Pandra Jhoot aur Tanhai ki Dhoop / پندرہ جھوٹ اور تنہائی کی دھوپ

by Muhammad Iqbal Diwan

285 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 2015

Reviews

[Rural Soul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Many of my online friends who are way more intellectual and educated than me, never liked my high waitage to the famous novel Peer e Kamil. Major obejection about that novel which is usually observed, is the idiocy of a stereotypical subject which is just an easy way to get attention. The subject Religion.

But the reason i loved that book was, that it was written in an era, in which i was trying to get my life together. Like it was something which just happened in front of me.
This is the same case with this book.

I knew about this writer Iqbal Diwan after reading Diwar e Girya kay Aas Paas, an travelogue about Israel. Written by Kashif Mustafa and translated in Urdu by this writer.
The preface impressed me at the degree that i ended buying tow books of him. The style and the diction was breath taking.

I loved this book just because its pure modern school.
A person like me who opened his eyes in this Rocky Part of Punjab and even finds it hard to gel in culture of central Punjab, still accepting that there is a lot common. Then we can imagine that how hard is to focus on subjects which are needed to be shut now. Give me break from these weared and teared topics.
Thats why the Lucknow, Delhi gibberish sometimes gets on my nerve. I am just hecking bored with this partition stuff and more.

It consists on 4 novelletes.
First two are my favourite but last two are not that bad eaither.
First one captures the common dilemma of online relationships or long distance relationships.
This is the subject that i always wanted to read. So many of us, or may be few of us including me, always strike our heads with human walls in real life. Eventually we end up in a world of imagination where we try to find people who think like us, infact who are like us.
This becomes the beginning of a quest which doesnt leave us the same, as we were.
Second novella,
Hmmm, What will happen if in a backward rural environemnt, a group of people,
1. A workout anthuisiast, Son of native wrestler,a School teacher.
2. A communist Landlord, A painter.
3. A shia orator.
4. A Punjabi Talib and Co.
5. An insane motormechanic and Saint.
Would do something which someone never expected, anticipated and feared ?
A group of people who carry separate ideology of revolution e.g. Revolution of Iran, China and Talibaan movement, but still get each other's backs.

I loved it.

[Azher Hosein · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well-crafted story is always manipulative. It prods us toward a territory of wonders beyond our imagination. Such a story is often written in prose marked by refinement and newness. “Pandra Jhoot aur Tanhai ki Dhoop” (fifteen lies and the sun of solitude), a collection of four long tales written by a Karachi-based master manipulator Muhammad Iqbal Dewan, is a book that captures the boisterous spirit of the modern society of Pakistan. All the four tales in the book are masterful and moving. They expose the voices that sound thrillingly modern, stifled by frustrations and vain hopes though they are. The central point of all the stories of the book—that magnificence and joy may or mostly do, sprout out of cataclysm—isn’t so hard to digest.
The titular tale is an account of a love-string which burns on at one end— simultaneously making and marring lovers’ joys—and is supported by pegs of multilayered lies at the other. The story though looks to be a showcase of perfidy, hatred, vengeance, hollowness and vanity, is more about women’s candor which they believe to have in their conjugal relationships. “Shehr ko Selab Le Gya”(The City taken by Flood) flickers around the countryside of Southern Punjab wherein the hot summer of terrorism is paving its way to set in. Bells of perils, to be heard by the days to come, reverberate here. “Raat bhi Neend bhi, Kahani bhi”(Night, Sleep and the Story) is much more than mere an account of a perplexed night consummated by the protagonist, a Karachi-based surgeon Dr. HB Qazi with his flighty mistress Guddo. Each succeeds to teach the other a lesson of life which both characters silently inculcate, perhaps not to expose it to anyone but to themselves. External descriptions of this story, though not all, are frugal but stinking: “Jokes apart, Mr. HB—a topnotch pleasant-looking surgeon of Karachi—had a wardrobe stuffed with assorted shirts, pants, cufflinks, socks and neckties shopped during his wanderings across the country. The underwear he loved the most was red boxer-briefs which, on its front elastic patch, showed the trade mark of a reputed manufacturing company of London. Out of three boxer-briefs, it only left him two, the blue and the yellow; the pigeon-blood red briefs got lost somewhere deep in his heart.” The story “wo jo maya thi” comes across a new kind of love which, despite its brokenness and hollowness from within, remains intact only because it never lets the peripheral to affect its veracity—the center.
Dewan’s stories arouse the pity and fear that, unlike the Greek tragedies, barely comes out of the death of a character. It is the choking of unbridled desires and gratuitous expectations, which brings about desolations in the personae’s lives.
“Pandra Jhoot aur Tanhai ki Dhoop” introduces to readers an innovative domain of storytelling where the thematic aesthetics are put in the shade by technique, form, and the subtlety of the language. Dewan is a stylist. He seems to think of a tale, and the tale manages to create its own narrative to let it be told. It has been a way of master storytellers—and also great poets—to create whats and hows at the same time. He works on his fictional language as a poet does. His use of symbols and analogies is unique in its brilliance. In the titular tale, when the leading character Maham is bathing under the flowing water of a shower, she feels “falling over her naked body each droplet, like an ascending light of self-conscience and discernment, was teaching her a refreshing lesson on love and its pleasures.” A little earlier in the same story, Dewan compares the-yet-unmarried Maham to the women “who were habitual of saying their fajr prayers at the sunrise”. In the story, “Raat bhi Neend bhi Kahani bhi” character Khalid Qureshi remarks that in Pakistan it is often “the bullet train of public relationships that drops you at your desired station in time”.
Apart from employing whimsical phraseology in his fictional prose, Dewan, like a stylist, works hard on forming and reforming his lexis. A good number of sentences from these stories show much of the author’s aphoristic glitziness. Although these expressions are diminutive, they are forceful and profound in what they convey to readers. The following instances may support the assertion:
- There is no time frame for memories and dreams. (pandra jhoot aur Tanhai ki Dhoop)
- The world of women is the world of embellishment, possession and assertion.
(Wo Jo Maya thi)
There are people you love to be defeated by. (Wo Jo Maya thi)
- Power without coquetry goes useless. (Rat bhi Neend bhi Kahani bhi)
- Men want old pints with young women. (Rat bhi Neend bhi Kahani bhi)
Muhammad Iqbal Dewan belongs to the class of littérateurs that has emerged to join the world of fiction in the midst of the first decade of this century. Yet his fiction doesn’t seem to hold a bit of what is sometimes seen as amateurish. Instead, he stands apart from his contemporaries. And reasons are several: he tends to set himself strictly in contrary to the conventions which, especially from the last few decades, are ruling the whole strata of short Urdu fiction; that is, to say, a deliberate effort of writers to raise their fictional characters to the level of type or symbol. He loves to tell a tale. He tells a tale as Marco Polo does: with an elegantly slow start, narrating events, of which, in one way or the other, he has been a part, or which passed through his observations while he explored the assorted souls, their actions and reactions, during his long journeys into varied worlds.
Dewan’s wanderings abroad have been extensive, yet his stories rarely fail to divulge indigenous sensibility. This nous of developing affinity with Pakistaniness, coupled with the writer’s practical cognizance of the Pakistani elite and the political class, is vivid in all stories in the book. This is how, after only three books of short stories, Dewan feels essential.

