As one opens this book showcasing two novellas from Pakistan and flips through the first few pages of each, one has no doubt that this is first rate writing from South Asia. A couple of years ago, Salman Rushdie had bemoaned the paucity of writing from the Indian subcontinent in good English translation.
In academia, a festschrift is a volume of writings by different authors presented as a tribute or memorial especially to a scholar, and presented during his or her lifetime. The term, borrowed from German, could be translated as celebration publication or celebratory (piece of ) writing.
Let me, at the very outset, make a set of declarations. The author is a good friend of mine from my days at the Indian Express in the 1980s and I know various members of her family very well. Also, it was her husband, Virendra, who brought me into journalism from publishing where I was ruminating on a boring future in a dying industry.
A society dominated by Morality, as defined by the patriarchs who hope to keep the world going according to their writ. This is what The Lesson is about. The blurb describes it as ‘a dystopian satire on the violence that women live with.’ The dominant role is that of the rapist, a rather perverted ‘knight in shining armour’ who descends on recalcitrant women to teach them a lesson.
In the summer of 1992 my father took our family and the family of a visiting aunt to Ayodhya, Faizabad. While the objective for the aunt’s family was clearly sacred and devotional, to my father it remained mainly ‘journalistic’. As he said then that ‘we must see the Mosque’ for he was not very sure of its ‘future’ given the politics of hate and violence in those times fuelled by the RSS, BJP and their various sister organizations.
If any evidence were needed to establish that Cyrus Mistry is one of the finest writers in India today reading just one of his tales from his collection of short stories will be more than enough. Each of his stories is intensely perceived and documented dispassionately, leaving the reader the license to react emotionally and rationally.