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First published in DAWN, 17 March 2002. Reproduced with permission

AUTHOR: Talat Abbasi - Vibrations of courage

By Rifaat Hamid Ghani

Talat Abbasi is an intensely private person, who has also become a public one. In an age where the media reigns and lay-your-heart-bare publicity is coveted, Talat, though appreciative of recognition, firmly preserves the cordons around the private space her temperament demands. And she achieves this without being evasive or prickly. Her self-disclosure comprises a balance between objectivity and illuminative, controlled insight that readers of her book, Bitter gourd and other stories, ought to expect.

The Oxford University Press, Pakistan, recently published that collection of Talat's stories, but it did not discover her. Talat, in a solitary speaking silence with herself as she lived and worked in New York, developed her reputation as a South Asian writer of significance slowly but surely. A public persona crystallized about her when her story "Mirage" won an award in the BBC international short story competition 2000.

Talat's presence in Karachi for her nephew's marriage provides the opportunity to ask: "How did it all begin?"

"I've always kept a diary. And then when I was in New York, and a full-time job and managing things at home didn't leave me that much inclination or energy to go out, I took to writing fiction. It was an outlet. Perhaps I chose the short story because I really didn't have the leisure to think novel. Maybe that, too, is why I've always enjoyed reading short stories myself so much," she observes parenthetically.

"When I had written two or three, I thought, why not see if I can get one printed. I went to the library to look up the particulars of journals to try. When one was accepted, I was encouraged to try sending in another, and that's how it went." She makes it sound disarmingly easy. Unassuming, she does not display the traditional "artist's ego".

Her work is now included in international anthologies, and has even found its way into textbooks for college use in the United States. From being critically acclaimed abroad her stories are on the way to being widely read here: where the roots are. But Talat Abbasi is no expatriate sentimentalizing roots and offering cliches about them or herself.

Her personal voice is bracingly astringent. "Living abroad has contributed as much to the writing, certainly to the self-exploration and growth. To the broadening of horizons, challenge sharpens the sensibility."

"Of course I love it here in Karachi. But that is because of family and friends. I am certainly delighted not to have a daily routine of battle with phones that don't work, elelctricity that doesn't work, and water tankers that keep you on tenterhooks! Also the law and order situation you all are so familiar with would shatter my nerves." It is said half in jest and half in earnest. She senses this and elaborates,

"This is home and I had a very happy childhood, and am grateful for its privileges. There are wonderful memories. Old friends, people. But how can one not be critical of so much that one observes here? Aren't most thinking people? And there is a strong temptation to stop thinking altogether. I've seen it happen to some. It could have happened to me. At the very least I could have stayed within a stereotype. And I appreciate the external stimuli in a place like New York. I love that city. Pretension has no place there."

Not quite one of midnight's children, Lucknow would have been home for her. Privilege and distinction go back several generations for Talat. Her maternal grandfather, Justice Naimatullah, was a member of the Privy Council. But her parents chose Pakistan when the time came, and her father retired at the very top of the civil service ladder. Talat would not be caught dead recounting any of this, but what can she do about people who happen to know?

She took her Bachelor of Arts from the Punjab University, where she topped in English Honours. But she was eagerly impatient to move on.

"I'd outgrown Kinnaird and the Lahore ambience, love it though I did. I wanted another prism. I knew there was a constant, enduring, big world out there. I wanted to be in it."

And so Talat went on to get her degree from the London School of Economics, reading Economics and British Government from 1963-66, and when she came back home to Karachi it was to work at NIPA, with marriage in 1969.

"It was 1978 when we moved to the States." And there she has been since, holding her own in the competitive world of the international agencies around the United Nations, working with the UNFPA, focusing on issues of gender and empowerment in developing countries. Talat has been a widow now for some years. But even before that, the conflicting and multiple demands of home and family often imposed a division of time and place. She had to spend much of her time alone in America, "learning self-reliance".

Talat's speaking-voice has many inflections. Again it brings her stories to mind. She herself is fragile in appearance. But after a little time in her company fragile is the wrong word for her. The vibrations she exudes are of a dauntless, resolute courage.

The more so because, for all the gaiety and humour, the dispassionate intelligence, one senses somewhere a very thin skin.

Education and self-development matter to Talat intensely. Her daughter, Maryam, and her son, Ali, have found benefits and opportunities that she and her husband would not have been able to provide in sticking with the easier choice of the cushioned working environment at home. But Talat does not believe in talking about herself as an end in itself, and we are swiftly back at discussing the author's work not the author's life.

"Influences, my taste in reading? Well, I love literature and read voraciously. But I have a special affinity with the nineteenth-century Russians. Chekov particularly. There are striking similarities with our own society and yet a fascinating difference in the manner of depiction, expression, reaction and response. And then I enjoy and admire Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, of course. Mansfield particularly set me thinking about short story writing in the first place, with her choice of subjects and style. They were so often things I had thought or felt in my own kind of way."

Does she have a favourite among her own short stories?

"I like the character in Bitter Gourd. A survivor, she contrives to get the better of the system by exploiting her own dependence, her relegation. But there is something special in each one of the stories for me. In "Granny's portion" it's the unexpected way children internalize adult conflict. Male displacement in "A bear and its trainer". "The Birdman" was broadcast on the BBC world service short story programme in 1993. In "Facing the light" a woman focuses on reality in her own self. I expose what I think is a rather typical kind of falsity in "Going to Baltistan".After a while she volunteers, "Displacement, poverty, education, women, I don't consciously choose any of those themes. But I focus on them at the individual level. I don't use a huge canvas." Again she emphasizes gaps and intervals in the time she can bring to writing. Almost as if the rhythm of time itself has made the short story her genre. But when I point out that it is her own sensitivity and self-discipline, her gifts, that have made it into her forte, she deftly turns the subject by demanding another cup of tea.

Does she think of settling down to a novel?

Talat Abbasi does not say either yes or no. "At the moment I'm deeply satisfied within the short story genre. But even people who don't write at all think of writing all kinds of things."

Is she thinking in terms of another anthology? "I'm always writing something. For myself to begin with."Talat, the individual, remains elusive. Curious readers must sense her feelings, her views, as established in the perspective of the words she herself commits to print. Powerful and piercing as it is, the vignette is incomplete. Talat, the artist and the person, surely has even more to construct and reveal. That too, readers of her work hope, a gentler more expansive rhythm of time will impose and allow.

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