Azher Hosein (اظہر حسین) is a Pakistani fiction writer, poet and essayist. He edits the Quarterly Lahore۔ He lives in Lahore.

[Rizwan Mehmood · Rating 4 out of 5]

پندرہ جھوٹ اور تنہائی کی دھوپ دو ناولٹ اور دو افسانوں پر مشتمل ہے۔
“پندرہ جھوٹ اور تنہائی کی دھوپ”ایک آن لائن محبت کی داستان ہے جس کا آغاز ہی جھوٹ سے ہوا بلکہ پوری محبت کی داستان ہی جھوٹ پر مبنی ہے۔ یہ معلوم ہونے کے باوجود کہ اس رشتے میں جھوٹ اور دھوکہ ہے پھر بھی جواب میں غصہ یا رنج نہیں بلکہ حسرت ہے۔ عجیب لیکن انوکھی اور ماڈرن دور کی کہانی ہے۔

دوسری کہانی “شہر کو سیلاب لے گیا” پنجاب کے دیہی علاقے کی ہے۔ سیاسی اور سماجی حالات پر ایک گہری نظری رکھے عمدہ کرداروں پر مشتمل کہانی ہے۔ دہشت گردی، اختیارات کا ناجائز استعمال اور بدلتی سیاسی صورتحال پر مشتمل ایک تیز ٹمپو والی کہانی ہے۔

تیسری کہانی “رات بھی نیند بھی کہانی بھی”۔ ایک کراچی سے لاہور آئے پینتالیس سال کے لگ بھگ سرجن کی کہانی ہے جس کی ملاقات ایک لڑکی گڈو سے ہوتی ہے۔ گڈو کی ہر بات پر وہ لاجواب ہو جاتا ہے اور اسے حیرت ہوتی ہے کہ اس طرح ایک لڑکی سے باتوں میں ہارنا اسے اتنا برا بھی نہیں لگتا۔

چوتھی کہانی “وہ جو مایا تھی” ایک ٹیپیکل بیٹریل اسٹوری ہے۔ لیکن ایک نئے انداز میں بیان کی ہے۔

محمد اقبال دیوان صاحب کا اسلوب مختلف اور نیا ہے۔ کرداروں پر ان کو مہارت حاصل ہے۔ ناول کی شروع ہی میں بہت سے کرداروں کا تعارف کروا دیتے ہیں اور پھر آہستہ آہستہ ہر کردار کی فطرت، نیت اور سوچ کو سامنے لاتے چلے جاتے ہیں۔ شاید یہ انداز سب کے لیے نہ ہو۔ لیکن مجھے پسند آیا ہے۔