu alphabet, and second, to efficaciously render the poetic valences of the metaphors that characterize this alphabet. To my mind, the demands of this task could only be negotiated by retaining the texture and cadence of the original Arabic and Urdu in the translation, while providing sufficient transliterations and context without overwhelming the reader. This allowed for a nuanced, provoking rendition of the story. To translate the politics and poetics of metaphor from the rich linguistic canvas of Urdu into the subtle rhetorical hues of English has been nothing short of a revelation.
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Flights of Birds
The first day of the week was the hardest. At the office, a team of six people awaited the woman officer. The new dictionary project had begun. She was the project lead and was requested to begin by establishing the principles of lexicography for the new dictionary.
Principles of lexicography, my god! she had thought to herself despairingly, wanting to kick herself. I haven’t got a clue about such principles, be it any new or old dictionary.
‘Look up the principles of past dictionaries,’ she had suggested.
‘But this is a new dictionary. We claimed it would be different, which is why we got the project in the first place.’
She looked at her belly which was concealed under her shirt. O belly! she thought. For your sake, I had to take the job of making a dictionary. She had been offered the job because of her articulate application composed in English. In fact, the position had simply been given away, assuming that she must be quite proficient in Urdu. She had once even worked on a bilingual dictionary, to make a living. But an Urdu dictionary! God! This was a whole other world.
We could start compiling the dictionary as detailed in the proposal. After ten to twelve pages, we will review the work. That will shape our principles, and we can note them down, her brain had advised her, thinking rapidly. She had presented the same idea to her team. They had compiled four pages of the new dictionary after working through some fifty to hundred pages, and today…today they were to discuss those pages. Discussion…which is not the same as argumentation, really. What is the point of argumentation, anyway? To exchange ideas? A practice that was certainly not observed in her culture. There was only opposition that turned into argumentation and culminated in an altercation. Ha! she mused.
Wiping her face with a tissue as she took the first sip from her cup of chai, she had thought to herself: What if I had not come in today? Target killings plagued the city. Who knew since when all this had been going on? On the Day of Ashura, more than forty men, women, and children had been killed in a mourning procession. This had been a month ago. The incident had sparked a daily cycle of targeted killings. The night before, one of her friends had called to report a rumor going around that these riots would intensify the next day and tell her that she should be careful. In the morning, she lay in bed cautiously for a while, then grew restless and jumped out. It seemed that the chain of suicide bombings and targeted killings would never come to an end. So, should everyone crawl inside their houses and hide?
‘Come, get potatoes, peas, tomatoes, carrots!’ a hawker on the street called out.
Why was he not afraid, she wondered? He must have arrived from the vegetable market with a full cart. The residents of Karachi had quickly grown accustomed to the ever-present possibility of sudden death and went on with their business. She too splashed water on her face and came to work.
‘Come. Bismillah!’ she said to her team members who had arrived. Their faces were invariably shrouded in a kind of haze, as if they were dreaming. But occasionally, a spark could be seen glittering in their eyes. Most of them kept beards. A string of black beards, salt-and-pepper beards, bushy and sparse beards stretched out before her. It seemed as though they had climbed out of their secret underground hideouts for this discussion.
‘Let’s begin. Bismillah. Alif-e-maqsura,’ she announced loudly. The first letter of the Urdu alphabet. She thought to herself that this alif, the short, clipped one, must be guilty of a qusuur, an offense, whereas the longer alif-e-mamduha must have, like a mamduha, a praiseworthy woman, accomplished numerous commendable deeds, for which it was constantly lauded and celebrated. She was extremely pleased with herself at this triumphant thought. One of her team members remarked: ‘Mamduda, not mamduha. The word does not contain the letter ح from the third set of the Arabic alphabet.’
‘Probably not…’ she said, abashed.
They began with alif and arrived at the word ‘اب’. Ub—rhyming with rub, meaning ‘now’.
‘We are recording the origin, right?’
‘Yes. We are beginning with the origin.’
The origin of ‘اب’ was noted down as ‘Old Aryan.’
‘Old Aryan? Meaning even earlier than Sanskrit?’ she said, surprised.
All the people in the room stared at ‘اب’ (ub) in amazement. Its foremost pronunciation was recorded as ‘او’ or uv. For thousands of years it had been associated with Hindustanis, and now, with Pakistanis as well. Marvelous ‘اب’, that ripped and pierced through the rubble of the past, evading storms, earthquakes, and infernos. Even though the mountains had collapsed, ‘اب’ still remained. A remnant of an ancient, hazy, buried past…‘اب’…chanting: “I was…I am”. Who says stones are more lasting than man? Stones may crumble, but the word born out of man’s discourse endures. Who knows for how long it will be with us? Cultures will erase and turn to ashes. Perhaps ‘اب’ would simply dust itself off and frolic about once more upon the tongues of new settlers, and in the languages of new people. Maybe, it would shape-shift.
