Of Babies and Butchery: Dur e Aziz Amina's 'You Get What Is Yours' is one of the better Salam Award winners

This is part four 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. 'You Get What Is Yours' was the fifth winner. Reviews for the other winners can be found here. 

That’s how the past works—after a house has burned down, who can tell where the first match was struck.

The fifth Salam Award winner is a short story that manages to have what the previous ones didn’t even come close to achieving: the decency of actually having a coherent plot. And while allowing the readers to connect the dots from start to finish would seem, to some, to be the most basic requirement of any story, it felt like those writing for this award as well as those involved in selecting the winners were taking this simple necessity as more of a casual formality, which is the main reason why I was so pleasantly surprised by this particular tale. 

I knew that was the night destinies were written, and I knew what the writers of destiny thought of unborn demons that grew inside unmarried women. 

Dur-e-Aziz Amina has written a good story, albeit one that mostly follows the lines set down by the earlier ones in terms of themes. Honestly, a month later I’ve all but forgotten all of the preceding prize winners already, which should give you some idea of how interesting they were. But what I do remember are the vague threads of religion and agency interspersed in the lives of their female characters, who are the protagonists of each winning tale. Which makes it even more baffling that I didn’t like any of them, since I’m usually pretty highly inclined to tilt pleasantly towards tales with female characters dominating the narrative.  

I have never been with a man, but I can tell you this—women are a much deeper joy. We eat simply and dance joyously. Do you know that when the drummer hits the dhol on the men’s side, no one dances more than I do? Veeray, you can’t understand this, but if any man saw his wife in here, I bet he would not recognize her for the bliss on her face.

As a tale, this fifth winner is pretty well done. Easy to read, and short enough to swallow without getting boring, it still manages to pack a punch. Told from the point of view of a woman telling another the whole story, our setting is a Sufi shrine in Multan where a female saint, highly unorthodox as a saint because of her gender, takes a vow of chastity in order to appease the community into letting her keep her elevated status, and then promptly gets pregnant.

As a devotee and the main caretaker of the saint in this story, our protagonist, Safia, doesn’t really show much of her personality throughout. Instead, most of the story revolves around the Saint herself, and the ways in which people, especially women, come to these places to ask the saints to intercede on their behalf with Allah for all manners of things.

“Behnee, you weep so much, no wonder our river is drying up,” I say, and they laugh, as if suddenly remembering that they can do that—turn their sorrows into demented joy. Then they make jokes about their husbands’ shriveled penises, their rotund mothers-in-law, the children they love dearly but sometimes want to smother with pillows.

Writing about shrines isn’t a new and original move by any stretch for a Pakistani author, and we can easily find mentions of such practices in every one out of five South Asian books. However, the argument that one must create something new and original is by no means a requirement of good storytelling. After all, most stories are just different amalgamations of the same few elements in different ways, and if every Pakistani tale is stereotyped as being obsessed with religion or corruption, what matters is how the same old repetitive themes are covered. In the former winners of this award, religion was as faithfully mentioned as it is in this short tale, but because I was so bored during the reading of them, it didn’t feel worth talking about. Over here, Amina also incorporates the presence of religious teachings into her narrative, in a manner that initially used to shock me, but has now made me realize that jolting readers through contentious Islamic content is a thing a lot of desi writers seem to be enamoured with.

Look, I know what brings these women to the shrine. It is what brought me here, all those years ago. Islam tells us to pray five times a day, but should I count for you the number of times I have seen anyone on a prayer mat in my fifteen years here? I could, and it would take mere seconds. There’s a reason our beloved Bibo Mai’s forehead creases slightly when anyone talks too much about Allah. If Allah were enough, why would we be here?

Of course, the usual issues that bother me, and bothered me so maddeningly in the aforementioned tales, were also present here to some degree. Not only was the italicization all over the place, but there were also random editing errors that made me want to pull my hair out in frustration. This, then, is the reason why Pakistani literature awards can never hope to compete on a global level, because stupid mistakes in proofreading and editing are absolutely inexcusable when you’re working with such high stakes. If we’re ever hoping to create a name for ourselves with our literature, if we’re going to claim that winning these awards carries real prestige, we simply can’t allow such silly blunders to be so visibly present where these award-winners are displayed. Stories can allow for interpretations. Insufferably bad editing simply cannot.

But how could she not care forherself?

All in all, a good enough tale, nothing that I’d jump up and down in excitement about, but also so much better than the earlier winners that it shines in comparison. With this review done, we’re now reaching this year’s winner, and I have all my fingers and all my toes crossed that the latest offering will, hopefully, optimistically, prove to be the best.

Men want our bodies, but they don’t want to know what happens inside them.