udassar Bashir’s latest collection Chatti Chobra contains two sections. The first section consists of 13 stories. Most of those are not only well written but also reflect his newly acquired emotional range as a writer. The second part is a set of really short shorts modelled after Manto’s Seyah Hashiye and is dedicated to the great Urdu writer. Mudassar Bashir’s humanism is visible in all the 13 stories. His love for his characters, regardless of class, gender and age, is what endears his stories to the readers right off the bat. As an observer and witness to the micro aggressions structurally embedded in a patriarchal society, Bashir is never shy of pointing a subtle finger at how women have to deal with the privilege men take for granted. These stories also show us that no society is black and white and that there are complex inter-woven layers in which men and women are not passive victims.

His story Mattha fleshes out the narrative beautifully. The entire cast is women, all employed at a bank. The woman manager ends up hiring her woman friend’s sister, down on her luck, and despite several chances the woman’s quality of work does not improve. Surrounded by irritated employees, the manager eventually lets her go after the friend’s sister chooses to talk back instead of being meek to retain her sympathy. An older employee, a mother-like figure to the manager, tries her best to make her change her mind and show compassion for the fired colleague, reminding her to not pay attention to the furrowed forehead but to her invisible wounds. Anyone who has read Bashir’s Samay knows that he is drawn to the uncanny and the mystical. He pulls this off smartly in the title story Chatti Chobara, about a woman who responds to the images in her dream and revisits the neighborhood of early years. It’s the most evocative story in Punjabi I have read in a long time and it shows Bashir’s total command of the language and twists and turns of storytelling without overburdening it with unnecessary detail.

The longest story in the collection Bandra is also a wonderful examination of a society at crossroads of change and stagnation. It looks at socio-economic relationships in four stages from people stuck in a sterile working condition to a gathering of intellectual-minded to interaction of the intellectual-minded in the real world and outside the salon-like environment to the relationship between home and the world. The thesis of the story, if one was intended at all, is to suggest that a meaningful change cannot come unless there’s harmony between a person’s inner and outer world and that all sections of a society are part of the process.

As an observer and witness to the micro-aggressions structurally embedded in a patriarchal society, Bashir is never shy of pointing a subtle finger at how women have to deal with the privilege men take for granted. 

Bud’dha, not Buddha, is the most risque story in the collection. It attempts to understand the impact of social media on free-spirited old men not averse to experimenting with taboo subjects in a socially conservative society. Here, too, Bashir does not exceed limits overstep to prove anything, be it his liberal credentials or sympathy for the outcasts. He focuses his skill on showing how certain characters negotiate cramped spaces and claim their agency.

A delicate balance is also visible in stories such as Uncle, KaniyaN and Bina SarnawaiN toN. Speaking of ‘subtle hints,’ there’s a reflection of the great Punjabi writer Virk, even of Nadir Ali, in his story Uncle, because the reader has read ‘writerly’ to detect the romantic attraction the young woman feels towards a man she has called ‘uncle’ from her childhood to motherhood, all because of one careless scribbling, a poet’s verse, in a diary he gave her as a gift, unthinkingly, when she was much younger.

The reader also cannot help but admire the irony carefully inserted into KaniyaN. A group of young boys share a cigarette as they take shelter from rain at a bus stop while indulging in a pleasant conversation with an older man, who advises them to quit smoking, while smoking hashish himself. The weakest story, perhaps, is the first story BilyaaN Kuttay, which despite its interesting topic of humans vs animals and humans’ ability to be kind to animals, gets bogged down because it barely steps outside of the qissa style, a trope to which many Punjabi writers have fallen victim. Nishaa, I believe, is the most delicate and well thoughtout story in the collection. It tries to explore the interiority of a single character, juxtaposed against a still lake, and makes the reader understand a woman’s loneliness.

Bashir’s diction is Lahori. It is cosmopolitan and does not strive to be ‘pure’ or uncontaminated by Urdu; it in fact embraces it where it is necessary as is evident in two very delicate situations in the stories Uncle and Bud’dha, acknowledging the influence of Urdu on the poetic aesthetic of Lahore. Just as Intezar Hussain used the symbol of buses as a space of fear, claustrophobia and renewal, Bashir’s transit is the quintessential office space where the readers get to experience the banter, patriarchy, sexual politics, survival and clash of art and work among other things as a microcosm of the society. As homage to Manto, his miniature shorts are right on the dot.

The language of the collection is easy. I hope that Lahoris pick up this book and enjoy their city anew.

The reviewer is a librarian and lecturer in San Francisco. His last book was A Footbridge to Hell Called Love. His novella Unsolaced Faces We Meet In Our Dreams is due soon