Face to face with my father, Joginder Paul

I always thought my father, Joginder Paul, was like Khodu Baba, a character from his story ‘Khodu Baba Ka Maqbara’, who walked across the borders between life and death so easily. When he wrote his ‘Self Obituary’, he declared convincingly of having been born at least four times in his life in four different cities: Sialkot, Nairobi, Aurangabad and Delhi. When I’m told his birth centenary year commences on his 100th birthday (September 5), this comes as a revelation of not absence but yet another comeback, with a difference. Indeed, a fresh perspective of time and distance comes by alongside. He passed away in 2016, leaving behind a throbbing world of characters and incidents in the parallel world of his fiction.

After his demise, I dived into that fictional world, setting their dwellings in order, securing the stories in their own linguistic domain, lending them their permanent address as it were, to stay within their boundaries and yet dream of flights outside. First, I needed to procure all the stories he wrote, the volumes he published in Urdu — he never could, or never cared to, organise or conserve his own writings in one place. In fact, I tried to even gather his beautifully handwritten drafts, lying scattered in yellowing paper in old half-torn files, some from Nairobi times.

Meanwhile, the National Council for the Promotion of Urdu accepted the proposal to bring out his collected stories, currently being managed by the scholar Abu Zaheer Rabbani, who has been also critically examining these works in Urdu. And then, the stories I thought needed to take wings to other languages through translation for a wider readership. Chandana Dutta contributed immensely in consolidating a Reader and a monograph on my father for Sahitya Akademi, in addition to editing a whole volume on him for the ‘Writer in Context’ series published by Routledge (UK).

And now, his characters, Deevane Maulavi sab of ‘Khwabro’, Baba of ‘Nadeed’, Bhabho of the story ‘Jaadu’ and even the grannies of ‘Dadiyan’ freely move around in at least three language domains — English, Hindi as well as in the Urdu original.

I remember he often talked about the autonomy of his characters, who carved out their own destiny and were not merely puppets with strings tied to the author’s will. In one of his afsaanche (short stories), when the author does not allow his characters — the two lovers — to marry each other, they decide to elope, and several years later, they meet the author in another story with their children!

The upheaval of Partition had obviously impacted my father’s consciousness deeply. As a writer, the experience stayed with him for the rest of his life. Off and on, he dug into it and brought out different aspects through his stories such as ‘Dera Baba Nanak’, ‘Daryaon Pyas’, ‘Fakhtain’, ‘Mele Mulakatein’ and many others, including his acclaimed novel, ‘Khwabro’. They have all come together in an English translation as ‘Rivers of Thirst’, published recently by Speaking Tiger.

Often I am asked questions about the literary legacy I inherited from my father. A ruthless critic of not just literary production but someone who upheld the highest standards of honesty, hated pretentious behaviour and who made no bones to condemn fraudulence… I know for sure that these are the values I hope to uphold in literature as much as in life. Am I able to live up to them, I don’t know.

What I know is that any compromise of these ideals brings up in my mind the image of my father ready to reprimand me. I do not have the courage to defy them. Where I defied him was in the choice I made in writing poetry and painting, the two forms of creative expression my father did not indulge in.

He always nudged me to write short stories but I didn’t. I don’t know if that was because I shunned the likely influence he could have had on my writing. He was undoubtedly a very powerful presence looming large over the family in the entire household, while I was fiercely protective of my independence. On the other hand, my mother, who was herself a popular professor of literature, was a friend, a very benign presence by my side always. Whatever I’d write, do or create, I would easily share with her. Not so easy with my father though. I was perhaps afraid that he would overshadow any creativity I’d lay claim on.

The range of his imagination, the delicate throb of his sensitivity to human concerns and his extraordinary handling of the creative expression overawed me. I needed to conserve my own self, needed the courage to evolve my own apprehension of life experience. But I know that whatever I got from him, came to me surreptitiously, on some deep subconscious plane. Even in my stirrings and reactions to him, even though I built my own structures of thought and feeling, the foundation I’m sure was provided by him covertly, if not obviously.

Often, I have resonated with Sylvia Plath’s ambivalent relationship with her father: on one hand, a remarkably strong intensity of love and on the other, resentment suffused with a deep fear of control!

My dear father, your birth centenary year empowers me with the essential distance from your haunting presence, liberating me to find my own bearings in order to engage with you and your writings with greater non-attachment.

— The writer is a poet, critic and academic