Essence of Camphor

by Naiyer Masud, Muhammad Umar Memon

Hauntingly beautiful short stories with strong affinities to Kafka and Borges, by one of the most enthralling voices to emerge from India.

Genres: India, Short Stories, Fiction, Literary Fiction

187 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Naiyer Masud (1936–2017) was an Urdu scholar and Urdu-language short story writer.

Naiyer Masud was born in 1936 in Lucknow. He did two separate PhD degrees in Urdu and Persian, and was a professor of Persian at Lucknow University. He started publishing his fictional work in the 1970s, of which four collections have appeared so far. Two collections of selected stories have appeared in English translation as Essence of Camphor and Snake Catcher, the former later also translated into Finnish, French, and Spanish. Besides fiction, he has several volumes of critical studies of classical Urdu literature to his credit and has also translated Kafka and numerous contemporary Iranian short stories. In 1977 he visited Tehran at the invitation of the Ministry of Culture, Government of Iran. He was the recipient, in 2008, of India’s highest literary award, the 17th Saraswati Samman.

Reviews

[Jim Fonseca · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of short stories from India with a lot of local color. I'll call them "mood stories:" a lot of atmosphere but very little plot. In the title story, a young, artistic man grows up observing his neighbors and neighborhood and develops a crush on a young woman who is dying. He mainly sees her on family visits and makes artistic gifts for her. This is old India, so it's not like they are going to run up to the bedroom and close the door. Another story is a bit of a ghost story focused on an old house. Another is almost a medieval tale of a laborer who steals a peacock for his daughter from the royal zoo. In another story, a death leads to a family melee over the deceased's jewelry. There is some elegant writing but little action or even psychological depth. The stories are translated from Urdu, the language of Pakistan, but these tales are set in northeast India where that language is also spoken.

[Anirban Nanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

I came to know about Naiyer Masud some months ago when I read about his sad demise in a few literary conscious online sites. Recently I started wondering about why our curiosity about a writer’s work suddenly escalates when he becomes out of reach. Articles with ten best stories and so forth popped out within days. I looked up about his writing online and read a few pages in the amazon preview and I was very impressed. It was an unpleasant surprise of discovery and joy. It was unpleasant because what I was looking for had been right there, the things I find absent in most of the great stuff had already been so nicely written by an Indian writer who had been alive all this while.
I found his short story collection The Essence of Camphor in my local Sahitya Academy library which had come out in 1998 and immediately started with it. It contains nine short stories and one novella, all beautifully translated from the original Urdu. The first story, which is the title story is about the innocence of childhood and how a scent can be evocative, even if it is not a powerful one. The boy in this story tries to imitate a kafoori sparrow but couldn’t exactly imitate no matter how many times he try. During this he develops the art of making intricate objects from clay. His diligent effort reminds a neighbouring girl of her childhood and soon they become friends. But she has been suffering from an incurable ailment. Now here Masud tries to evoke the abstract by constantly reminding the reader that there is something special about the perfume made from camphor and that particular scent is the scent of death. He does it so confidently that even a cold, rainy afternoon can incite a strange forlornness in the reader. We sometimes feel something and try to link it to something entirely absurd. When an author identifies similar things and writes them down in a fictional form, the resulting work unsettles the reader. I felt vulnerable as if the author has touched something raw in me. I had a similar feeling when I read Clarice Lispector’s stories for the first time.
In ‘Interregnum’, which is one my favourite stories in the collection, a father-son relationship has been shown in ways I seldom see. Of course, there are books like “The Master of Petersburg” that can challenge the above statement, but there is something entirely different in this story. The motherless son is possessive about his father from a very early age. His father is a mason, he designs patterns and makes sculptures. The son would hide his tools every day and he has to beat him up to let him go to work. Thus their chemistry changes with time and nearly in the end, in one afternoon, the father met an accident. He was bedridden for weeks. And there is this passage:

“After he was seated, supported by several pillows, he became absorbed in thought. Never before had he seemed to me to be a thinking individual. But now, as he sat propped up against a pile of pillows, dressed in clean and proper clothes, he was in deep thought. And, for the first time I considered the possibility that he might be my real father.”

That passage hit me. I was in awe, to be honest.
‘Sheesha Ghat’ was another story that dwells on a similar theme.
Another story I really liked is called ‘Obscure Domains of Fear and Desire’. I read a preview of this story before in Amazon. And upon finishing the story, it turned out to be strangely dreamy. Throughout, his techniques have been similar. You always feel that the author is talking about something out of your reach or grasp. I remember V.S. Naipaul once advising young writers to not go for the abstract, and go for preciseness and clarity. I believe he meant to say only the skilled and the gifted people should try to handle the abstract ideas in their writings.
Not all his stories are like this. ‘The Myna from Peacock Garden’ is a simple tale of a father trying to fulfil the wish of his daughter. In all his stories, I found his prose to be clear and precise. Masud was a gifted writer and he wrote about stuff no one writes about. I hope his works get translated in more languages, especially now that he is no more.

[Rural Soul · Rating 4 out of 5]

This review is specially for western readers who read Masud in English translations.

His stories feel so bland in English translations that sometimes non Urdu reader fails to fathom point of well crafted but yet static plot.
For that, one will have to understand structure of Urdu story or Afsana.