‘!اب’, that nobody had thought twice about, and uttered, maybe, hundreds of times a day. For the sake of the venerable ‘اب’, they unwittingly observed a few moments of silence and then moved on, bowing in homage to the Arabic ‘ابّ’ (ubb) and ‘اب و جد’ (ub-o-jad). Father and forefathers.
‘You did not include ‘ابتہاج’ (ibtihaaj). “A state of gladness”?’ she asked.
‘No,’ they replied.
‘Good,’ the woman remarked. ‘No one uses this word in Urdu anymore. But then why include ‘ابتسام’ (ibtisaam) or “cheerfulness”?’
The bearded faces smiled, but stayed quiet.
‘If you ask me, it wasn’t necessary,’ one spoke.
‘It was! Wasn’t it?’ said another. ‘You see, when people consult the dictionary to name their child, these words should be there.’
‘They can always consult our big dictionary for naming a child,’ she suggested.
She now imagined ‘Ibtihaaj’ and ‘Ibtisaam’ as two little brothers. Two carefree little brothers, running and stumbling after a ball, making their way into her new dictionary.
Curbing her wild imagination, she said: ‘Our rule of thumb should be to include only words from books published after 1901.’
The thing of it was, this association had already published a twenty-two volume dictionary containing all the Urdu words in usage since the time of Adam. Now, the plan was to compile a concise dictionary that might be helpful to people other than researchers. The aim was to have a single-volume dictionary, which meant a large number of words and proverbs undoubtedly had to be excluded. They had also claimed that the dictionary would be made in the modern tradition, like the new English and French dictionaries. Their proposal included terms such as ‘user-friendly’.
When she proposed that to get a general idea, certain kinds of words could be disregarded and that the team members—herself included—should consult a few pages of the old and new English dictionaries, one of them turned red. Standing his ground with the patriotic air of Akbar, he raged:
‘So, are we to imitate them? Copy them thoughtlessly?’
‘Then why don’t you suggest a way,’ she responded.
Six associates offered six alternatives. The conclusion was the same: no word could be omitted. They had become too emotionally attached to all the words. The result of their discussion was that the old dictionary would have to be copied in its entirety.
While she felt no less emotional than her wards she also needed to be pragmatic. ‘We will not be imitating them, but in order to learn one must look to others,’ she said, feebly. Then she thought of an adequate example. ‘For instance, take a look at our atomic bomb. Wasn’t its formula copied in Holland, modeled into a paper cartridge, and smuggled into Pakistan? And now look how far we have come by imitation. No enemy dares cast a hostile glance our way.’
‘That’s different. This is different,’ they retorted.
She couldn’t deny it. That was indeed an altogether different matter. This was different.
‘Consider the Hindustanis,’ she pressed on in her effort to persuade them. ‘Copying Russian tanks and producing one tank after another. Are they not?’
They found this example to be far more impressive. It was not only permissible to do whatever the enemy did, it was practically in alignment with the principles of Shariah. Based on this rule, they became convinced to study the English dictionaries, after which work progressed rapidly.
Suddenly, they heard the sound of a blast. Everyone was alarmed. ‘What…what was that?’ she asked after a few moments.
‘Nothing,’ said the office boy standing by the door. ‘A door banged shut.’
‘Oh!’ they exclaimed, recovering their wits and laughing heartily. They drank water, and when their pounding hearts calmed down she asked to bring chai for everyone. They carried on. They were just skimming over ‘ابابیل’ (ababil)—a kind of bird mentioned in the Quran—when she remembered something. This had been weighing on her mind for a while, and finally she said it out loud.
‘See, in the English dictionary, the name of every bird, flower, tree, and so on is accompanied by its native genealogy in Latin. We too claim that our dictionary will provide exceptional knowledge about any given word to its readers. Can’t we perhaps include the scientific name along with these names?’
‘Where will we find the scientific name?’ they asked.
‘Consult Plautus,’ someone suggested. In Plautus, the meaning of ababil was simply recorded as ‘swallow’. Its scientific name was referenced in the new English dictionary—a Latin term.
She was deep in thought. She said: ‘My fellow brothers, this is an English bird. Animal life is not the same everywhere on earth. The Hindustani ababil cannot be the same as the bird that soars over English meadows. What’s surprising is that even their crow is different from our crow…I have seen it myself. We should document this difference in genealogy on account of geography,’ she said, her eyes wide.
