Darkness and Other Stories

Razia Sajjad Zaheer’s stories are gentle and unassuming tales that describe the lives of ordinary women—a homemaker, a teacher, a writer, a sex worker—whose struggles simply to be themselves, or to make sense of the realities they see around them, mark them as extraordinary. A low caste woman shows up society’s hypocrisy in dealing with caste and, in doing so, turns the mirror on her own tendency to do the same. A working woman, a mother and writer, grapples with how to deal with her over-helpful house help, a man, who thinks he knows that when she asks for tea, he must instead serve her milk. A writer travels alone on a train at night, fearful that she may be attacked by the sinister-seeming men around her, only to find that they are fans of her writing. Every story offers a situation that readers may easily recognise and relate to, and each then suggests a complex twist or an ambivalence that is sometimes elusive and sometimes illuminating. Saba Mahmood Bashir’s competent and accessible translation brings the work of this important writer—which has thus far received little attention—to life for readers of today.

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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.

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.