Of Prizes and Pointlessness: Firuza Pastakia's 'The Universe is a Conscientious Garden' is pretty underwhelming as an award winner

This is part one of reviewing short stories which won The Salam Award for Imaginative Fiction, which promotes science fiction and related genres of writing in Pakistan, and includes everything from regular science fiction and steampunk to magic realism and weird fiction. 'The Universe is a Conscientious Garden' was the first winner. Reviews for the other winners can be found here. 

In my review for The Tallest Woman, the short story that won the Zeenat Haroon Rashid Writing Prize for Women, I mentioned how excited I was about the mere idea of awards given for local writing. As a person who likes to read and review Pakistani literature, there’s something very appealing to me about any attempt to promote and encourage said literature. But while The Tallest Woman laid to rest my fear that the first winner of an award might not be that good, ‘The Universe is a Conscientious Garden’ did the complete opposite and proved me completely right.

Every other Sunday afternoon until she was eleven, Katy Cooper went to her grandmother’s for tea.

The beginning is interesting enough. A young girl spending her days in her grandmother’s garden discovers a key, and then there’s a box, and some magic, and it was by that point that I was scrolling down to check how much of it was left. I simply couldn’t feel any interest. So much of the narrative was disjointed, with no cohesive thought to turn it into a whole.

With stories like these, I sometimes used to wonder whether it was just me and not necessarily the narrative. Given how I have come to terms with the reality of my love-hate relationship with the short story format, it wasn’t too big a stretch. But I find that I am no longer so forgiving of poor narratives or futile characters because I have encountered short stories that are amazing in terms of storytelling. And if they can exist, then that means that there is simply no excuse for such poor storytelling.

It’s not that the story is truly horrible per say. It’s just that it feels sort of pointless. And while I don’t expect literature to necessarily educate me or change my worldview in new and amazing ways every single time, I don’t believe it’s so unreasonable a request to ask for at least some emotion created within us in response to the author’s words. Unfortunately, what I mostly felt was a blank nothingness. I was neither entertained nor curious. Throughout the whole story I kept waiting to get to the part that would hook me in to the characters’ lives or troubles, and it just never came.

But it’s entirely possible, and I’m willing to admit this openly, that it wasn’t the story itself but the absolutely bonkers presentation of it that ruined the experience. Honestly, halfway through the reading experience I was forced to wonder what issue the website designers for the award had with darker fonts. My poor eyes suffered terribly throughout the whole ordeal, and reading the light grey text was such a chore. This was particularly irritating to me because back when I was a new and fresh-faced editor, still believing that it was only the text that mattered in a published book, it felt remarkable to me how many of our conversations revolved around font size and colour and paragraph formatting and so on and so forth. These little details which affect your reading experience mostly remain invisible to the average reader, but in the background these particulars are checked with a fine-tooth comb because so much of it matters.

Honestly even the colour of the font wouldn’t have been as big an issue if the random paragraph breaks hadn’t made an appearance. Whoever did the final formatting of the website page was an idiot of a superior quality, because lines broke off in between sentences and erratically jumped onto the next one. Since these were so absolutely haphazard, I find it hard to believe that this could have been the author’s intention, and can only blame whoever placed this text on the website for this ridiculous error, which was repeatedly generously throughout the text and infuriated me continuously.

Consider for a moment the humble box and its peculiar properties. It is a thing in itself, an object in its own right, deserving of an independent life and identity. Whether punched and folded and stapled into shape from a sheet of cardboard or moulded and filigreed and soldered from a slab of gold, a box is like an opening sentence, a first step, a pre-meeting

meeting. For it to exist, for its life to have a purpose, for it to be worth opening, a box must contain something.

The reason I questioned myself at the abrupt stops the sentences took in the middle of the page to jump to the next line was because the author did, in fact, take a few creative liberties in her abundant usage of clauses and/or phrases instead of sentences. And while I understand that the whole point of fiction is to allow writers to use language in new and inventive ways, I only find that I can forgive it when I am sufficiently impressed. And impressed I was not, especially when I encountered spelling errors as well.

And when a misplaced key mysteriously reappears, there are forces are work that are clamouring to be heard.

How has such a short story, award winning and up on the website, not been edited to remove these errors? The lack of professional cleanliness was so bothersome. There was the promise of brilliance throughout the story, coated in a thin veneer of the kind of flowery writing I used to read in my university literature newsletter. The editor in me died a slow, torturous death at the lack of a guiding hand. An author like this deserves better, honestly, and I hope Firuza Pastakia finds one soon, because I can easily admit that this same story would have worked better as a novella, or even a full-length novel. There was potential, and then it was squandered.

Ordinary people are not the stuff of history. Butchers and bakers and candlestick makers, what good are their stories? They die and the world sighs and blinks and whizzes on without them. Their histories, if they survive at all, are little more than fragments, traces in the silence of a sentence, whispers in the lyrics of a half- remembered song. 

I genuinely think I would have enjoyed it more if the formatting had been more rigorously checked. The same thing in a better font style with better colour and a cleaner layout would have a much better reception. Which just goes to show that at the end of the day, there’s a reason why publishing is a whole industry with designers and compositors and other experts involved in the printing of a book, because otherwise you get the unholy mess that is this website. As it is, I didn’t much care for the story at all, and am all sorts of amazed that this is the final winner of what must have multiple entries. Whenever a bad story gets published, I always think, who was the editor who commissioned this piece, or approved of its publication in the first place? With this story, I am forced to wonder: how bad were the other entries, that this is what finally won the award?

Here’s holding out hope that the other winners present something better.