Urdu story heavily relies on metaphors and expressional idioms. Surrealistic themes had been used but stories are always plot centred. Moving plots are always brings out new imaginations which sometimes manipulates reality.

So here comes the point that Masud actually rebelled these notions. He used very plain sentence structure without Urdu idioms. Secondly he claimed that every story he painted is true and he didn't run his thoughts wild. The realistic atmosphere with immense sadness made these stories pointless in English but in Urdu it's unique and has an aura of magical realm.

[Shreya Kashyap · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started reading after I saw a reel where Varun Grover suggested this as one of his favourites probably. Not that I am his fan/ follower, it was just serendipitous. I was looking for a way to ease into reading once again. Almost a year had gone by and I had not finished a single book. And there it was - a collection of short stories. And by an Indian writer. And an English translation. Possibly the trifecta I was looking for.

Magical realism may not be my cup of time but the fact that Masudji was getting equated in attitudes to Kafka I was completely intrigued. And I think reading through this book finally paid off. I barely made my way through Metamorphosis but the fact that magical realism has to be taken at face value and not be ventured as a thought of the reader. It belongs much more to the writer than the reader. The writer can play mystery with the reader, leave the reader cliff-hanged, confused, able to decipher just as much as the writer wants. I was finally aligned with the genre. Much more comfortable than I was a few years ago. Although the tolerance really came after I started One Hundred Years of Solitude ... What a book... What a book ... Just bad luck that I have not finished it yet, although facing abandonment issues with the anticipated completion. This book served me with a get-out-of-jail-free card to just indulge the writer's ideation. Being led by the writer's thoughts and then play with that. However bizarre it is, however abrupt and absurd it is. Although the later stories in the collection are much more real and closed for interpretation that my feelings for the book were completely balanced out. Eased me not just into reading but reading the genre.

Lastly, the translation... The English... Superb! I would dream of writing one day the way the stories are written. I am sure the Urdu original supercedes this as well.

[Amu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Novellit ovat tyyliltään satuja. Niissä tapahtuu erikoisia, jopa yliluonnollisia asioita. Niillä on aivan oma maailmansa. Mutta niissä ei ole sadun kaavaa, ne eivät ala olipa kerran eikä loppu ole onnellinen. Tarkemmin: niissä ei ole mitään kaavaa tai sanomaa.

Novelli on minulle vaikea laji, koska usein tuntuu etten ehdi mukaan, kun tarina jo loppuu. Tässä kokoelmassa sitä ongelmaa ei ole, koska teksti on intensiivistä, täyttä ja vetävää.

[Jonathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think it's best to simply copy-and-paste my review for the Masud collection entitled "Snake Catcher", as all the same remarks apply to this book as well:

"Even to rate this book seems inappropriate. Masud is a brilliant writer. I don't know what he writes. But I'm glad I have read it. Every little sentence is so simple and makes so much sense. But when you put the simple little sentences together, none of the stories make any sense at all. Not that it's clear that Masud ever meant them too. If nothing else, these stories highlight the ambiguity of life in a manner that makes all other literature seem false and contrived by comparison."

[Tariq Ahmad Khan · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's an amazing book.

[Teodora Gheorghe · Rating 4 out of 5]

I fell in love with Masud's odd, ethereal prose after reading "Obscure Domains of Fear and Desire" (also present in this collection). He definitely deserves more recognition outside of India and Pakistan.

Thank you all who translated Naiyer Masud's work into English so that I may delight myself with these hauntingly beautiful stories, which are plotless (except for one, which I actually did not like) - they are atmospheric, almost like poetry in prose or ghost-paintings made of words and memories... They do, however, share common themes - loss, death, grief, loneliness, the intertwining of reality and imagination, and alienation. These are prevalent in all 7 stories.

Masud's narrators are alter-egos of himself, wanderers along the past's twisted corridors, which often permeate the boundaries of the present, like insidious ghouls. These lonely travelers are always confronted with the difficulty of discerning between reality and their own fantasies. This conflict, nevertheless, does not really frighten them; they find it rather intriguing despite its puzzling and often bizarre nature.

Naiyer Masud's stories give you the impression that you are dreaming - the narrator and the other characters often do not understand each other despite speaking the same language; they appear and disappear on a whim, they say weird things (like in Twin Peaks); odd individuals who talk gibberish pop up in empty houses or decrepit rooms and people die or vanish suddenly and sometimes shockingly.

Unnamed relatives, verbose women, sick family members, phony doctors, men who leave and never come back, long, creepy gazes, things rising and falling, bird and fish symbolism - these are also ingredients of a unique literary recipe concocted by Masud's brilliantly gloomy imagination.

Masud is poetic, almost metaphysical, and diaphanously subtle - even when he throws a bit of sexual innuendo in the mix.
I read a review where it was suggested that "philosophical horror" would be a suitable way to describe this "genre". Truth is, it's so hard to label it.

"Essence of Camphor" is my favorite - reminded me a bit of Yoko Ogawa's "A Scent of Ice".

[Michael Norwitz · Rating 2 out of 5]

Anthology of short stories from an Indian writer. The scenarios hold some initial interest but I found the protagonists universally annoying and the ending of each story perplexing. Perhaps they suffered in translation.

[Julie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm learning that it's OK not to understand every story. It's the ambiance and feeling that's evoked that matters.