In “The City of Sorrow,” Intezaar Husain portrays nameless
and identity-less figures recounting dryly and shamelessly tales of their crimes.
They affirm that though they are alive and speak but at the same time they are
dead. I feel the reason behind the narration of each person’s crime is so they
could share their pain with the other. After self-realization of their own
actions, (i.e when the father is ashamed of his son’s actions and dies) their
own actions are becoming horrors to themselves thus this places them in an
orbit in which there is no possibility towards healing. The criminals are going
in circles narrating their stories and are unable to find comfort in them. I,
as a reader understand that pain is the reward of the culpable. They remember
every trivial detail, which even includes behavior of a street animal, cat or a
dog, towards them. They are stuck in impossibility of forgetting their own
painful and horrific acts done to the others.
It always saddens me and I don't find any exclusion from any of such partition story. ‘Shehr-e-Afsos’ has strong social outfalls. I am convinced of the "Two Nations Ideology" which is the foundation idea of indo-pak partition. In Shehr-e Afsos, Intizar Hussain's protagonists (our forefathers, indeed) are three dead people discussing the circumstances of their death. The story, which begins with a clear sense of 'death', is blurred as the story progresses with the protagonists arguing about the degree of certainty of their deaths -- and if, they have 'died' at all. In all this, each dead man recounts how he died. The story invokes myths and archetypes rooted in local cultures (Hindu, Muslim, folk), and ideas of migration, cultural and social dislocations, and most of all, memory. The story rotates around dead people, trapped in a swamp of guilt and condemnation, seeking redemption and ways to escape from memories that haunt them. Without finding any salvation, they plunge deeper into despair in the city of sorrows. Intizar Hussain's works consistently seem to affirm the inextricable link between the histories of a people and their collective memory. The term Magical Realism which has been applied -- more as a description than a definition or a genre -- to understand a certain kind of writing appearing from post-colonial world, has remained absent from critical discourse in our part of the world. We need to tell our stories. If we don't, no one will. They will be lost for the coming generations.
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