She carefully studied the different definitions under the entry ababil. She was pleased to see that they referenced the Qur’anic verse, explaining that ababil enjoyed near sacred status in Urdu. They further mentioned how ababil had destroyed Abraha’s great army, which had set out to storm the Ka’bah, by flinging stones at them. The origin of ababil was recorded as Arabic.
‘Good,’ she said. ‘These are key details that must be documented.’
All of them smiled beneath their beards. A proverb followed the English meaning of ‘swallow’: ‘One swallow does not make spring.’ Reading the proverb, they commented: ‘So these birds must arrive in the spring. Towards the end of the winter, perhaps. See, we have noted here—it is called ‘migratory ababil,’ meaning it comes and then leaves.’
She looked up the meaning of ‘migratory ababil ’: a black bird with angular wings and a red ribbon around its neck which arrives in cities at the beginning of winter.
‘But English birds arrive in the summer, not winter’ she said, scrutinizing the text. ‘These seem to be two different birds, with distinct habits and characteristics.’
‘Sair-ul-Tayyur, A Guide to Ornithology has not provided the genealogy,’ one of them reported.
‘That other book written by an English author about ten to twelve years ago, Birds of Pakistan, is it available at the library?’ she asked.
‘We don’t have it.’
‘Please request it right away. It will give us useful insights. In fact, place an order for all the recently published books about trees and plant life.’ She mumbled, ‘Probably also authored by the bloody English.’ Then, she was struck with another idea: ‘That Indian ornithologist who’s quite famous – if he’s written a book, do get that too.’
Hearing the name of an Indian, their faces darkened.
‘Bhai, he’s Muslim,’ the woman reassured them, which eased their fears.
By the way, what was that gentleman’s name? Never mind, I’ll look it up on the internet and let them know, thought the woman. The team was in awe of the way she used the internet. This made her feel reassured, uneasy, and embarrassed at the same time.
The entry for ababil further mentioned ‘ababila’. A kind of pigeon whose wings and tail were identical to ababil in shape and color.
‘Hmm…’ she pondered, ‘Excellent!’ But now, her head was filled with other geographical dilemmas. She said, ‘Hindustani and Pakistani birds…it’s not certain they inhabit Arab lands; indeed, they might not even exist there. These are inhabitants of our jungles. Let’s see what the Arabic dictionary has to say about ababil?’
Arabic dictionaries were brought in from the library at once. The room fell silent after ten to fifteen minutes of study. All lexicographers now wore expressions of nervous apprehension.
‘Why? What does it say?’ she demanded.
‘Well, here is the word. Plural form of bil, meaning: herd or flock, of birds or livestock.’
‘And what about that Qur’anic verse…’ she stammered as she recounted the verse.
‘It’s the same—tairan ababil.’
‘Precisely!’ said an Arabic lexicographer. ‘Meaning: flights of birds.’
‘Doesn’t the Qur’an mention what kind of birds they were?’ she inquired, even more surprised.
‘No, it does not. In light of Arabic dictionaries, though, the matter seems quite clear.’
The room quietened for a few minutes. They sat mute and motionless—some engrossed in wonder, others in disappointment. Finally, she inhaled deeply and said:
‘And here I thought all my life that it was indeed a flock of ababil that pelted Abraha’s army with stones.’
‘You’re not the only one. Your ancestors and their ancestors had the same misconception.’
Someone whispered furtively into her ear: ‘When non-Arabs read the Qur’an, they thought ababil was a swallow. About thirteen to fourteen years ago, they gave the name to an enchanting black bird, and convinced themselves that the flights of birds that had cast stones were the same one. That bird is nonexistent not only in Arabia, but everywhere else too. This is how a particular bird got branded with this name and became the ababil that had flung stones upon Abraha’s army.’
She recalled how, in an English book by an Arabic author, she had also read that Abraha’s army had in fact fallen victim to smallpox. The inhabitants of Mecca had witnessed neither elephants nor smallpox before. This deadly pestilence was unknown to them. They perceived the sores and pustules on the soldiers’ bodies as wounds caused by the pelting of minuscule pebbles against the skin. The poetic imagination of the Arabs had crafted the same allusion for the manifestation of the disease.
She pushed aside the memory of that book floating in her thoughts. She did not want to voice these sacrilegious notions to the bearded lexicographers. She had realized how important the human imagination was, and how mighty the creator! The example was self-evident. It was imagination that had transformed ababil into a living bird of black, with forked wings and a tail inhabiting Hindustan, Pakistan, Turkey, and Iran. The same bird that had pelted Abraha’s army with stones.
