October 29, 2006

AUTHOR: Writing to survive

By Nyla Daud

Three novels with another one in progress, more than half a dozen collections of short stories, a travelogue, an autobiographical snippet romancing a much physically and spiritually idealised bureaucratic stint in the small-time district of Pakpattan, Muhammad Saeed Sheikh’s field of creative vision is boundless. Sheikh picked up paper and pen seriously rather late in life: almost after 15 years of “roughing” it in the provincial civil service. It was a career to which he owes a lot in terms of creative produce. However, he can now look forward to the end with happy anticipation since he attaches infinitely more worth to his creative identity.

The universally accepted, demi-god-like, portrait of the run of the mill bureaucrat scatters to smithereens as, with humility rare to his breed, he makes the confession, “Yes, I admit that it was because of my official status that I got to see life so up close and in such detail. Those experiences would not have been possible anywhere else. The civil service exposed me to facets of life so profound and so various that they seeped into the sensitivity. So when I began to write, it was but natural that those experiences would be reflected in my work.” To be sure, the late Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi would not have remarked for nothing that, Sheikh has had access to things and places and people which a lot of writers cannot reach. Or perhaps dare not reach out to, even if they happen to be in a position to do so.

He came into the Punjab Civil Service more by default than actual ambition. “The headmaster of my school decided to speak for me when the newspaper people came around to interview me after I had got a first in the Middle Vernacular examination,” he says. The lad from small-time Kamoke had, at best, dreamt of a teaching career. “But they sort of put that idea up in and around my being as profusely as they had garlanded me and pushed me on stage that day and then pulled the ladder from beneath me. There was no way out.” Somewhere he writes how his appointment as a city magistrate suddenly elevated the family status. “I did go through life,” he muses, “with the realisation that my parents had no standing in their circle. So when I got into the PCS, I had basically achieved a lot by family standards. There had been nothing like it before.”

But the oomph did not last long; at least not for him. It turned into a monotonous journey, “Which the service actually is,” he agrees. Another 10 to 12 years and then tedium set in, as the charm of self opening doors and traffic cleared roads wore itself out. “I chose to write for survival. I was questioning myself ceaselessly whether getting to the 20th grade was all that there was to life? Especially when I was a daily witness to a system so unfair that even a cursory exposure to it can destroy the human spirit. Creative writing has given me a catharsis. It has been the answer to the voice of my conscience. It gives me a certain type of moral justification.”

Then the latent idealism made its presence felt; and with what vengeance. For as Sheikh began to write, he would feel the lightening of his torn conscience. The bursts of creativity, fashioned by exposures to the human condition he daily presided over in the course of official duty at times stretched over umpteen pages. Sometimes there would be painful delays in search for the first sentence. But ever since the weir learned to be washed aside, there has been no stopping of the pen. There have come short stories that are born out of incidents as rudimentary as the case of an innocent man sent to jail for a night, or the forest officer indicted on the testimony of a clerical mistake, or a woman pleading for clemency in support of an errant son condemned because he was guilty of a search for inner peace on the wings of home brewed liquor.

But while a lot of his stories are born out of the official experience, Sheikh’s own inherent sensitivity has also had a lot of say. Pampering this sensitivity on the wings of an infinitely enriching wisdom acquired over the years spent on magisterial assignments in the Punjab, Sheikh has penned stories seeing through the folds of social hypocrisy and consequent injustices in a system gone awry. He writes with equal sensitivity of the traumas of childless marriages, of Freudian relationships, of marriages of convenience. Out of the folds of the vast canvas of mortal experience and human misery and the vicissitudes of creature destiny that Sheikh has presided over, came his first novel: Aik Aur Darya. This reflected an outburst of uncontrollable creativity. A complex condominium of basic psychological complexes, of women pushed into matrimony for procreational assignments, of the feminine ethos in consummating remarriage under the spectre of being a war widow, of feudal mindsets and criminal whispering. It was as if un-satiated by the myriad nature of his short stories and their fields of vision, Sheikh wanted to say it all in one go.

