A Season of Premature Twilight by Fehmida Zakeer
Reviewed
by Neera Kashyap
Early in her story, ‘A season of premature twilight’,
Fehmida Zakeer sets an impersonal and ironic tone for the reader. With this,
she deftly minimizes the impact of the serious issues involved in the
narrative: an impoverished fatherless childhood with three other sisters; life
in an orphanage; autocracy, fraudulence and sexual abuse in adolescence itself;
public attention through a media that fluctuates between two extreme situations
of vilification and fulsome praise. But the protagonist Zeenat is bright, very
bright. This, too, is established early in the story.
Zakeer’s concession to emotion in the first part of the
story is reflected in Zeenat’s observation of the rapidly deteriorating
condition of the orphanage where she lives – ‘a gap-toothed roof that creaks
and groans in the wind’, the floor mat a ‘green skin….a breeding ground for the
insect world’, broken glass, still hanging in window panes, ‘covered with
cardboard, torn out from our notebooks, fearing an invasion of snakes and
scorpions’, ‘the roof, covered with ancient tiles, resting on a rotting wooden
frame’.
This intelligent use of imagery to depict the protagonist’s
own denudation of mind and soul culminates in a situation when a torrent of
monsoon rain breaks into the building and forty girls are shifted into two
storerooms. It is here that the writer prepares the reader for the crisis to
come: “To the mosquitoes buzzing at night, our sleeping bodies might as well be
one giant creature with several arms spread out over the floor. Not that it
matters to them, they just want our blood.’ When the marauders do come, they
come in the form of ‘four, no, five black cars, black and long, parked all
around the building, like crows clustered around a carcass.’
It is this minimalist style that hooks the reader. When the
writer can take the tragic turn of events in her stride, so can the reader. A
fraudulent marriage of a girl from an impoverished family results in sexual
abuse for a week not only by the ‘husband’ but by a ‘different husband each night’,
in a resort in the backwaters overlooking a picture postcard view.
Then comes a delicious sardonic touch: Zeenat is dumped back
home; her mother faints, then pleads with the school, and then with the child
welfare committee. The media swings negative on this occasion, vilifying Zeenat
and her family. Zeenat’s words are terrifyingly matter-of-fact: ‘I am
famous…..Every day I learn more about myself from the newspapers and
television’. Equally stunning is the media swing when Zeenat tops her exams in
the entire district. At a press conference at the collectorate, the media
demands justice for Zeenat. The cacophony is again reflected in Zeenat’s mind
in images of barking dogs, raucous crows and wailing cuckoos. It is here at the
story’s end that there could have been greater comic exaggeration, so far the
story having been so evenly toned by the writer with its use of reflective
imagery and impersonal observation.
One was reminded of a story, ‘The divine pregnancy in a
twelve-year old woman,’ the 2018 Commonwealth short story prize-winner from
Asia by Sagnik Datta. In this, God visits the villagers of a particular village
in a dream, bestowing one woman among them with ‘His honour’. So a 12-year old orphan
girl is believed to have the honour of carrying God’s child, the story building
up through layers of possessiveness and anticipation to the climax of the child’s
birth. There is, of course, a very sneakily alluded-to lover in the background.
The child born, to great all-round shock is a girl, and the 12-year old girl’s
end is described with such an exaggerated impunity that it becomes humorous: “Usha
continued bleeding even after the baby was delivered. In fact, she bled so much
that the blood soon flowed outside her room and down the steps into the
courtyard. It would have reached the pond had we not started mopping it up; men
with their lungis and shirts, women with their saris. But there seemed to be no
end of it, and we wondered how her little body could have held so much blood.
After an hour we were tired, and had to call for shovels to dig a moat.’
Reviewer Neera Kashyap's stories 'Supplication' appeared in Out of Print June 2017 and 'Dual Awakenings' in Out of Print June 2018.
