Near the beginning of Mohsin Khan’s novel Allah Miyan’s Workshop, translated from Urdu by Maaz bin Bilal, a cat grabs a hen from a village home. Before the horrified eyes of the boy Gibran, the narrator, and his sister Nusrat, their black hen Kallo is killed. That night, brother and sister try to solve a conundrum: why did Allah Miyan make the cat if he also made the hen? They cannot find an answer, and Gibran concludes: “Only Allah Miyan can answer this.”
As the novel makes its way towards the end, many such questions arise, all unanswerable. For the first hundred pages of the book, though, Gibran and Nusrat live contentedly: children in a poor but otherwise happy home. Their Abba is deeply religious. The children go to a madrasa, where their teacher Hafijji gets Gibran to occasionally run errands. Nusrat is studious, Gibran less so. While he should be memorising parts of the Quran, he yearns for the kite snagged on a nearby tree. While he should be at the madarsa, he runs off with a friend to watch tamasha. He steals a coin whenever he can manage it; he lies to cover up his misdemeanours.
Gibran is a boy: a daydreamer, a carefree child, rather like RK Narayan’s Swami, of Malgudi. In fact, the glimpse of community and village life in Gibran’s story bears a striking resemblance to that of Malgudi: there is the same sense of a close-knit community, where everybody knows everybody else. There may be fights, but there is a sense of belonging too, of security.
This security is what helps sustain Gibran’s and Nusrat’s Amma when Abba, away on a Jamaat tour, does not come home and they run out of food. Then, with Amma unwell, comes worse news: Abba has been arrested on suspicion of abetting terrorists. From here onward, the lives of the children change as they discover what it is to be dependent on others.
In the translator’s afterword to the novel, Maaz bin Bilal writes that readers “will get an insight into an ordinary North-Indian Muslim (rural) family life, as also into the intercommunal and Indian state-Muslim citizen relations of India today.” That is probably the most visible aspect of Allah Miyan’s Workshop: its depiction of what it means to be Muslim and poor in today’s North India: the fear, and the push-and-pull between religion on the one hand and ‘fitting in’ or staying in tune with the times on the other. In a country torn by communal tensions and hatred, Allah Miyan’s Workshop is an important book, a book that offers a glimpse into a community.
Equally importantly, it is the story of a child for whom kite-flying and tamasha-viewing is paramount, a child who wants his new kurta tailored in the style of Salman Khan’s. A child who can be wild and disobedient, but who also has the heart to feel sorry enough for a dead chick to give it a burial. This is a heartbreaking, sensitive story, and Maaz bin Bilal’s translation does it justice. His decision to retain several Urdu words—like maidan, salaam, burqa, and harami, that have common English equivalents—helps provide a deeper connection with the original language.
