KATHA 1998

Selected and Edited by Muhammad Umar Memon

My previous reviews of older or classic books:  https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/reviews-of-older-books/

When I read these stories slowly, my even slower thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…

5 thoughts on “The Essence of Camphor by Naiyer Masud”

  1. THE ESSENCE OF CAMPHOR

    I have read the first quarter of this story, half of the half in Zeno’s Paradox, and I am  entranced by gathering its account of the narrator’s childhood with making of things, alongside a peppercorn of forlornness for my tired tastes, from the mix of fragrances as if some new atelier of the New Look, to the ‘kamfoori sparrow’ to act as model for (or be modelled by) a bird seen in a wall picture, and it turns out (spoiler alert) to be dead and insect-ridden….and the friend who sent the narrator (‘the darling of the house’ yet prone to childhood’s abrasions) into the tree to reach the sparrow had used an ‘elbow’ to ‘nudge’ the narrator up to it.

    • I have so far read up to: “…audible kisses and the sound of Mah Rukh Sultan’s name being called.”  

      To me, doesn’t feel like a girl’s name, but nevertheless it is — a girl among many who have moved in next door with two older men, brother to each other. Is this the house where our narrator knew of a family who once lived there always with their heads bowed?  Sensing the power of the iconic, these words will linger as much as the kamfoori bird with its trailing string, and I somehow pull a wire and watch move the other clay objects as ‘toys’ the narrator  has made, and the fragrances in the ground when the rains came, and the blue sky became grey, while the narrator sat on the roof with his friend.  Reading  backward through this section. Meantime, does MRS smell of camphor or kamfoor?

    • “‘No, I don’t know who made it,’ she said. ‘I’ve only altered it.’”

      …which each reader will do with this exquisitely haunting  story, ‘immensely forlorn’ but as beautiful as death might turn out to be. Very impressed by all of it, by the ‘thicket’ of lively sisters who live in the house where people used to sit with heads bowed, the thoughts of our crafts and arts narrator and his little houses and other objects, the little house perhaps melding with the disorientation of where the narrator is in the geography outside the houses where they live when visiting the moribund MRS. Full of sparking cut-glass chains and chandeliers and fragrances and a room with a number of fireplaces, and the burden transferred by gifts between the narrator and MRS, but what of the camphor and the possibly ill-named kafoori bird? A question that hangs literally in the air as you read and ride the musical ‘dying falls’.

  2. INTERREGNUM

    “…he [my father] settled himself in the verandah under the red and green ceiling decorations and set to carving wood.”

    A highly lingering story of a father and son relationship, where part of the time the latter as possibly reliable narrator doesn’t know the former is his real father, illiterate but involved in crafts as well as masonry, in interface with an old male teacher who taught the boy, and a house with many empty rooms, one with padlocks containing old books, and identical fish design on doors and elsewhere in the house and in the local area. The old teacher becomes conflated with a young girl, and we read from the previous story’s aura of a chain, here “a length of fine silver wire”, later to ‘silvery fish’ slithering from books. Also the fragrances and scents of the previous story explicitly interest the narrator. Father and son as a conflated if reliable narrator? A palimpsest as an eternal interregnum? But the ceiling described above eventually crumbles. And the fish design? I did ask myself: is it a tench?

  3. OBSCURE DOMAINS OF FEAR AND DESIRE

    “…then to my elbows…’

    I don’t want to overstate this, but I think I have just read a story that I would always regret not reading should I have not read it. I have someone else to thank for this opportunity, and thanks to them. It is story of houses that are sometimes in half, not knowing who lived in the other half. A man inspecting houses and their eponymous domains. And sexuality interruptus with a slightly older woman who is one’s aunt by dint of complex kinships. And there is a Little Bride who prides herself in infancy that he is her Bridegroom. A sexuality, amid a few more references to fragrances, with the slightly older woman ever on the brink of the greatest ghost story ever told. Seriously. I am so emotionally moved by this work, I am too breath-taken to talk more about it, even to talk at all. I’ll just quickly mention the tuggable string to a toe that echoes the earlier such tags in this book’s stories above. No doubt my voice will return by the time I am inevitably drawn into reading the next story. Just a complex of padlocks to manage, first.


  1. SHEESHA GHAT

    “My father had said that she would go crazy if she heard me speak. I tried to envision myself talking and her slowly growing crazy.  I tried to imagine what it would be like to live with a woman who would go crazy.”

    At first, I thought the translator of this story was too prone to using the word ‘would’, but perhaps the ‘envision’ and ‘imagine’ justifies it in retrospect, as the boy’s father-by-word-of-mouth ditches him, as a result of the above fear that his new wife would go crazy with the boy’s stuttering, ditching him, indeed, while still loving him, to a retired mimic clown with mucho tobacco smoke and  a pink sail on his back and the same sail now on his house, near a lake with hovels round it  and a large dishevelled boat upon the lake where an imposing gawky woman and her more charming daughter lived, the latter one day trying lethally to suspend herself by walking upon water as a parallel with the boys pent stutter between the start of something he wanted say to but never quite saying it. As a parallel, too, to this poignant story as a whole!

  2. BAI’S MOURNERS

    “And her speech imitated her gait: as if every word got stuck in her mouth and waited to be ejected by a kick from the word following it.”

    This description of Bai’s ‘maidservant’, small as younger girl but perhaps older than her mistress, seems fitting to connect on from the previous story above. More fitting indeed than the mis-connections between the two halves within this discrete story itself. The first half about a boy’s form of bride-phobia, with adept horror genre frissons of  giant centipede in a bride’s calf and the stickability of a dead bride, with jewellery that snatches at you! Ah, but then, I am relieved to discover a connection, with the second half at last, others snatching jewellery as Bai, ex-singer, ‘dies’ in the balcony house. Notwithstanding, though, the sugar remedy for centipedes and the nature of trees’ growth or not depending  whether a bride reaches her groom or not. Reminds me of the Little Bride and her ‘bridegroom’ earlier in this book?

