Chetan was fed up at last. And so, one day, he set out quietly for Basti Guzan to catch a glimpse of his future wife. Basti Guzan isn’t that far from Jalandhar. In fact, it’s such a short distance that a good tonga driver will happily accept two paisas for the fare, and on a slow day he might even be willing to take some dried-up, miserly old lady for just one paisa. Once upon a time, Basti Guzan was inhabited by tall, sturdy Pathans of the Guz caste, but nowadays it’s been settled by skinny, tubercular Hindus and Muslims. Who knows if they came from elsewhere to settle here, or if they’re actually descendants of those same strong, beautiful Pathans.
Chetan walked along, trying to imagine the girl his family had been discussing for so many days. The day was drawing to a close and the fragrance of damp earth began to spread through the bazaars as the shopkeepers sprinkled the ground with water.
Everyone was bustling about. In Bajiyanwala Bazaar, two musicians were seated on platforms in front of their shops, cheeks puffing out as they played their clarinets. Farther ahead, in Chaurasti Atari, two minstrels wandered about in open-collared shirts, tahmads tied about their waists, turbans wrapped every which way, mouths red with paan. They sang the story of an illiterate mother-in-law and her literate daughter-in-law, and the crowd listened excitedly, like the sorts of fools who watch with delight as their own kites are shredded to ribbons by shards of glass stuck to the jagged strings of other kite fighters.
In the large open square of Chowk Sudan, the trunk sellers prepared for the evening’s customers by polishing their trunks stacked one atop the other outside their shops. At the corner of the road to Bazaar Shekhan, in front of the paan shop, two prostitutes, well past their prime, chewed paan and spat the juice from the corners of their lips, as they bestowed sidelong glances and smiles at men from the countryside and soldiers from the Cantonment.
At the corner of Chhati Gali, Dinu the sweet-seller had set up his tray of sweets outside the shop, and the piping hot imaratis sharpened the already keen hunger pangs of the penniless passers-by. Chetan entered Chhati Gali, absorbed in his own thoughts and oblivious to all these sights and sounds. Ducking through the crowd of Bara Bazaar, he somehow made it to the neighbourhood stand and got into a tonga.There were only two passengers seated in the tonga at that time. Chetan wanted to reach Basti Guzan before four o’clock.
‘Hey, how long is this going to take?’ he asked the driver.
‘One more passenger, sir, then I’ll go.’
Just then a businessman came into view, huffing and puffing.
The tonga driver yelled out to him, ‘Tonga’s ready to go, Seth ji!’
The businessman came and plunked himself down next to Chetan in the back seat. The driver called out again loudly, ‘C’mon, c’mon, one more passenger for Basti Guzan!’
Chetan’s patience was running out. ‘Let’s go now!’ he said, exasperated, ‘There are already four passengers, are you trying to get a ticket?’ The tonga driver laughed and said, ‘What’s it to you, Babu ji, I’ll put them up front. Chetan was annoyed. ‘But I’m in a hurry. And there are already four passengers.’
‘One passenger can sit up here, sir,’ replied the driver Chetan wished he could ride in another tonga and leave this worthless guy behind, but there was no other tonga ready and he was in a hurry. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘drive a little faster; I’ll pay for another passenger.’ ‘May you live long, sir!’ The tonga driver blessed him happily in Punjabi and clucked at his horse as the tonga began to speed along.
The translator
Daisy Rockwell is an artist and writer living in northern New England. She paints under the takhallus, or alias, Lapata (Urdu for ‘missing’), and has shown her artwork widely. Rockwell holds a PhD in Hindi literature and has taught Hindi-Urdu and South Asian literature at a number of US universities. Apart from her essays on literature and art, she has written Upendranath Ashk: A Critical Biography, The Little Book of Terror, a book of paintings and essays on the global war on terror, and the novel Taste. She has also translated a collection of Ashk’s short stories.
About the book
A young man from Jalandhar longs to become a writer but fails at every turn. Upendranath Ashk’s 1947 novelexplores in great detail the trials and tribulations of Chetan. From the back galis of Lahore and Jalandhar toShimla’s Scandal Point, Falling Walls offers a rich and intimate ortrait of lower-middle-class life in the 1930s andthe hurdles an aspiring riter must overcome to fulfil his ambitions.
About the author
Upendranath Ashk (1910-1996), was one of Hindi literature’s best known and most controversial authors. Ashk wasborn in Jalandhar and spent the early part of his writing career as an Urdu author in Lahore. Encouraged by Premchand, he switched to Hindi, and a few years before Partition, moved to India. He moved to Allahabad in 1948, where he spent the rest of his life. By the time of his death, Ashk’s phenomenally large oeuvre spanned over a hundred volumes of fiction, poetry, memoir, criticism and translation. Ashk is perhaps best known for his six-volume novel cycle, Girti Divarein, or Falling walls - an intensely detailed chronicle of the travails of a young Punjabi man attempting to become a writer - which has earned the author comparisons to Marcel Proust. Ashk was the recipient of numerous prizes and awards during his lifetime for his masterful portrayal, by turns humorous and remarkably profound, of the everyday lives of ordinary people.