‘I won’t say a word,’ she thought to herself. ‘Never. Lord forgive me! Lord forgive my baap dada!’
She contemplated on how forgiveness was always sought for the baap dada, the father’s forefathers, and not ub-o-jad, the ancestors. Why was that? The implication of both was the same. Perhaps one phrase was the literal translation of the other. Nonetheless, the subtle yet significant difference was evident. We are more familiar with our father’s forefathers, repeatedly calling for mercy upon them.
‘Since the word is Arabic, the origin will also be Arabic,’ one of them declared.
‘Agreed,’ she replied.
‘But what would be the origin of ‘migratory ababil’? It’s a Persian phrase.’
‘Note down the origin as Persian. Please add this to our principles of lexicography that if the origin of the phrase is different from that of the word, it will be indicated.’
They quickly completed four pages. She was extremely pleased with their work. They had compressed fifty to hundred pages into two to three pages in such a way that each essential word had been included. It was no ordinary feat. Consulting modern English, and Urdu to English dictionaries had proved favorable. For instance, against the word ‘ابال’ (ubaal), meaning ‘boil’, they had to specify a certain temperature, similar to how the English dictionary had recorded the meaning of ‘boil’, which was nowhere to be found in the old Urdu dictionaries. In various places, they had employed a bold font, made use of different brackets, and inserted commas and semicolons consistently in each definition, crafting meanings that were utterly unique to this dictionary. (This really is splendid meaning-making, she had thought.)
They had extricated idioms, proverbs, and phrases scattered about in the old dictionaries and consolidated them in the correct order under each headword. Her methodology turned out to be successful since the principles of lexicography were being derived from the actual work being done. She felt a kind of extraordinary joy at this accomplishment. Uncle Karl Marx had been right then, when he had said that man acquired knowledge while he labored to fill his belly. She gazed reverently at the vision of Marx that she carried in her heart. She recalled how, in her youth, she would show photographs of Marx and Engels to her mother and say, ‘See, these are holy men too. Just look at their luminous beards!’ Her mother would laugh dismissively, ‘Nonsense! These are not our kind of people.’
Now, she feigned helplessness as she told the team, ‘Which words should be included and which ones shouldn’t, that decision is up to you.’ The idea proved successful. They began taking keen interest in each word. Truth be told, they had no other choice. Had Plato himself descended to pronounce the final verdict on word choice, even his decision would have been challenged. As it were, she laid no claim to Platonic wisdom. (She hesitated a hair’s breadth from making such claims.)
She was feeling particularly moved by her team. Such bright, devoted, precious people they were!
She picked up the newspaper spread out on her spacious desk, which was crammed with headlines of target killings. She folded it up and put it away to make room for dictionaries and papers. Over the past several days, the media had been unsuccessful in revealing the mystery of who was killing whom. Whether Shiites were killing Sunnis or Sunnis were killing Shiites, whether Muhajirs were killing Pathans or Pathans were killing Muhajirs. Or, were they all framing each other to avenge the killings of their kin? The third possibility was that the murderers themselves were pawns in a game orchestrated by organizations working to achieve a distinct purpose. The fourth possibility was that a foreign power was behind all this. Foreigners might find the idea ludicrous, but what did they know? Circumstances have been the same in this part of the world for ages.
Laying the books on her desk, the woman spoke in a tone filled with gratitude: ‘I don’t have words to describe how much I admire you all. Initially, I was concerned whether you were up to the task of fulfilling this responsibility.’ Then, swept up by emotion, she said jokingly: ‘I mean, I was always frightened by your appearance. I was afraid that one of you might even be a suicide bomber!’
They smiled. ‘But that’s what we are,’ they said, and shifted in their chairs.
The next moment, neither the room was there, nor the people sitting in that room. There was only a deafening explosion reverberating in the city. Pieces of the dictionary were flying in all directions. Lonesome ‘Ibtihaaj’ and his little brother ‘Ibtisaam’ had been flung into the air. The drawings of elephants and horses on their tiny clothes were reduced to ash in the raging flames.
The limbs of forefathers were dispersed everywhere, severed from their torsos. Coming to life by force of sheer imagination, the ababil had burned to death. The old Aryan horseback rider ‘اب’ was in a disorderly state. Its ‘اشو’ (ashv) and ‘اسپ’ (asp) reared on their hind legs and neighed plaintively. Their eyes had widened in fear of the blazing fire. The footsteps of ‘اب’ went spinning like a top, scattering every which way. Its throat had gone dry in terror, and in a strangled voice, it screamed repeatedly:
‘What now? What now?!’
Another ear-splitting explosion…and this time, poof! ‘اب’ ambled away, vanishing into thin air.
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Mozhi 