Our socio-moral dilemmas

By Dr Ejaz Hussain

Ali Akbar Natiq occupies an unusual position in contemporary Urdu literature. He is a writer who has arrived at the pinnacle not through elitist literary institutions and traditions but through sheer individual agency and authenticity of his craft.

Bunglay Ki Baoli (The Bungalow’s Stepwell), his third collection of short stories published by Book Corner, Jhelum this year, arrives after Qaim Deen and Shah Muhammad Ka Tanga, and following the remarkable success of his debut novel Naulakhi Kothi in 2013, which has reached approximately forty editions and earned an English translation from Penguin. More recently, his historical novel Kufa Kay Musafir (Travellers of Kufa) has extended his literary range considerably. With Bunglay Ki Baoli, Natiq not only consolidates his literary achievement but also advances it, producing what may be the most formally accomplished and thematically expansive collection of his career to date.

The collection’s thematic architecture rests on several interlocking themes: the corrosive power of greed, the ambiguities of faith and religious authority, the psychic wounds of Partition, the quiet heroism of ordinary people, innate human love, and the moral ecology of rural and urban Pakistani life. These themes do not sit separately from one another. Rather, they interpenetrate and complicate each other across the collection’s span, creating a cumulative portrait of a society both deeply traditional and under perpetual, often violent, transformation. Read alongside Kufa Kay Musafir, which locates similar moral preoccupations — betrayal, the manifestation of power, the corruption of political and spiritual ideals — within the seventh-century Islamic context, Bunglay Ki Baoli reveals the consistency of Natiq’s essential vision: that history, whether ancient or contemporary, is driven by the same familiar passions and failures of conscience.

“Darvesh Ka Maqbara” (The Mausoleum of the Dervish) is the collection’s most ambitious and philosophically layered story. It stages a confrontation between two irreconcilable religious temperaments — the arid, exclusionary monotheism of a small landowner who recently performed Hajj and who deems the ecstatic, earth-rooted spirituality of wandering mystics (malangs) as polytheistic — and ultimately they contest, literally and metaphorically, over a tract of land belonging to an ancient graveyard, part of which Haji Rahmat Ullah annexed illegally. His appropriation of graveyard land and his dismissal of the villagers’ fear of divine retribution represent not merely individual impiety but an entire epistemology, one that reduces the sacred to the transactional. Very soon, a Barelvi malang, Saen Allah Ditta, is seen securing the remaining graveyard land by making a boundary with bushes, hoisting a green flag, distributing langar and, above all, soothing village women with taweezes (amulets). The village youth hovered around drinking hemlock. Soon after, another malang, Dooday Shah, appeared carrying a black flag, representing his sect identity. Interestingly, the two malangs, despite doctrinal differences, started living at the same place peacefully. One day, however, Haji Rahmat Ullah appeared at their takya (hospice) along with local bureaucrats whom he had bribed. They asked the malangs to vacate the illegally occupied state land, as Rahmat Ullah had planned to build a housing society there. The Barelvi malang seemed conciliatory and backed down, while Shah vowed to defend his identity marker when the police attempted to take down the black flag. Being insulted, he assaulted Haji sahib with his wooden rod and the latter died on the spot. Dooday Shah was hanged after two years, and Saen Allah Ditta later capitalised on his martyrdom by establishing a formal mausoleum at that site. In this crucial story, whose characters are readily recognisable across rural and urban Pakistan, Natiq skillfully lays bare human greed, institutional corruption, and interfaith dynamics, as well as the use of religion for personal gain. Rahmat Ullah and Saen Allah Ditta shared this trait, though in different dimensions and manifestations. This is such a realistically oriented yet literarily powerful narrative that it warrants a separate publication as a standalone booklet.

“Shikari Ki Jheel” (The Hunter’s Lake), the first story of the collection, offers what might be called a lyric of selfless action. Akhtar Lahoriya, a passionate hunter and a humble man, abandons his sport to save a drowning child and loses his own life in the attempt. The story resists sentimentality through the precision of its circumstantial detail — the seasonal duck hunt, the cold lake water, the specific texture of a man’s habitual pleasures — so that when the sacrifice comes, it arrives not as melodrama but as the quiet revelation of innate human goodness operating beneath the surface of ordinary life. The lake symbolizes the dual nature of life—it offers joy but can also bring tragedy. The author conveys this dualist lesson subtly.

