Ababil
A translation of an Urdu short story by the renowned Indian film director and author Khwaja Ahmad Abbas.
His name was Rahim Khan, but there had seldom been a man as cruel as him. The whole village trembled upon hearing his name. Once, one of the ironsmith’s boys had fastened a few nails to the tail of Rahim’s ox. Rahim Khan beat up the boy mercilessly, until the poor child collapsed unconscious. The following day, a government officer’s mare wandered into his fields—Rahim Khan gave it a thrashing that left it bloodied.
People began talking amongst themselves: this wretched man had even lost the fear of God. “His name may be Rahim (merciful) but he is a brute. Nothing about him suggests mercy. Be it the innocent or the speechless, Rahim does not spare anyone from his rage. This is how he flaunts his status as a Rangarh. He will surely experience the depths of hellfire.”
But all of this, they only dared whisper behind his back—none spoke it to his face. Once, a poor man, marked by terrible luck, overflowed with courage, and confronted him: “O Rahim Khan, why do you strike the blameless?” This was more than enough for Rahim Khan to unleash his anger and batter him to no end. It turned out to be the last time any villager ever spoke to Rahim, as they collectively decided to give him the silent treatment. Unsure of what he may take objection to, the sight of him was enough for everyone in the vicinity to turn and walk away.
Despite the shunning, Rahim continued to go about his day. He would often be seen in the distance with his shovel hanging over his shoulders, treading toward his pastures. He would not speak to anyone on the way; instead, treating his livestock as men, he took to having conversations with them. He gave both of his oxen names, patting one on the back and calling him Nathu and the other Shidu. While ploughing, he would exclaim loudly: “Why Nathu, do you think your father is going to complete this corner?” and, “Shidu, looks like your turn has come.” Indeed, their turn to be punished—he would thrash their backs with his thick bamboo stick, covering their hides with lacerations. Then, he would begin lashing their thighs. Nathu and Shidu too began fearing his menacing voice and trembled in fear upon catching sight of him.
In the evening, Rahima would return home and vent on his wife and children. The trigger could be trivial: his daal or saag hadn’t been salted, and he would whip his wife until her contused skin produced ghastly bruises; one of his sons had played some mischief, and Rahima would hang him upside down and strap him until the child choked down his wails. Trouble was forever brewing. Rahim Khan would step into his neighbourhood and his household would fall silent. His children would stop playing and rush inside, looking for places to hide. Enduring his fits of rage had reduced Rahim’s wife to a half-dead state. At the age of forty, she looked sixty. The young children had bided their time; as soon as the eldest son Nooran turned twelve, he ran off to a village close by and began living with one of his uncles.
A few days later, Rahima’s wife, her nerves frayed, mustered some courage and beseeched Rahima: “If you go to Halaspur, please bring Nooran back.” Rahim turned red: “Why should I bring that rascal back? Should he return, I will flay his feet and throw him outside.” Two and a half years passed: his younger son Bindu followed suit and joined his brother at their uncle’s residence. Rahim Khan’s wife remained the solitary object of his wrath. She had grown accustomed to regular beatings. But one day, Rahim tortured her so viciously that she gave up and, finding the opportunity, packed for her father’s house. She told her neighbour to inform Rahim that she had left for her father’s village in Ramnagar.
When he returned that evening, he was told of his wife’s departure—but instead of expressing any outrage, he quietly went off looking for his oxen. After all, he was sure, his wife would never return. When he found the bulls and returned to tie them at his house, he came across a little cat meowing around his yard. He grabbed the cat by the tail and flung her outside. There was neither wood in his kitchen nor any rotis cooked for him. Seething with anger, he laid on his bed to sleep.
When he woke up, the day was bright and the sun was shining. But today, for once, he was not impatient to leave for his fields. He drank goat milk in the house’s yard and filled his hookah to smoke on his charpai. By now the sun had flooded his front yard. He noticed some cobwebs in the corner i the ceiling and decided to clean them. Tying a cloth to a stick, he embarked on his mission. Hidden among the tiles, he discovered a nest of a few black swallows, known as Ababils. Two of the birds kept hopping in and out of the nest.
His first impulse was to do away with the nest with his stick at once. But then he grabbed a teapoy and climbed it, and began pondering the nest closely. Two small red nestlings were screaming, the two parents standing guard around them. Rahim had only extended his hand towards the nest for a moment when suddenly the mother Ababil pecked at him. “Are you going to fight me?” he growled. He climbed down the teapoy, and so the nest was spared from destruction.
The next day, Rahim returned to work on his farmland as usual. None of the villagers spoke to him, and he would return to his house before sunset. He would then sit on the bed with his hookah and intently observe the nest. The nestlings gradually began peeking their beaks outside the nest and slowly learned to fly. Rahim named them after his two sons. Now, these four birds were his only friends in the world: the two Ababils and their two fledglings. The people of the village were amazed, for no one had seen him beating his oxen in a while: Nathu and Shidu appeared happier, and the lacerations on their backs had almost healed.
