The first notable thing about Khalid Jawed’s writing, even at preliminary and tentative reading, is its marked difference from anything one has read so far in Urdu literature both in terms of language and discourse. You may or may not like, accept or reject it, but you just can’t ignore it.His narrative, with its free flowing, centrifugally charged, multi-layered prose and discourse, the utter unfamiliar nature of it and the concerns interspersed within, with sparks flying about intermittently, may intrigue you, disturb you and in the end engulf you either with a deep sense of admiration or of discomfort or disquiet, foreboding or introspection, culminating either in fulsome appreciation or rejection depending upon your literary taste, inclinations or insights. There is no middle ground.Nemat Khana, not to overstate a point, is one such novel of recent origin in Urdu.It opens its doors, with a cosmic vision of a solitary shadow, decrepit, lonely and lost, entering a house crumbling to ruins, an edifice totally disintegrated and disintegrating all the while, his entry witnessed by none other than the ever-present primordial winds. The shadow, accompanied by the shadows of a limping rabbit with jagged ears and a cockroach perched on his collars like a butterfly, the ever-present trees, the soil, the primordial wind itself metamorphosed and metamorphosing into stones amidst the trees and rivulets and water and stones, the only true witness of all that there is there to be witnessed, complete with the presence of “Lucy and Jack”. And, against this dark dismal backdrop, the presence of two breads prepared with love, unfurling like a flag, as the symbol of life and lust and sweat and grime and blood and disgust and cruelty and pettiness and human avarice.The Paradise of Food, Khalid Jawed, Juggernaut, 2022.After all, The Paradise of Food is ultimately a saga, sad and sordid, of bread, of food, of onions and garlic and oil and grain and liver and lungs and lust and all the banalities, vulnerabilities and cruelties enmeshed with human existence, all enacted in the arena of the kitchen, the most dangerous place in the house and on the earth in the author’s words.Khalid Jawed invites the reader to this paradise of gluttonous, carnal, existential realm of disquiet and disgust, forcing us to witness the entirety of human existence, its myriad cruelties. And some beauty too.On one plane is the story of an individual, a shadowy figure, one Hafizuddin Mohammad Babar, son of Zahiruddin Mohammad Babar. He is amidst the ruins of his ancestral home and his traditions, crumbling in its foundations. He carries his ancestral burdens, which include never-ending litigations, dying patriarchs, cruelly disposed, sexually starved, dehumanised and violent women. He shares a house with snakes old enough to have whiskers of their own.The protagonist travails in this dismal setting, with the presence of Anjum Baji, Anjum Aapa and Anjum and finally Anjum (his loveless wife), four women incarnates, in his life, coupled with his murderous nature and sinister instincts for predicting impending catastrophes, one after the other. His deep association with all that is base and fake and cruel with a veneer of respectability within and without, and the author’s insistence on blasting this shibboleth, of civilised, spiritual, virtuous and evolved humanity, is quite something to be experienced through the story.But the writer declares in his foreword to the book that he is neither a story writer, nor a novelist. He is, in his own words, “placing myself at the high pedestals of a creative writer is, in fact, merely an illusory perception of mine. It is highly likely that perhaps the reason behind my claiming the status of a writer, is my inferiority complex borne out of my attempt to write in a language that has not only lost its political and social but literary credibility also, and has forsaken its bright future to the darkness.”Also read: Book Review: Dreaming of a Khichdi India, One Recipe at a TimeHe goes on to further declaim, “My fiction has been written by the consciousness of a living, feeling person and not by a professional but general entity called a literary writer. Nevertheless, converting my consciousness into fiction, I also fulfil some of my other objectives for the earth of my consciousness has been kneaded with pain. That’s why fiction converts all that I write into knocks on the dusty doors of conscience. My individual conscience (neither I nor my novels or stories pay any heed to collective conscience), repeatedly attacks the dominant moralistic and aesthetic; rather poetic aesthetics. I see and recognise literature as a plaint against my conscience….I do not write only by the reasoning logical, right side of my brain. But writing is another name of being utterly alone. My conscience, in this painful act of being alone, includes my whole body.”Nemat Khana is an elegy, lurid at times and grotesque at others.It is a dirge of the Indian Muslim, a lament of the times and of life as it exists. At the same time, it is loaded with all its tragic ironies, of dark neighbourhoods, dug up roads, fundamentalism of all hues, moribund institutions and genocidal violence. Is it about the sordidness of reality, pan India, or about the actual nature of human civilisation that we all seem to be exulting about. Khalid Jawed, calling upon his conscience and pleading his plaint in the courts of our conscience, demands that readers look into their souls and accept their pettiness, avarice and splendid cruelties.Perhaps it is a mistake to read Khalid Jawed literally and textually. He is not to be read textually at all. For you are not going to witness a set pattern or theme or subject about which he is writing about. In fact, one of the attributes of most of his stories is the absence of a plot, of a sequence of events which will unfurl one after the other to finally culminate into a final moment of surprise or shock or revelation.In my humble opinion, he is to be read between the lines, beyond any plot or happenings, where events are just a glue to bind his main message; a message loaded with subversive intent for he proudly claims that he has not read or written a line during the last 25 years, keeping in mind aesthetics or literary gratification.Also read: Abhijit Banerjee’s ‘Cooking to Save Your Life’ Is a Collection of Recipes From the HeartHis literature is to be read as a testimony in the court of the reader, the human being. Khalid Jawed, with all the shrewdness of a master storyteller, is ultimately a very subversive writer. He debunks everything you treasure. You talk of beauty, he will debunk it and say, it’s cruel and ugly; you talk of civilisational foundations of human existence, he blasts you to pieces; you talk about essential goodness of religion, he rejects you outright; you take shelter in God, he will present the devil to your to face.The weak-hearted, well-intentioned, simplistically disposed, and noble or aesthete smug souls, along with those given to cathartic exultations should avoid reading him. So should the critics given to unitary, arithmetic and formulaic interpretations of life.Ekram Khawar is a Mumbai-based poet who writes contemporary Urdu nazms. His poetry collection includes Masnad-e Khaak and Lahu Se Chaand Uthta Hai.