The stories of greed — “Nazim Baig Ka Dukh” (The Sorrow of Nazim Baig), “Naslain” (Generations), and “Basti Dulla Raas) (The Hamlet of Dulla Raas) — form a triad on inheritance and self-destruction. In each, the desire for property fractures families across generations, leaving survivors not enriched but haunted by fear, guilt, and an isolation that is simultaneously the punishment for and the consequence of their acquisitiveness. Natiq’s moral vision here is unsentimental but not nihilistic; he lets greed consume his characters on its own terms.

“Mughalpura Ki Haveli” (The Mansion in Mughalpura) enters the traumatic terrain of Partition through two opportunists looting abandoned Hindu and Sikh properties in post-1947 Lahore. Usman Amritsari, whose family migrated from east Punjab, is sheltered by Niaz Khan. While on a looting mission, Usman dodged his friend and escaped to Karachi with the booty they had stolen together. In his search for Usman, Niaz entered a haveli where he was detained by a Sikh family hiding there and surviving on a diminishing food supply for several years. They revealed that they had killed other intruders as revenge for their slain kith and kin. One day, however, a soft-hearted girl rescued Niaz, and he later discovered that he had been cheated by Usman, the very man he had sheltered.

“Neela Gumbad” (Blue Dome) and “Turab Bhai Taalay Walay” (Turab Bhai, the Locksmith) represent the collection’s urban locale and are among its most richly textured accounts. The former renders inner Lahore with sensory precision — Shabbo halwai’s shop, the Pak Tea House, the particular ambience of a literary culture conducted over tea in crowded lanes — while also depicting human greed and later repentance through Shabbo’s kiosk near the Blue Dome. The latter, set in Karachi’s cinematic world of the 1980s, is memorable for the way cultural specificity — the elaborate ritual of paan-making — is woven into the moral agency of Turab Bhai. Once deceived by a boy who made him open a neighbour’s home and then plundered it, Turab Bhai was jailed. Upon release, he set up a paan kiosk where he later encountered a protagonist in financial hardship, helping him by unlocking the college accountant’s office and securing a fee waiver. Apparently an act of theft, it was, seen through Turab’s moral compass, a helping hand extended to a struggling student with many dreams. The story’s deployment of the Kanpuri dialect adds a further layer of authenticity, reminding the reader that Natiq deploys linguistic realism as a means of grounding the identity of his characters.

“Maulvi Ke Parinday” (Maulvi’s Birds) and “Dhaan Ki Fasl” (The Paddy Crop) demonstrate the breadth of Natiq’s thematic concerns. The former explores how religious authority functions as a mechanism of social coercion and market manipulation. The latter addresses environmental degradation through agricultural chemistry, whereby small farmers are structurally pressured to use pesticides for greater yield and profit. Consequently, though they now have paved streets and brick homes, this comes at the cost of chirping birds and glowing fireflies (jugnu) — a subject rarely treated in Urdu fiction, handled here with a sorrow that connects the destruction of the land to the destruction of an entire way of life.

“Chunay Ka Garrha” (The Pit of Slaked Lime) and “Laathi Ki Awaaz” (The Sound of the Staff) continue the collection’s focus on revenge and concealed violence. Indeed, Chunay Ka Garrha depicts the socio-psychological dilemma of an elite Islamabad family whose child is religiously radicalised by a cousin. Shahraiz, the mother of the killed jihadi, takes revenge by disposing of that cousin within her own compound. “Izzat Ka Sawaal” (A Question of Honour) offers a sharper, lighter touch — a story of social vanity that provides welcome tonal relief without sacrificing thematic seriousness. The title story, Bunglay Ki Baoli, brings concealed violence and moral duplicity to bear on institutional authority, as a secret buried beneath canal official Shirazi’s bungalow floor retrospectively reorders the narrator’s understanding of human beings as deeply complex creatures. People who appear soft in tone and moralistic in character may commit heinous acts — in this case, taking the life of Rana Ilyas, whose men stole canal water, in response to a personal insult.

Taken together, these fourteen short stories posit Ali Akbar Natiq as a writer of genuine stature and matured skills, and Bunglay Ki Baoli as an essential addition to the body of contemporary Urdu fiction. It is thus highly recommended for those working on power dynamics, social transformation, radicalisation, and identity in Pakistan in particular and the subcontinent in general.