Chaman Lal Hakhoo

I feel rather uncomfortable to talk about a dear friend and a noted author, Hari Krishen Kaul, who is no more.

I am not a critic but only a creative person of some measure. I am aware of the fact that humans are no more than ships in the sea, separated by fog, which occasionally glimpse each other’s lights dimly in the distance, and exchange brief salutes as they pass.

In fact, we are allowed a glimpse of each other for a mere moment only to be forgotten almost immediately. Sometimes these moments stare us like bright milestones on a long journey. These glimpses may be immediately kept on the back-burner of our mind, but may be retrieved, many years later, when history acts as a catalyst.

Hari Krishen Kaul (HK) was a product of Kashmir Hindi Sahitya Sammelan, an un-patronized and un-financed literary and cultural organization, devoted to the twin objectives of the propagation of Hindi language as also its literature in the Valley.

This small assembly of Hindi enthusiasts housed in a non-descript room, with a single electric bulb providing it light, surrounded by the smell and dampness of the busy Kralkhud Chowk of Srinagar city, had the reputation of a place where young men sat huddled up in semi-darkness, dreamed of achievements and discussed the works of Premchand, Tulsidas, Nirala and Lal Dyad.

Here, in the disciplined atmosphere, where thought provoking things about short story/poetry/literary criticism were discussed loudly and fearlessly, HK discovered a hilly track, narrow and uneven, which he negotiated slowly but unwaveringly, and that prodded him on to the road to Sahitya Akademi.

Unfortunately, in the beginning, people in the government, in Radio Kashmir, and later in the Cultural Academy, stayed clear of this group as they thought it worked for the spread of the ‘alien’ Hindi language. Elsewhere in the city, Cultural Congress and the Left-sponsored Young Writers Association conducted their own activities which attracted larger audiences. HK could not resist the temptation of attending and reading out a short story in these meetings. Many more followed him. In course of time, however, ‘Hindi people’ started getting accepted even by those who earlier wished to keep them at an arm’s length.

It was in the Sammelan dos where I met Hari Krishen Kaul for the first time in 1956. I had passed the matriculation examination while he had graduated, had secured a government job, was married and had the identity of a Hindi short story writer, all at 23.

I could not help being highly impressed by him. I liked him for his politeness and also for his enthusiastic and natural response to subjects that interested young minds. He expected new entrants like me to appreciate what he said and when we did, he would do a narcissus act by looking at his thick hairy arms and wrists and smile approvingly.

HK needed a takia, an abode of Sufis, where meditating intellectuals and creative artists could indulge in smoking endless amounts of charas and discuss matters of short story writing alone. He was not fond of writing or reciting poetry, nor was he good quoting couplets from Ghalib or Iqbal or commenting upon verses of Lal Dyad or Rasool Mir or Parmanand. He created a world of storytelling within his own self and wanted us to respond in full measure. He had no taste for scholarship or in being known as a pedant, and I believe he had no fascination for people in his teaching profession obsessed with moving up the ladder.

He talked endlessly about Anton Chekhov, the Russian storyteller whom he considered his guru and almost worshipped him as one of the greatest writers of stories written after Katha Saritsagar. I remember HK often described Chekhov as a writer who wrote the way one relates to another the important things in his life, slowly and yet without a break, in a slightly subdued voice. Later, when HK started writing in Kashmiri, he abandoned what was called the “event plot” for something more “blurred, interrupted, mauled or otherwise tampered with by life”. He talked of Virginia Woolf and the techniques of stream of consciousness.

HK was also a great fan of O. Henry’s stories which are famous for their surprise endings, to the point that such an ending is often referred to as and “O. Henry ending”. He loved to be called the Kashmiri answer to O. Henry as the latter was an American answer to the French writer Guy de Maupassant. HK did not resort to ‘Diamond Necklace’ or ‘Gift of Magi’ endings in his stories but could not resist the temptation of creating twist-endings which were much more playful and optimistic. His stories, for example, ‘Yaksha Aur Topi’ in Hindi and ‘Shamshan Vairaag’ in Kashmiri are well known for their witty narration, temporal setting and drawing on the stock of characters he lived with.

Memories are a reward of life.