  3. SULTAN MUZAFFAR’S CHRONICLER OF EVENTS

    “For a moment I imagined I was in a dream…”

    “‘Up to where have you written?’ / ‘The arrival of the Sultan in the desert.’”

    Real-time chronicling. Imagining being in a dream, an interesting phrase in hindsight,  is exactly how I am now due to see gestalt real-time reviewing, and this story — probably based on a real historical figure — involves the chronicling of a chronicling of a desert war campaign and the building of a tomb without walls that becomes a castle, and this is an amazing hindsight echo of my  own recent fiction miniatures of mansions without roofs that in some instances turn into castles with ramparts. It is as if I am part of some gestalt and I feel delightfully  helpless to define what I mean about this in the context of this story, and I will simply leave below  a few keynote passages as an aide memoire, if not for you, certainly for me… or to help posterity to a greater understanding, should there be a posterity left to understand it. A work that is also tantalisingly MR-Jamesian, I felt.

    “‘Its roof…’ / ‘Doesn’t exist,’ said my companion, ‘but can only be seen from a distance.’”

    “I got the feeling I was not listening to what he was saying, but reading what I had written myself.”

    “‘You have told us everything,’ I said, ‘but I want to see it as well.’”

    “Because of the proliferation of walls, and because the sun was setting, it was somewhat dark inside the tomb, and one did not feel the absence of a ceiling.””

    “Chronicling has to be done on imperial paper.  You will get paper too, but without the imperial seal, and not in numbered quantities.”

    “…’The building of this tomb … can’t we write an account of its construction together?’ / ‘Then you too will have to say in your defence that you have only written what the chronicler of the building of the tomb had written.’“

    “At that moment neither I, nor perhaps he, remembered that the tomb was made only of walls.”

    “This was easy for me, because I did not have the responsibility of explaining what I saw and wrote.”

    “I had described it as though I had been an eyewitness.”

    “From the platform the tomb’s serrated roof, which did not exist, looked beautiful.”

  4. LAMENTATION

    “Each man-woman pair would touch first elbows,… […] … with motley strings of colour connecting the wrist and elbow;…”

     …being the many attractively tuggable tags that this book contains. This is another story in this book that is remarkably landmarkish in the canon of what I have read in my life. How can this possibly continue? In many ways it reminds me of modern Folk Horror but in a more stylish vintage, pervaded with R. Ostermeier’s Peninsula world, and is about a narrator who visits the wasteland communities who later become his paper-people, oh  whistle and I shall come, my lad, in more ways than one, evolving, amid an entrancing sense of psychogeography, and the unforgettable concept of the ‘congregational lament’, and much more. Who knows I may be that old man who looks like a small boy in that outlandish cart (a vehicle in itself unforgettable) all yearning towards me to help from the time when I was younger. Gestures and tones that mock my gestalt real-time reviewing. Please simply read the first paragraph as an example.  This story is my ‘prize’ fallen from the bazaar table in a bizarre geography I have travelled so far with this great book.

    “….all the way up to the elbow…”

  5. THE WOMAN IN BLACK

    “I arranged and rearranged the scraps in many different ways but failed completely to make any sense of them; as soon as I changed their order the events they were supposed to represent also underwent a complete change.”

    I know the feeling! Like the same scraps of paper in the previous story, too. This work is of a narrator in his nonage who lives in a house where so-called ‘bad women’ are tried and tested by elders, and a surgeon squats in a portico outside and an older woman whose accident  has fused her feet together with half-buried toes is operated upon with our narrator’s help. Another delightfully lingering story that sticks leaves together, with tuggable branches and equally stickable spiderwebs or leaves of tiny yellow. Like the tags and tassels in earlier stories. Following matters concerning a ghost and some dust in later life I wonder if pruning the tree with the aforementioned leaves would serve any purpose. But leading to a completely stuck door at the end. 

  6. NOSH DARU

    “— a small air pump, tied to the bike frame with a string, had come loose with his tugs and was dangling free.”

    …as with this story’s thread, A confusing set of encounters of old men and younger men in India, dialogue you can actually hear spoken, and an ‘English Chemist’ shop in India which preternaturally prophesied, for me, the Sunak family who was later to create a prime minister of England by dint of a special medicinal concoction of ingredients called Nosh Daru. 

    Dare I put my own head over the parapet and make these thoughts about this story public? Self-evidently, the answer is ‘yes’. 

    “…he mixes things up.”

  7. THE MYNA FROM PEACOCK GARDEN

    “In the spaces between the rails, flowers and birds had been shaped from thick silver wires, and between the wires there was a delicate netting of gold metal threads, with tiny doors and windows set in on all sides.”

    A long charming tale of a black Abyssinian in India amidst Indian history, whose wife has died and his small daughter yearns for a hill myna, and he works in a Peacock Garden involved with the giant ornate cage and smaller feeder-cages amidst the psychology of personal temptations and political machinations that ensue after his taking one of the mynas with the same name as his daughter. I found myself being page-turned, till I knew not where to turn, except towards an unexpected happy ending. But expectations are not always what they seem till they are cinched by a patient real-timing of them. A coda to this unmissable and surely unforgettable  cagebook’s symphony of spills and spells in and out of it. What is the equivalent of composed silence as fragments of fragrance?

    “A small green satin canopy with a fringe of metallic thread had been erected on ornate silver posts in front of the Wondrous Cage.”

    END