Muhammad Asim Butt has lately emerged on the literary horizon as a talented novelist, an accomplished short story writer, and a competent translator. His novels Da’ira and Na Tamam coupled with his translation of Kafka, speak eloquently for his literary acquisitions.
Da’ira
The two novels are purported to have been published in the same calendar year (2014), but chronologically Da’ira enjoys precedence over Na Tamam. The walled city of Lahore, with which the author seems to be intimately conversant, is the locale of the narrative. The language, culture and lifestyle of the denizens of this peculiar spatial zone are graphically painted by the novelist in this piece. He animates it with a tinge of intrigue, suspense and fantasy, and proceeds to measure the strength of his characters, especially females, in this background.
The story of the novel revolves around a trilogy of characters (Asif, Rashid and Naureen) as a centrepiece. A phantasmagoric situation of missed identities or guises leads to complications which move in a circle ad infinitum, not finite, symbolising the vicious continuum of the burgeoning human dilemma.
Through a self-proclaimed process of ‘attachment and detachment’, the novelist is enabled to achieve the desired artistic motif necessary to narration of a tale strung on a psycho-moral theme. The end of the story would seem to germinate another (story) in a cycle and the process would continue.
Da’ira
Author: Muhammad Asim Butt
Publisher: Sang-e-Meel Publications,
25-Lower Mall, Lahore
Pages: 254; Rs.500/-
Na Tamam
It is the story of a lovelorn girl Saima who coincidentally also happens to reside inside the walled city of Lahore. Gautama (later Lord Buddha) forsook his wife Yashodhara and their fledgling son Rahul at age 29 in pursuit of Nirvana. The novelist draws a parallel between the two women; the one in the legend is abandoned by a would-be troglodytic saint whereas the other by a young floater with an archetypal genealogy.
Yet another similitude is artfully contrived by the author to complete the triangle viz, the Sita-Rama myth from the sacred elegy Ramayana wherein Sita is asked by her husband Rama to prove her innocence after he had battled to seek her release from the year-long captivity of the villain Ravana. That she successfully does. But even after she is reunited to Rama, the society would continue to doubt her virtuosity which compels the latter to banish her because a ruler is supposed to be the preserver of its morals also. Her tribulation therefore does not abate as per one version of the epic. The novelist here capitalises on the two legends to show ‘the common predicament and plight of women in our part of the world’.
In this perspective, Asim Butt’s fictional narrative relates the ‘unending’ story, trickling down across the ages in ‘gyres’, of male chauvinism rooted in abject bestiality. This gyratory movement is perhaps the kernel, to echo the author, of ‘the grand scheme of nature’ propelled by repetitiveness. Saima’s suicidal exit from the diurnal scene of her unwholesome existence on the mother earth heralds a quasi-repeat of her pre-destined end in the appearance of another such ill-fated girl seeking identical ‘deliverance’ in a murky clinic situated in an unnamed town. Mustansar Hussain Tarar correctly assesses Asim Butt’s fictive prowess when he commends his character portrayal and its creative prospects on the flap of the book.
Na Tamam
Publisher: Sang-e-Meel Publications,
25-Lower Mall, Lahore
Pages: 158; Price: Rs.400/-
