First published in Newsline, Pakistan. Reproduced here with permission
Abbasi joins the ranks with her first book, Bitter Guord. Abbasi's stories depict the silent and often internal struggle prevalent between the empowered and the disempowered, those accepting their fate and those rebelling against it.
Her attention on the pathetic condition of servants in the story The Cock Crowed Again, for example, is an attempt `to give voice to the voiceless'. Her expose of society's attitude toward the poor hapless servants who are left at the mercy of the master/mistress has been done with the finest and softest hand, in effect holding a mirror up to society itself. Class conditioning affects children as well; subsequently influencing and moulding their behaviour as adults. In her story Ticketless Riders, the six-year-old narrator is aware of her position as mistress vis-a-vis her teenage maidservant, who is "only a servant girl". She exercises her authority to bend the servant as per her wish. But like most master/slave relationships, the line gets smudged as to who is exploiting whom.
The wives in A Bear and its Trainer and Sari Petticoats are also commodified by their husbands and thrown aside when they've outlived their utility. In Granny's Portion, the `poor' relative internally rails against her `rich' relatives, only vocalising her angst to the children of the `rich' relative who bring a portion of sacrificial meat on the second and not the first day of Eid. In Bitter Gourd, once again the poor relative has to swallow her pride to get her mother's monthly `envelope' from her rich relative , who says, "if my late mother promised it to you, you'll get it, even if I don't remember any such promise."
In the Birdman, a widowed servant girl, fed up with living with her abusive and exploitative in-laws, finds refuge in a handsome birdman who promises to marry her and take her away, but finds trusting him throws her into unimaginable peril.
By thus exposing the dominant and recording the experiences of the disempowered, Talat Abbasi opens new vistas for the hitherto unrepresented class and hints at the necessity of change.
She has proved herself a deft miniaturist. Instead of just following a mainstream plot with its defined structural form, she paints in great detail. In effect, she freezes her camera on moments in the lives of ordinary people and "plumb(s) the heart of its meaning": a mother checking her son into a home for mentally dysfunctional children; a child betraying her ayah's secret; a servant child who yearns for a piece of birthday cake; a brother who can't live up to the expectations of his sister.
By careful and controlled character-building, Abbasi recovers the voices of an inarticulate culture trapped between liberating educators, religious zealots and impoverished crowds. She registers her sympathy by bringing out the interior voices of her characters, those whom society has backed into inescapable corners: the barely articulate children, the mute servants, and labourers trapped in a struggle against exploitation; the dehumanised men and women who have been stripped of all expectations. Abbasi's shift between first- and third- person narration and her alternating perspectives allows the reader to sympathise with the abandoned Pakistani wife and with the ex-husband (A Bear and its Trainer), with the betrayed husband and with the younger frustrated wife (Pye Dog) and with the older overly maternal sister and the younger hen-pecked brother (Pumice Stone).
Some of her stories, like Mirage, written with such heart-rending feeling, sound practically autobiographical in nature, so deftly has she been able to capture `the moment.
The strength of her prose lies in the reality of her characters. Everyone reading her tales will be able to relate personally to one or more of her characters or be able to draw a comparison with someone they know, be it a servant, a friend or a `poor' or rich' relative.