In 1958, we found ourselves together working for Master’s degree in Hindi literature. For more than a year, I spent my days and nights at HK’s place in Zaindar Mohalla. Now, when I look back, I find that HK performed an amazing balancing act. He cared for his family as much as he did for his scholarly pursuits. He maintained a smile on his face and kept his cool in those difficult and uncertain times. While we pored over the prescribed books by the day, we had enough time during late nights to read aloud passages from the works of Kafka, Camus, Sartre and T.S. Eliot.

I am sure he did not like the complicated technique of storytelling. He was not impressed by symbols and substitutes, Ionesco’s Absurdities, Kafka’s Surrealism and the host of motifs now known as Rushdie’s Magical Realism. Simplicity of language and expression was his mantra. He preferred to be nicknamed as ‘Hari Chekhov’ of Kashmir and dared to produce works like ‘Seagull’. ‘The Bear’ or ‘Ward No. 6’.

Those were our halcyon days when both of us, defying the pressures of poverty, least careful about the requirements of the syllabus, unmindful of the prospects of unemployment staring us in the face after M.A. created our own forms of intimacy to get the best of all possible worlds. HK had a special liking for spicy-juicy titbits that authors usually use as a means to enhance the meaning and purpose of their work.

I immensely enjoyed his manner of animatedly talking about the cunningness of a farmer in ‘Greesnaama’, about Kalidas’s description of tiny hair around Shakuntala’s navel, about the details of the flashing blade in the ‘The Outsider’. About the element of sadness in the paintings of Amrita Shergill, about asanas for conjugal bliss in kamasutra, about how he liked to be served Roganjosh by a young woman with her palms hennaed and wrists heavy with gold and green glass bangles. He had a passion to talk, to pour out his opinions, to get rid of his gloom by bringing out all his secrets, memories, fantasies, conscious and unconscious, by smashing hypocrisy and artificial decorum.

Memories are a reward of life.

I accept that my interaction with HK may not be qualitatively profound but it is satisfying to remember those fragments of joys, bits of jealousy, moments of ecstasy that we lived together with, and those personal slices of life that we shared that often made us feel that after all we had found a way to free ourselves from the humdrum worries of life, at times behaving like creative artists and at times enjoying being completely shameless.

It was a day of Shivratri/Salam. HK, clean-shaven and smartly dressed in a grey Gabardine suit, tie and all, came to my house to wish me Herath Mubarak. My father invited him to his room where my father lifted the lid off his old wooden chest, drew out a bottle of Scotch and offered him a drink in a fancy crystal glass. HK was moved by the gesture. He felt he was honoured. He had come with a sort of religious enthusiasm and left with the ecstasy of gratified pride. He never forgot the moment and often referred to it as a moment of reverence to life where there was no scope for complaining about upbringing.

Out in the open fields, in the canteen of Radio Kashmir, in the wooden barracks of Doordarshan Kendra, in the compound of Cultural Academy, in the college staff room, HK enjoyed being alive, curious, involved in obtaining ideas both directly from the world around him and through the medium of an intelligent mind interacting with literary texts. Once he confessed that while he talked of Hindi literature and listened to a lot of gibberish about English literature in his college staff-room, he kept himself occupied with the characters roaming on the Habba Kadal bridge, little insignificant happenings next door that sharpened his perceptions and triggered his imagination.

In 1972, Doordarshan started functioning in Srinagar. HK was happy and enthusiastic. Words like screenplay, story-board, camera angles were in the air around Coffee House and elsewhere. He discussed with me how to prepare a screenplay and how it was different from a radio-play. At times he was agitated and frustrated as either I could not communicate my views satisfactorily or he doubted whether I was right. But he lived the agony. He wrote the first Kashmiri TV play ‘Yi Ti Akh Inqilabah’. I re-arranged some sequences, directed it and produced the first-ever TV play in Kashmir. I am sure that play was seen as a model play for many years.

During the fifties, HK and company met an unusual visitor – noted Hindi author Upendra Nath Ashq – in a restaurant in Srinagar. Later, for many years, HK never tired of repeatedly quoting Ashq’s remark: ‘An author is a one-man industry. He is the producer, distributor, seller, banker, advertiser, consumer, and appreciator’. This two-line statement became a leading mantra of his mission.