But then he is, very obviously, also a man in a hurry, “I feel that I have got so much to say. I am not yet 60 but I feel I have lived twice over. I think I have lived the ages of all my characters. I have to write a lot more because I am also tormented by a recent sensitivity which I have not experienced earlier; that creativity may desert me,” he admits to the multiple layering of his first novel just as he defends his own moral justification to the vast spread of landscape normal to this genre. “A novel tends to lay bare the internals as well as externals of the self. Or perhaps in this first novel I was influenced by Marquez.” He also names Dostoevsky and Herman Heiss. “Aik Aur Darya has not been the result of any lack of focus. It was the result of the diversity of characters, each operating in its own world. There were so many threads once I started writing that I was committed to tying them up individually.”

In his next novel Rang-i-Jahan Aur, Sheikh was a different author. Here was a writer perhaps more in control of his creativity or was it that the subject, a seething comment on the hallowed lifestyle of a blue blooded bureaucrat, and on what it takes to live that hallowed life only to be treated ultimately like the proverbial fly in the ointment … has been a playing field he is deeply familiar with? And this is a field populated by scathing home truths like the rags to riches tale of a middle class boy buying off destiny in a matrimonial deal with a senior bureaucrat’s daughter and the vagaries of fortune that later disillusion him.

Sensitivity and sensibility come together on occasions like when he writes of the woman as a temptress. “Women normally like to live life on the physical, bodily plane,” he writes in DC Nama, the spiritually charged magnum opus born out of his association with Baba Farid during a Pakpattan posting. Very likely to be put in the dock for that highly gender in-sensitive statement, he is quick to defend himself, this time once again on the basis of home truth. “What I have said there is not a theory. It is a statement based on social trends and the crises of being a woman, especially in the rural setup.” Then almost as an afterthought he provides reasoning, “Rabia Basri, Bibi Maryam and Fatima were exceptional women but otherwise, the immediate issue a woman faces, is on the material and the physical plane. So she has to attend to that aspect of her life.”

In DC Nama, Sheikh becomes bolder too, in that out comes the ethos of another kind of injustice. “I feel that in our society injustice is not only done by the people in power over their subordinates. It is a universal phenomenon. Whether it is the stake of the central civil servant over his provincial peer or that of the thanedar over the wrongly indicted respondent in a civil case; injustice is a constant. Then it becomes the ground for self pity. This self pity gives an impetus for creativity. Had I been a central civil servant instead of a provincial one, I would probably not have gone through this path of discovering creativity. Self pity is a very strong motivating factor for a writer. I, too, have gone through it and I don’t rue it, because that has been my lot. So instead of being apologetic, I have used it positively to highlight the pitfalls in the system.”

Currently working as secretary co-operatives to the Government of the Punjab, Saeed Sheikh (like a lot of other civil servant writers) has had to face the allegation of using official assignment as a launching pad for creativity. A lawyer by training, he takes no time to counter these accusations. “It has worked both ways. My being a creative writer has helped me in becoming a more conscientious public servant. My sensitivity to the human condition is something that helps me see even the official world and its duties in a totally different light. This sensitivity has never hindered my efficiency, because I believe efficiency, even in the official sense of the term, does not mean how quickly you move a file but how far you can look beneath the covers, beyond the obvious. In the same way, my official positions have exposed me to all that makes up the world. When I use my sensitivity to help somebody by virtue of my official position, I feel I have written a short story. I believe this is a literary achievement in another sense. I would say of any other state servant who goes the extra mile to solve a petitioner’s problem that he has been creative in the real life sense of the term.”

Sheikh took the road less taken, whereas he could have been like one of the others. He could have, under the flimsy cover of official privilege; by-passed the real life world which most bureaucrats prefer to gloss over. After all it is a fairy tale world the Pakistani bureaucrat inhabits; one which evaporates the moment retirement rings the knoll. Instead of waiting for that time and day, Sheikh resolved to live there and then. The result has been some of the finest literature in contemporary times.

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When you have to shoot, shoot. Don't talk. ~ The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly