Razia Sajjad Zaheer’s fiction belongs to the progressive strand of Urdu literary writing. Darkness and Other Stories, translated by Saba Mahmood Bashir, brings together Zaheer’s short stories in a way that foregrounds how women’s lives are shaped by the social worlds that are at once intimate and violent. Most of the short stories included are set within the domestic sphere; showing the reader how the ‘private’ is continually constituted by the political, and how one’s politics also emerges through their everyday habits within the ‘home.’It is telling that the collection is inaugurated by the titular story, ‘Darkness,’ which follows a woman writer travelling alone in a first-class train compartment in post-Partition India. When she notices a group of men repeatedly hovering around her cabin, she immediately assumes danger: she is Muslim, and she suspects they might be Sikh. Her fear is one that is historically saturated with the trauma of partition, almost refusing her the ability to comprehend the scene as it is. Only at the end does the story reveal, in a reckoning for the narrator and readers alike, that the men are not attackers but admirers of her writing who merely wished to meet her.I believe opening with ‘Darkness’ serves a metaphorical function that runs throughout the anthology. Time and again, Zaheer shows how middle-class life is enveloped by the darkness of its own anxieties. These anxieties are manifested in the actions of the individual characters as they become consumed by their personal crises, prejudices and moral certainties, and therefore fail to recognise the humanity in front of them. What Zaheer’s stories strategically stage is the slow dismantling of these mis-recognitions and Bashir’s compilation subtly emphasises that dismantling as the collection’s central project.Everyday (mis)conceptionsZaheer’s stories repeatedly return to the everyday as the site where prejudice is expressed in the most insidious ways. Her characters do not merely belong to a caste, class or gender; they expose how these categories solidify in the encounter between the perceived and the perceiver.Darkness and Other Stories, Razia Sajjad Zaheer, translated by Saba Mahmood Bashir, Ashoka Centre for Translation and Zubaan Publishers. One of the most searing representations of this comes through in “Low Caste,” which describes the relationship between Sultana, a schoolteacher, and Shamli, her lower-caste maid who has left her husband. Because Sultana grew up viewing such an act as transgressive, she instinctively attributes it to Shamli’s caste. Yet the story’s brilliance lies in how Zaheer renders such prejudice inarticulate but privately rationalised. Sultana keeps her thoughts to herself and even scolds other workers for shaming Shamli, but her internal monologue betrays this moral anxiety. When she learns that Shamli’s husband is not dead, the narrative voice turns inward: “Maybe this is about women of low castes – arrey, no, no, there’s no such thing as caste! She didn’t believe in caste, did she? Uff!” The voice, hovering between narration and Sultana’s conscience, becomes the story’s most incisive device. The ‘she’ is not only Sultana; it is also a larger figure of the liberal, middle-class subject who disavows caste even as she continues to think through it.A similar dismantling of everyday judgement emerges in, ‘Yes, Sir,’ where Zehra, a lecturer, develops an immediate contempt for a postman whose mannerisms appear anglophilic. Her dislike is almost instinctive and not rooted in a particular action. However, instead of leaving her with a rigid belief, the story makes her confront the man’s humanity. At the end, when Zehra realises that the postman went out of his way to ensure timely delivery during a moment of crisis, the narrative forces both her and the reader into a shift of perspective. The stake of such an ending lies not only in refusing prejudices, but also in reflecting how these classed perceptions can intuitively become moral verdicts.Taken together, these stories insist that Zaheer’s writing cannot be read through a linear or one-sided politics. Her narratives are built through varied encounters between upper-caste and lower-caste subjects, between men and women, between those who presume dignity and those who are expected to earn it. The result is a kind of polyphonic realism wherein marginalisation is something produced relationally, through one’s everyday negotiations of power.Women translating womenEven as Zaheer’s stories map caste and class encounters with remarkable range, they consistently return to the figure of the woman as the locus where social contradiction becomes most visible. In that sense, the anthology justifies its place within the Ashoka Centre for Translation’s ‘Women Translating Women’ series with Zubaan Publishers, which foregrounds translation itself as a gendered act, one where a woman writer being carried across languages by another woman is a politically relevant choice.This choice can be appreciated when reading how Bashir’s translation is particularly attentive to the interiority of Zaheer’s women. The stylistic choices made by the translator also sharpen that effect. The use of italicised passages, for instance, repeatedly produces the sensation of being pulled into the psyche of the protagonist, as though the narrative is not simply describing a woman’s inner thoughts but registering the complexity that accompanies a woman’s self-interrogation. Rather than offering explanatory distance, the translation allows the reader to inhabit these hesitations, rationalisations and sudden flashes of recognition.One of the most difficult tasks of literary translation is not merely rendering dialogue or idiom, but carrying forward the affect produced by the author. Bashir’s translation is particularly successful in this regard. Emotions in these stories are not preserved as abstract psychological states; instead, they come through in the lengthy bodily descriptions that Bashir’s translation provides. In doing so, the translation retains the embodied affect that makes Zaheer’s fiction so politically incisive. Fuzaila Khan is a Teaching Fellow in the Department of English at Ashoka University.