Of Mughals and Myths: Fatima Taqvi's 'The Third Feather' blends history and fantasy together in cool but confusing ways
 |
| Cover Art – Winter 2022 Issue |
Sometimes I read a story and I simply have no idea what it
means or what the ending is or what it wants to say. This is one of those
stories. Granted, it started off simple enough, but then it veered into a
direction that I think I understood?
A little? Somewhat?
No. Not really.
The starting was clear enough. A woman has magical feathers.
She burns the feathers to get wishes. All of this is introduced to us in a
really cool setting: that of the early sixteenth century subcontinent, with our
heroine and her husband on the run along with Emperor Humayun, who is fleeing
after his military defeat at the hands of Sher Shah Suri. I loved the fact that
Amerkot Fort (which I always read at Umerkot in most history lessons) figured
so prominently right at the beginning, to give us a sense of where we were, and the question of when exactly in history we were
standing was also answered pretty quickly, with Humayun’s arrival at the courts
of Rana Prasad Singh Sodha, asking for refuge. Any student of history, or
anyone who can do a quick Google search, will be able to locate this moment in
our past as 1542, knowing it as the place where Humayun’s wife Hamida Bano
Begum gave birth to the young Mughal Emperor Akbar.
The author does introduce all these people, these famous
Mughal characters entering the story around our heroine, who grows up on a farm
and is meant for a boring, mundane life until war arrives and her father, in
his desperation to save his daughter, marries her off to a warrior. As part of
Sher Shah Suri’s army, her husband is part of the group of soldiers who are
meant to kill Humayun, but instead he saves the Emperor’s life, and is thus on
the run with the royal entourage, hoping for the Emperor’s favour once he
eventually succeeds. And to help her husband achieve this goal, Jiji has found
a solution.
Three golden feathers given from a mythical bird, in
exchange for a life saved.
“You saved one of us, expecting nothing in return, not
knowing who we are. So when you wake, take three of my feathers. And any time
you need help, you must burn one feather and make a wish. And I will make it
so.”
This blending of fantasy and historical fiction was well
done, and something I really enjoyed in the story, even if some of it was too
weird for me to stomach. The Simurgh as a mythical creature is one I’ve
encountered in other stories as well, and I’ve always wished they would be a
more visible part of the narrative. Even here, I wished it had been given a
greater amount of visible, so to speak, especially since the moments in which
it does come, the author goes a bit overboard trying to describe it as being a
creature of myth and shadows, and blurs the line between fiction and magical
realism. To be fair, magic realism and fantasy are mostly related genres,
cousins at best, but I prefer the difference be starkly visible, and so was a
bit disgruntled when things became a bit too wishy-washy to be believable.
It is like a veil has been removed, a line has been
crossed, between what needs to be believed to keep life running, and the awful,
terrible reality that is its backbone. And the result was the stuff of
nightmares.
However, it helps that we don’t stay in that realm of the vague
and the wonderous for long. The story’s main focus is on the birth of Jiji’s
son at the same time as that of Akbar, the next Mughal Emperor, and Jiji’s
status as Akbar’s main milk-mother. The boys growing up together, Jiji’s
closeness with Akbar’s mother, the resentment of the other milk mothers, and
her husband’s ambitions for bigger and better things form the main part of the
story.
“Sorceress,” Jiji hears someone hiss. She snaps her
head up immediately but cannot tell which of the resentful faces around her has
uttered the accusation.
On its own, the story is an interesting one, and something I’d
recommend to a friend. It’s got intrigue and political machinations, it’s got
complex characters with conflicting intentions and there seems to be an attempt
to move the plot from point A to point B. I didn’t much care what happened to
the characters, which one could count as a flaw in the storytelling, but I was
sufficiently entertained, which is sometimes all one can ask for. The only
visible flaw was that horrible, unbelievably amateurish editing.
Akbar takes his leave. He embraces Jiji and they
sobbed, consoling each other.
There were numerous tense issues that seemed to repeatedly
occur, in a manner that makes me wonder whether the author, editor, or publisher
have actually understood what the present, past, and future tense are meant to
imply. It can’t be that hard, surely, to write a whole story in a language, and
print it, and publish it, and not know that when one begins a sentence in a
particular tense, one ends it the same way (unless we’re indulging in a
particularly complicated brand of artistic flair and creative license, I
assume). Beyond this problem, there was an obvious double space issue that
should have been checked. Commas snuck in places where they shouldn’t be. Even
the word ‘who’ was used when it should have been replaced by ‘whom’, and while
I’m usually very forgiving of this particular error in common conversations,
given most people’s obvious and understandable confusion regarding this
particular literary rule, surely published stories can be subjected to a
greater degree of scrutiny.
But after reading a fair few of this published crap, maybe
not.
Honestly, most of this story felt like I was reading
something by Usman Tanveer Malik, which is a
compliment because while Malik’s stories have the same weird and confusing
vibe, they also manage to entertain. The only difference was that his works
always have a veneer of polish to them that was missing here, but that could
possibly be nurtured, given time and effort and, of course, a better editor. The setting was a great idea, the using of Mughal characters was even more so, and there was definite potential here, if only it had been cultivated with a bit more grace. On
the whole, good stuff, but probably not the author’s best work.
A bird does not give milk. Surely not even one with
paws and a cat body. Yet this one did. And after she imbibed her milk, she
threw up. And then she drank some more, heard her father’s flute playing, and
her mother, whom she had never known, telling her a story. A story about a
cosmic creature, flying against a sky that is not of this earth, but from an
eternally silent blackness. Tasked with the tending of a tree from which
budding worlds emerge.
The Third Feather by Fatima Taqvi was published in Issue 001 (Winter 2022) of Tasavvur, an online portal for South Asian writing. The remaining reviews for other Tasavvur stories by Pakistani authors can be found here.