One day, Rahim returned from the fields earlier than usual and came across a few boys practicing Kabaddi. They noticed him approaching and ran barefoot, expecting him to rain blows on them for no reason. Rahim was left yelling: “O my in-laws, stand for a moment! I am not going to eat you.” The sky was engulfed by dark clouds and the boys continued sprinting away despite Rahim’s appeals.
The grey skies compelled him to rush home, dragging his cattle with him. Just as he arrived, the clouds finally roared and unleashed rain with a vengeance. Rahim shut the door and lit a lamp. Just as he had done every day, he crumbled an old piece of roti and dropped the bits about the nest, shouting “O Bindu! O Noora!”—the names he had given to the two little fledglings. But they did not appear. When he checked the nest, he found all four birds with their faces tucked in their feathers, huddled together rather meekly. Rainwater dribbled onto their nest from a hole in the roof. Rahim figured that if water kept trickling, it would ruin their nest, and leave them homeless. He stepped out in the pouring rain and climbed the roof. By the time he had plugged the hole in the roof with mud, and returned inside, Rahim was drenched to the bone. He began sneezing, but paying it no heed, he changed his clothes and went to sleep in his charpai.
Upon waking up the next day, he was stricken with fever and body aches. But who was there to ask about his health? Who would bring him any medicine or food? He lay there for two days in a half-conscious state.
When people noticed his absence from his fields, they began to worry: perhaps he had fallen ill. They had observed a positive transformation in his demeanour; they had seen his genial, warm attempt to talk with the kabaddi-playing children, and the way he now treated his cattle. He no longer cussed every other person he saw. This moved the villagers to visit his house, however reluctantly. They peered inside—not a sound. Rahim lay in bed, speaking to himself. “O Bindu, O Noora, where have you gone? Who is going to feed you today?”
The birds were fluttering around his room. The onlookers wondered if Rahim had turned mad. Kalu Jimidar shook his head, and decided they should call the hospital the next morning, and have him sent to the mental asylum. None dared approach him, afraid he may pounce at them at any moment.
The next morning, the villagers brought the hospital staff to Rahim’s gate. They opened his door and found him dead, the four Ababils perched solemnly with their heads lowered.
Addendum
ਫਰੀਦਾ ਪੰਖ ਪਰਾਹੁਣੀ ਦੁਨੀ ਸੁਹਾਵਾ ਬਾਗੁ ॥ ਨਉਬਤਿ ਵਜੀ ਸੁਬਹ ਸਿਉ ਚਲਣ ਕਾ ਕਰਿ ਸਾਜੁ ॥— O Fareed, the bird is a guest in the world’s charming garden. The morning drums are beating, prepare to depart. (Sheikh Farid, Guru Granth Sahib anga 1382)
“My sweet little sisters, birds of the sky, you are bound to heaven, to God, your Creator.” (St. Francis of Assisi, as recorded in the Little Flowers of Saint Francis, c. 13th century)
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The three daemons of Punjab
Away from the commodified, flat, bright and sanitized representations of Punjabi folk and vernacular cultures in cinema, music, and other cultural media: we find in the medieval age the consolidation of a distinctly ‘Punjabi’ ethnos, informed by three broad currents: the violence of tribal and honor cultures, a generous spirit of romance, and devotional traditions. Here, the brutality of blood feuds and vendettas is coterminous with the tenderness of romance, the warmth of fraternity, kinship; these, in turn, are subsumed by a ubiquitous devotional aura centered around divine intermediaries. These, we may offer, are the interpenetrating vectors of Punjab’s folk landscape. These are what Goethe may call the daemonic: elementary powers, forces of nature, numinous conduits, minor gods, sovereign impulses vying to dissipate themselves through various earthly vessels that have roamed the unfolding pages of Punjab’s turbulent history.
And so: love, war, and piety. They co-exist as a matter-of-fact reality: bursts of violence brusquely rip through the text with a casual, nonchalant savagery; the fires of love course under the surface of the narratives with a menacing pulse; the impulse towards religiosity and mysticism stirs every verse. As a people given to a sovereign, freely hemorrhaging excess of emotions, the Punjabis’ tales reflect narratives driven by a profoundly heightened emotional and spiritual tenor.
The daemon of war: one may venture to ascribe a certain nihilistic character to Punjab’s peasant/tribal violence. It is a self-existing, seething, turbulent mass governed by the logic of acquisition, honor, and competition. Over centuries, various ideological currents—religious, tribal, political, cultural—have sought to orient and lend specific velocities to this torrential energy. Beneath all ideological facades, in practical terms, what defines Punjab is the right of might, the force of will, the reign of passion.
Perhaps it is on account of this daemon’s utter dominance that it is necessarily tempered by love and piety: humanized, so to speak, in service (however illusory, however tenuously) of a legible, civilized cosmos. It is in the happy balance of this trifecta that the Punjabi character finds its highest and most complete manifestation.
