Defying Boundaries

Naiyer Masud’s short stories bring to mind the writings of mavericks like Haruki Murakami, Jose Saramago, Franz Kafka, Edgar Allen Poe, Robert Walser, Jorge Luis Borges and many more. However, he carves out a separate place for himself within the literary oeuvre. One of the primary reasons for this is his masterful use of Urdu language (where Persian words creep in like strange insects) and his eerie sense of temporality where one ceases to differentiate between the past, present and the future—a sense of time and space which almost seems common in all his stories yet is distinguishable by the degrees of decay and dilapidation they offer. Although quite a number of writers and critics try to straitjacket his stories under the popular genre of Magical Realism, Naiyer Masud’s writings, in my view, defy those boundaries, as these at no point seem apologetic or lacking closure or offer any possible solution.

Like the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges’s story ‘The Book of Sand’ in which words are in constant flux and one sees the words for the first and the last time when read, Naiyer Masud’s stories also appear so fluid that one will always attempt to revisit the desolation left after repeated readings. In a Calvinesque fashion, Masud’s stories, thus, can never be only read but always reread, that is to say, these stories have the knack of leaving an everlasting imprint on our imagination through their layered meanings. Masud’s stories are seductive and hypnotic in such a way that the reader simultaneously wants to read and abandon the text.