During my very short-lived affiliation with a literary group, I heard the definition of an afsaana* for the first time ever. It was something like this: writing an afsaana is like taking the reader into a circular room with only one door; you take them in through that door, get them to take a whole round trip inside, and then make them exit through the same door.
To this day, I am not sure if — just like an evergreen afsaana — I really understood that analogy. The categories of evergreen and good afsaanas are neither mutually exclusive nor wholly overlapping. Many evergreen afsaanas are good ones but most good afsaanas are not evergreen. But that comparison is for another day. Today, I want to share my opinion on good afsaanas and how they are all about the right person observing the right thing at the right time.
No story is born in a vacuum. Fiction is very much the child of mind interacting with matter — matter in this case being things and people outside the writer’s own mind. If the interaction is highly nuanced, intricate, and complex with respect to the central theme, and if it has many facets which — like individual threads — are sewn together to form a whole fabric, that piece of fiction is usually a novel. Afsaana, on the other hand, is a monolith which insists again and again to be seen as a whole and not its parts. I think that this insistence has to do with the motivation or trigger that lies behind the act of writing an afsaana.
The writer finds this perspective or “take” that they would like to share with people, but as such, without any narrative, it is either too happening or too boring so the writer literally concocts a narrative to go along with it (one meaning of afsaana in the Urdu lughat is “baseless/false thing or saying”). The trigger for an afsaana is nothing but a sliver of time that a writer captures quietly in their mind. They nurture it and lend it a narrative which is either a conscious or subconscious part of their own personality. This personal input is why different writers come up with different stories on the same topic.
What strikes me as a great afsaana is the one which shows a unique and intriguing observation imperceptibly combined with the personal narrative of the writer.
The bad ones usually get it wrong; they try hard to say something clever but their “trigger” struggles to reconcile or adjust with the setting in which it is placed. Many a times, they lack the required subtlety and make the “point” too childishly obvious, thus losing their charm. This is done in two ways: either the “trigger” is fairly disparate with respect to the narrative and looks forced into it, or it is spelled out too clearly which discourages reader from trying to “read between the lines”, and so, makes them lose interest.
Some go in the opposite direction — and too far at that — and make it unnecessarily hard to crack. These are the ones which you read from start to finish but do not have any idea what they were about. In these, either the narrative or the “trigger” is rendered acutely abstract such that it becomes inaccessible to the reader.
If it is the narrative, more often than not it means that the writer made it too personal and since their lived experience is not accessible by the common reader, it makes no sense to them when they read it.
If it is the “trigger”, it means that the writer tried to push it forward indirectly from all directions until the narrative got pushed in the background and all there was left was an abstract mental construction of the writer which they struggled to link with a “human” story. I think that the idea of writing something obscure and elusive can be very tempting but from the reader’s perspective, it can appear as equally unwelcoming.
Both things matter — the writer and the sliver of time they capture. The agent out of the two, however, is the writer. Because I believe that “potential” afsaanas exist all around us but the lack of an observer or their attention robs us of many. Thousands of people visit railway stations every day but I am pretty sure that not many stand there, watching travelers come and go, and spin a very peculiar tale about a last goodbye. But those who do, conveniently isolate that scene of two people separating out of its real context and assign a new perspective to that action.
It is perhaps this act of using only a certain sliver of time as events unfold around the writer that makes some afsaanas exhibit (seemingly) abrupt endings or incompleteness. This kind of difficulty is usually present in those afsaanas which are set in an environment that deals with the routine life or the mundane. Because being mundane, it makes the reader able to take a guess at the direction it will take and probably its end too.
But since the writer is the only one who knows the exact length of that sliver of time which is relevant to them and their story, they end it exactly where that time ended. The writer stops writing when they feel that they have justified their choice of writing about that particular sliver of time and have said what they needed to say with regards to that. The reader, unaware of the length of that sliver, expects a conclusion beyond that — and not unreasonably so — because they can see more happening with the story. They do not know that the writer is limited by the duration of that sliver of time and their specific observation of it.
So may be the analogy of a circular room with one door is somewhat relevant, after all. It is confined, and as a reader, you must enter with the only door (the narrative) that the writer is taking you in through, and you must take the whole trip (the setting) with them before exiting through the same door with them. The room is as big (the sliver of time) as the writer decides and the door is placed at the exact place (the angle that they want to explore) the writer finds interesting.
*loosely translated as Urdu short story