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Khwaja Ahmad Abbas’s swallows
Khwaja Ahmad Abbas helmed some of the earliest cinematic works of Indian neorealism, winning the Palme d’Or in 1941 for Neecha Nagar. He also scripted Raj Kapoor’s celebrated films like Awaara, Mera Naam Joker, Bobby, etc. As a scriptwriter, film director, author and columnist, Abbas’s prolific output endeavored to realistically present the plight of the poor, to contextualize the difference between the privileged and the deprived, the ravages of communalism during the 1940s, and the heroism of the common man in the face of insurmountable odds. In January 1947, Mulk Raj Anand wrote to Abbas: “The strength of your short stories, my dear Abbas, lies in the fact that you have grasped the weaknesses of your characters amid their strengths.”
‘Ababil’ was Khwaja Ahmad Abbas’s first short story, written when he was twenty-six. In the figure of Rahim Khan, a Ranghar peasant, we find the daemon of war triumphant: the bellicose, brusque spirit of the Punjabi hinterland drained of all spirituality and tenderness, bereft of piety and intimacy. Rahim Khan exists to make war with the world. Meaningless, relentless war. He is driven by a hatred far from the state of grace, sparing none—not his wife, not his children, nor his cattle or the villagers—alienating himself from the whole village.
In a sense, Rahim Khan is a strikingly contemporary figure: an ill-tempered, alienated man living in the absence of God, punctuating the dreary rhythm of rural routine with meaningless bouts of violence. After all, violence is only justified in pursuit of a higher ideal, of constructing an ethos, a cosmos. What Rahim inhabits is the chaos of self-consuming bitterness, alienated from the power of love and devotion, impressed his misery upon others through beatings. By the time the swallows show up in Abbas’s short story, Rahim’s children have run away, his wife has left him, and his village shuns him. If anything, he is more isolated than ever, alone in his hut away from the wider cosmos of the village.
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Despite their brief presence in the narrative, the titular ababils are the central motif in the tale. It is these four birds, his only friends, that break through Rahim’s sullen and alienated psyche. It is in Rahim’s interaction with these birds that we are presented with poignant glimpses of his capacity for love. It is through the birds that the crude and hard-hearted Rahim is revealed to be a man of inarticulate sorrows, capable of dignity and love.
The swallows represent divine grace: think of St. Assisi’s sermon to the birds, or the ever-present birds that fill the miniature illustrations of devotional and hagiographic texts like the Sikh janamsakhis. ‘Ababil,’ the miracle birds of the Surah Al-Fil, defending the Kaaba. The birds and the animals, God’s dumb creatures, free from the burden of human consciousness (for it is our lot to strive for the Guru’s lotus-feet), live in an effortless state of what Bhogal terms the ‘animal sublime.’ ਕੁਦਮ ਕਰੇ ਪਸੁ ਪੰਖੀਆ ਦਿਸੈ ਨਾਹੀ ਕਾਲੁ ॥—Frolic the beasts and the birds, [for] they do not see death.
Characteristically, Rahim’s first impulse is to destroy the nest. But in the two swallows nursing their little fledglings, Rahim finds a measure of domestic harmony that perhaps never took root under his roof before. The most touching detail of the story, expressed deftly without any pathos: he names the young fledgling ababils after his own sons. Bindu and Noora. Tossing them little morsels of roti, climbing the roof to plug the hole above their little nest: Rahim finds a taste of duty and service. This is also reflected in his treatment of his cattle, whom he no longer thrashes (“they appeared happier”), and his interaction with the distant villagers, whom he no longer cusses. The somber and bitter overtone of the tale is cleansed by Rahim’s beatific transformation, one that arrives only after he has lost everything. Where society failed to temper his wretchedness, the God that resides in nature (the enchanted world) finds a way into his heart. As an empty vessel, he readily receives the grace represented by the little birds. At last, the harmony of love, war, piety. Here we find Punjab’s highest character emerge through Abbas’s pen.
This redemptive arc finds a feverish climax in the days leading up to his death, alone in his home. This death doubles as tragic and beatific. Yes, he has lost his family, and his death cuts short a life that seems to have found song and meaning again; and yet, it is in keeping with the classical logic of “a man’s daemon is his fate.”
At the same time, he departs not in familiar ignominy but in a rarefied state of grace, consumed by an almost devotional love for the swallows (even in his delirium, he worries about feeding little Bindu and Noora). The act of braving the vicious rain, climbing the roof and plugging the hole: this is his redemptive gesture, this the act of grace that signals the conquest of nihilistic, relentless violence by the light of love and piety. This, then, informs his lasting fate: the daemon of love (and in love, the reciprocal current of piety).
It is, after all, His will that signals our arrival into and departure from this mortal coil. If we are to leave at an unknown ineluctable hour, is it not good and virtuous to leave in a state of selfless and sublime grace? Does Rahim Khan not leave in a state of grace, surrounded by the four mournful swallows, his last and dearest friends (his heralds, procession, psychopomps)?
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