He once boasted that his one short story in Kashmiri paid him enough dividends: it was broadcast on AIR, published in Sheeraza, in Kashmiri, in Urdu and in Hindi, and presented as a radio play, as a national AIR play, and as a TV play. He always labored and delivered too. It was not just fun that his friends called him ‘Pragmatic Kaul’ – the name he simply laughed at.

In 1975, when Indira Gandhi declared internal emergency in the country, HK came to me looking anxious and downcast. He felt choked for words and asked me if I too felt the same way. I honestly said I did not. He did not believe me. Some months later, I realized what HK must have meant by choking. It so happened that in that particular political phase, my job demanded that I should produce a play eulogizing the merits of Emergency. I requested HK to write a TV play on the theme of Emergency highlighting its positive features. He agreed and wrote the play which I produced and directed. No one who saw it appreciated. HK never ever talked about it.

Fundamentally a product of his time, HK’s work provides one of the best examples of catching the entire flavor of an age. Whether it was the theme of corruption in government offices (‘Da Anna She Anna’), subdued strains of romance (‘Sharad ki Dhoop’), changing social values (‘Taaph, Yeth Razdaani’) or looking at the tension of class and wealth in the transitional phase of India and Kashmir, HK had an inimitable flair for isolating some element of society and and describing it with incredible economy and grace of language. Some of his best work resides in the collections, Pata Laran Parbat and Yeth Razdaani, which explores some discrete aspects of life that form a part of a larger plot in a complex structure even as it painstakingly erects a monument of a story.

HK wrote a radio-play ‘Dastar’ which I produced for TV too. There was a dialogue ‘Rama-a Lag-e Chani Lellaye’ that achieved wild popularity in the valley and village school children made it a part of their play during recess. It was freely employed as a greeting phrase in public places in the city only to be replaced many years later by ‘tera kya hoga kaliya’ of film Sholay.

HK’s stories leave an impact. ‘Shamshan Vairaag’ has a character: Tarzan. One chilly-lazy winter morning Tarzan was woken up by his friend who asked him to prepare himself for the funeral of his other friend’s mother. Tarzan took rather long time to free himself from the caressing warm bed and prepare for the task and finally, when he was firmly standing on his feet, declared that he was ready to carry anybody’s mother to the shamshan. It is easy to see what HK strived for: the idea of being an intermediary, liberating individuals from their surroundings, fighting loneliness and disentangling the author in him from generalizations.

Strange are the ways of the world. In his last years, HK suffered both physically and mentally. That is tragic. Tired of hypocrisy all along, he had hoped to emancipate his heart and liberate his will with a desire to participate fully in what the world has to offer, to be human in the wildest sense, looking at the field and not noticing the horizon, and be content with “I like my stories. They have given meaning to my otherwise meaningless life. That is enough for me” statement in his preface to his first Kashmiri story collection Pata Laran Parbath.

To conclude, I identify HK, the Anton Chekhov of Kashmiri fiction, as the one who had perhaps the most creative journey in search of a better way of storytelling. There never came a time when his train was shunted into a siding or that the engine refused to move further or that the vision of his destination blurred.

Extract from the editor-in-chief Neerja Mattoo’s editorial ‘A Word With You …’

“…. Talking of loss and melancholy associated with the city, one must mourn the passing away of one of its most articulate voices, Hari Krishen Kaul, who recorded the life of its inhabitants in all its different facets and shades. He understood the angst of the intellectual oppressed by the deception and hypocrisy practiced in the society, as perceptively as he did the mere bread-and-butter concerns of the lowest rung of Kashmiri society, even its lumpen elements and their pathetic situation in life. Through sharply etched portraits filled in with snatches of dialogue, he crafted stories of a people trying to come to terms with changing times, their unfulfilled aspirations, or betrayal by the so-called leaders. His eye went to the hidden corners of lives, but even while exposing the distasteful, the narrative never lost its essential good taste. Today the genre of the short story in Kashmiri is impoverished, as there are few practitioners of the art of story writing of Hari Krishen Kaul’s stature on the scene. Miraas pays tribute to this great writer by including one of his well-known stories in translation in this issue, in the hope also that our young readers will be drawn to read his stories in the original Kashmiri."

Source: Miraas, a quarterly publication of Kasheer Foundation. Vol – I No. – IV Oct-Dec 2008 . Vol – II No. – I Jan – April 2009.

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