Of Stories and Staleness: Nihal Ijaz Khan's 'The Smokecense of Pluvistan' feels like squandered potential

This is part three 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 Smokecense of Pluvistan' was the fourth winner. Reviews for the other winners can be found here. 

I really really wanted to like this story. Primarily because I want to support the Salam Award and what it stands for, but also because I thought the first two winners just plain sucked. Unfortunately, I’m one short story away from giving up on this award as a whole.

“Is hunger a forever thing, Papa?”

Once again, the best I can say is that there were some good parts. Admittedly few, and mostly hard to find, but they were lingering here and there. Buried under a story that literally made no sense to me. And while I get that the magical, dream-like, allegorical strands of storytelling that can exist in this type of genre are meant to be read between the lines, there were points where I literally couldn’t understand what was happening. That is something I have, in fact, encountered before in the works of South Asian writers such as Usman Tanweer Malik, whose The Vaporization Enthalpy of a Peculiar Pakistani Family made almost no sense. But the difference between this story and Malik’s works is that Malik had a greater degree of control over his craft, whereas Nihal Ijaz Khan clearly doesn’t.

Usually at this stage in a review I’d try to at least summarize what the story was about in order to convey some sort of idea about what a reader could expect, but in this case I’m drawing a complete blank. A man and his daughter roam around some sort of magical land where there’s rain and then sunlight, and there was something about his wife’s bloated toe, and hunger, and an injured dog, and what was that about the heaventree again? I couldn’t tell you, because I have absolutely no idea. Even the worldbuilding was confused and all over the place, and elicited all sorts of frustrated ramblings from me at my friend about the ethics of using one language (Urdu, in this case) as a tool in a tale told in another language (English).

The elders, who were called Buzurghs, scavenged the Pind in search of prayer signatures and parties to sermonize. 

This quirky little trick of building up your world by using Urdu words as proper nouns is something I’ve noticed in works by other South Asian writers as well, but it doesn’t get any less irritating. At the beginning I just considered it lazy writing. After all, how convenient if, for example, instead of making up a specific name for the elders in a community, we can just say they are called ‘Buzurghs’? How easy, but also how ridiculously uncreative! Because sometimes the best part of reading fantasy or supernatural as a genre is the absolutely fantastical ways in which authors can set up the worlds which our characters inhabit. Using words from Urdu used to feel like a cop-out, although I’m now starting to wonder, could it be a compliment? Do these authors think they’re adding an extra layer of representation by putting in these little sign posts for desi readers and desi readers only to understand? Should I be flattered to know that if an author calls the village birth attendants ‘Dai’, I know, as an Urdu speaker, that Dai is literally the word for the midwife in my mothertongue?

Human breaths slipped out from their lungs to settle under their skin, and when a group of Dais, the village birth attendants, swore upon witnessing a newborn slipping out from a mother’s womb as a distillation of smoke, the Buzurghs finally announced it was the end of life.

I’m not sure. I’m not sure at all, so I’m going to do what I’ve been doing so far, that is, engage in long-winded debates with my friends to try to find a solution to this pernickety little thing that I can’t let go of. Just like my inability to be at peace with the italicization of text in any story whatsoever, and what style guide was being followed. Usually, as a rule most publishers will italicize the word that belongs to another language. But if a South Asian author is using Buzurgh as a proper noun, then it can’t be italicized, because it is then part of the world building. In which case, why was the word ‘Dai’ italicized in this story? And more importantly, why are the editors of these short stories so useless at their jobs?

In those days, as they shuffled in the vacuumed streets, waiting for their meals from the sun showers that had grown infrequent, Mumtaz often wondered if they were last humans alive.

I mean, actual words were missing from sentences. It’s a short story. That won an award. Up on the official website. How are these basic mistakes slipping through the cracks? I feel like the more I wanted to support this award and what it stood for, the more I found reasons to be disillusioned with its prestige. Even improper comma placement, which I generally find easier to ignore since it can sometimes be subjective, bothered me to no end, and my usual generosity in terms of forgiving unwieldy editing found itself at its limits.

Streets, which one day were narrow and muddy and abutted by nests of hawkers and the limbs of encroaching houses would next be eroded into barren, swollen plateaus. 

I think the thing that frustrated me the most was the fact that the story had the potential to be good. In pretty much the same vein as the other Salam award-winners, this one also felt like it could have been something better, if only with a little bit of pointed guidance. Even convoluted plotlines and obscure worldbuilding can be forgiven in a story that feels purposeful and entertaining, such as Usman T. Malik’s Pauper Prince, my favourite example of a story that makes little sense but still manages to engage its readers. Fairly odd stuff I’m willing to wade through, but the fact that it’s so boring is what makes the whole endeavour truly depressing. At one point during the reading of this story I actually had to shift tabs and mindlessly scroll through social media to wake myself up before I could get back to forcing myself to finish it. On the whole, I’d say give this a miss.