Darkness

An excerpt from “Darkness and Other Stories,” a story about a woman who finds herself on a long, unusual train journey.

Razia Sajjad ZaheerTranslated by Saba Mahmood Bashir

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A monsoon night, a light drizzle. Old Delhi railway station: the train for Amritsar stands, some coaches plunged in darkness, others sporadically bathed in light. It’s eight o’clock. The train is to leave at nine but its inside lights have not yet been switched on. The scattered lights on the platform dimly glow up some of the compartments. The number ‘I’ is visible on one of them; this must be a first-class coach.

The notice outside the door had her name printed on it. She saw coolies coming towards the train, and wondered if they were coming to her coach to put more luggage in it. If the coolies were accompanied by a woman in decent clothes, she would wish for the woman to enter her coach; but it was likely that once she noticed the ‘I’, the woman would invariably move on.

She felt a sudden surge of anger at her husband. How many times had she asked him not to book a first-class ticket? The train passed through all of Punjab — what if she was all alone in the coach? Of what use was comfort if one had to spend the entire night in fear? She felt…

Pause here for now.

Razia Sajjad Zaheer

Razia Sajjad Zaheer, commonly known as Razia Apa in literary circles, was born in 1917 in Rajasthan. At the age of 20, she married Sajjad Zaheer, a member of the Communist Party and one of the founders of the Progressive Writers’ Association. She got a Master’s degree in Allahabad. Her life changed when, shortly after she married, her husband was given a two-year prison sentence for his revolutionary activities. Razia took to writing, teaching and translating to make ends meet and, over time, managed the running of the household as well. She worked hard to bring her husband’s works to public attention, and continued to write alongside. She received several awards for her work, including the Nehru Award (1966) and the Uttar Pradesh Sahitya Akademi Award (1972). She passed away in 1979.

Translator

Saba Mahmood Bashir

Saba Mahmood Bashir is a poet, author, translator, and assistant professor at the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. She did her doctorate on the poetry of Gulzar. Her first book was a collection of poems, Memory Past (2006), and was followed by several others including I Swallowed the Moon: The Poetry of Gulzar (2013). She has also translated Gulzar’s screenplays of Munshi Premchand’s Godaan and Nirmala and Other Stories (2016) along with fiction by Premchand and Saadat Hasan Manto. Her recent books are Aandhi: Insights Into the Film and Women of Prey, a translation of selected stories by Manto.