This is not a novel of childhood.
This is a narrative that portrays a particular way of looking at the world.
Translation and childhood are in-between states, and that is where so much conflict takes place.
Mohsin Khan’s Allah Miyan’s Workshop (translated by Maaz Bin Bilal from Urdu) is a nostalgic journey the author has created, woven around a world of memories that crowd the mind of a character who reminiscences about his childhood days. In the childhood world of Gibran, the narrator, nothing is small. The two hens, Kallo and Chitkabri seem almost human to the boy. Chitkabri “would suddenly crow loudly and claw Kallo’s face.” Kallo, in contrast, is patient and composed. But she disappears one day suddenly. Allah Miyan is summoned by the child and on the strength of his word, the hen is brought back to life. “Here, I will bring your hen back to life,” assures Allah Miyan. In the child’s imagination the divine symbolises possibility—that which is lost can be brought back to life.
At one point, the narrator finds a book titled the Duniya ke Chand Azeem Log. Interestingly the child comes across the words “it does not have stories—it has actual events from the lives of people who invented useful things”. This book makes him think that the world is bigger than his home. The child now has a chance to learn about life in places that are far away from the familiar world of his geography books.
Religion for the child is not just concepts but also an atmosphere or an environment. He experiences sounds of sermons, azan, madrasas, etc. Invisible notions are also given a shape. Life after death is perceived by the child in simple terms i.e. a bridge of Sirat. The child’s experience and understanding of concepts of the afterlife and the fear of them is what religion comes to mean to him.
Khan portrays how children experience history long before they can verbalise it and even before they fully comprehend it. History is as they perceive it in relation to politics and the adults in their environment.
The title, Allah Miyan’s Workshop, suggests a space where anything is possible; losses can be mended and all loose ends tied up in order to make sense of life and reality. The novel, however, does not explore the theme of God. What it tries to portray is the human experience of making sense of the world around us.
Some other dimensions are brought to the fore in the translator’s note titled ‘Confessions of a Reluctant Translator’. “I am a poet and writer. Then why am I translating?” asks the translator. The answer to this question that Bilal has so aptly demonstrated is that in spite of the loss that every translation entails, there is also something that the translator is not losing—which they can choose to focus on. In this case, Bilal chooses to focus on the words which he feels are intrinsic to the universe of the book, both linguistically and emotionally, and hence he retains words such as madrasa, sipara, namaz, azan and Jamaat in his English translation of the novel. All these words are considered essential to the fiction’s universe, not merely on a lexical level but also as conceptions that sustain the novel’s atmosphere and content.
Translation and childhood are in-between states, and that is where so much conflict takes place–between dependence and independence, between fear and courage, between the two options of a cross-road. The translator is in between two languages– between Urdu and English–and in between his own memory of the original and his reader.
The story is seen through the eyes of a child. Therefore all events are recounted as they happen to the child. However, later in the novel Khan exposes the adult world of politics within the domestic environment. He shows how politics affects the lives of the characters in the novel but most importantly, he explains how the child in the story does not understand most of these events.
It is in this truth that Allah Miyan’s Workshop is most powerful. The novel doesn’t cancel out loss but turns it into a novel, a story. Thus the lost hen is just a memory; the kite that was flown is a symbol of freedom that has been lost; the madrasa of the story is a space of distrust and anxiety; and the dire poverty that the child narrator experiences is all a part of his growing up.
Khan has written a gentle novel in which the child is left to be himself, full of wonder and fear. He experiences things as they are and as they occur to him. His view of things has been transcribed here, and that view has been retained by the translator. This is not a novel of childhood though. It’s a novel that portrays a particular way of looking at the world. The place where Gibran grew up is not going to be there anymore but the courtyard of Allah Miyan’s Workshop of lost things will remain as a personal souvenir.
The novel does not bring back the lost things of the Workshop. Instead it makes readers bring back to life the many losses they may have suffered in their own journeys.
(Wani Nazir is the author of two collections of poetry: ‘…and the silence whispered’ and ‘The Chill in the Bones.’ He is a senior lecturer in the Department of Education, J&K and writes prose and poetry)
