Of Cyborgs and Close-minded Societies: Hamza Sarfraz's 'Being a Putla' tries to introduce something cool but ultimately fails

Cover Art – Summer 2022 Issue

Having technology embedded in your body doesn’t make you less of a human, and yet, at the same time, it doesn’t make your more than a human either. You remain as you always are. A flawed being, restricted by the bounds of the society you live in. 

I think the nicest thing I could say about this story is that I wish someone else had written it.

By which I mean to say that it’s a good story, a great one even. It’s got lots of interesting things going on: a future in which humans become cyborgs to treat medical problems, the slurs and dehumanization that comes with such a reality, and the guy who has gone through the procedure tasked with convincing other patients that it’s worth the hassle. I’m not sure how much of this is regurgitated sci-fi from existing books, given that my exposure to the genre is so limited, but it felt interesting enough to read.

For five years now, I have been assigned the tiring and ultimately annoying job of convincing hopeless patients that getting cybernetic implants on their bodies is their only solution.

Adan Jaleel is our young protagonist, a person who has a full cybernetic body after a tragic accident at a young age. He is routinely called in to the hospital where more patients come in for the treatment, standing in as an example of a successful surgery, and someone who can attest to the fact that life doesn’t change after such a change. Of course, all his reassurances are completely false, as proven by his own lived experience, where he faces insults, covert glances, and the strong, undeniable feeling that he just doesn’t quite fit in like the other humans do.

I couldn’t but help feel bad when my entire existence was misidentified, and due to what? The ignorance of people who do not understand science? The casual disregard for humans like me who had no option but to make this choice for their bodies?

Adan had the possibility of being a very complex, very fascinating character. I can’t actually remember whether I’ve read a story from the point of view of the cyborg before (see earlier sentence about my limited interest in science fiction), and the whole concept of being less of a human because you have machine parts keeping you alive seems to be rife with potential. Unfortunately, the writing in the story, well. It’s kind of boring.

He had called me a Putla. Ouch.

Surely it’s weird that a narrative, even one which includes a first person perspective, hass ‘Ouch’ or ‘Ugh’ as one complete sentence right in the middle of sentences of longer length. I know that it’s an artistic choice to write this way, but reading is also a subjective experience, which means one can decide to like it or not, and to me it just felt weird and gimmicky. But it’s not even the randomly interspersed interjections that were the real problem. It was just that the writing was simply not polished enough to be published. Maybe an editor’s sharp eye could have whipped it into shape a little more, except clearly the editor over here wasn’t even checking for formatting or correct comma usage, much less taking the time to work on developmental edits.

I would have to  convince another person that I was not a Putla’and neither would they be if they agreed to go through this procedure.

An extra space after that fourth word, completely visible and highly frustrating to the editorial eye, as well as an apostrophe where there should be a comma. What kind of mistakes are these? How is no one spotting them? That first quote at the top had a 'your' where there should have been a 'you'. As we go on in the story, we’ll more find misspelled words, commas where they shouldn’t be, and the right punctuation marks missing from places where for all intents and purposes they should be present. I’ve been complaining about the bad editing in stories printed in this online catalogue of South Asian writing for a while, and this story is just one amongst the many that have managed to disappoint me in how unprofessional they are, how unready to be presented to the reader.

I clenched my fingers again, and it was then I realized that in the silence that had followed, my hands had made the whirring sound that disturbs people so much. Ugh. 

Set in Lahore in 2060, the rest of the world building was super ambiguous and utterly disappointing. The story could have been set absolutely anywhere, within any vague moment of time in the future, which meant that the location of Lahore and the year 2060 didn’t actually have any effect on the story itself. But I was prepared to forgive that if the characters or the writing would just blow me away, and while the bare bones of the idea itself felt compelling and worth creating a narrative around, ultimately both the plot and the writing itself felt amateurish and not fully utilized. So while I can appreciate what the story was trying to do, and I am intrigued by the idea itself, I’d say the execution left something to be desired. 

Overall, in the list of science fiction written by desi authors, I think one can give this a solid miss.

Being a Putla by Hamza Sarfraz was published in Issue 003 (Summer 2022) of Tasavvur, an online portal for South Asian writing. The remaining reviews for other Tasavvur stories by Pakistani authors can be found here.