“The Monkey’s Wound and Other Stories” by Hajra Masroor

Hajra Masroor (via Wikimedia Commons)

Coming from a literary family, Hajra Masroor and her sister Khadija have been referred to as the Brontë sisters of Urdu fiction. While Khadija was known for her novels, Hajra was a writer of short fiction and plays. A new translation of a collection of Hajra Masroor’s work, The Monkey’s Wound and Other Stories, by translator Tahira Naqvi, now gives English readers an opportunity to read eighteen of her stories, all centered around the hardships of being a woman in pre-Partition India and the new state of Pakistan. Masroor lived from 1929 to 2012 and started writing in the early 1940s, several years before Partition.

The first story, “In the Darkness”, tells of a young woman named Zehra who is a de facto maid to her brother, ordering her to bring food and drink when he entertains friends. Zehra overhears a friend of brother speak of equality in a marriage. It was a new concept to her and she could not stop thinking about it.

 

How much a man who understood his wife’s pain would love her, how happy their life would be. Then she would not have to spend all her time handling the stove and pots and pans in the dark, stifling atmosphere of the kitchen. She would study a lot, have nice conversations with him, and together they would travel extensively.

 

Her dreams are dashed when she overhears this friend speak of his own future. In other stories, young women look forward to an equal marriage, but also have their dreams thwarted.  In “On the Other Side of the Moon”, eighteen year-old Lalli is matched with a husband around her age. He’s tall, good looking, comes from a good family, and has a good job. On the day of the wedding, Lalli is sad to leave her family, but her father convinces her that she will be happy in her marriage to such a suitable husband. Then everything goes wrong. As Lalli’s father recounts to police officers:

 

Oh yes, Sir, what a grand wedding party it was, decorated with flowers, the band arrived on the bus along with the boy’s family and friends. The bridegroom had a sehra made of roses covering his face, a heavy garland of rupee notes was draped around his neck and he had wrapped himself in a Kashmiri shawl.

 

The face behind the sehra is not that of the young, dashing man Lalli’s father had been shown, but a 60 year-old. Lalli’s father feels so betrayed and sees that the only way out is to take revenge on the man who just married his daughter. In the end, Lalli’s father hurts himself and his daughter.

 

The Monkey’s Wound and Other Stories, Hajra Masroor, Tahira Naqvi (trans) (India Penguin Modern Classics, September 2022)
The Monkey’s Wound and Other Stories, Hajra Masroor, Tahira Naqvi (trans) (India Penguin Modern Classics, September 2022)

Marriage also appears as a theme in another story, “The Third Floor”, which has been likened to Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The collection does not list a publication date for this story, so it’s difficult to tell if Masroor wrote it before or after the Truman Capote novella. “The Third Floor” refers to the Karachi apartment building where a Miss Dorothy Pereira lives. She’s Christian from Goa and loves nothing more than to dance.

 

She usually stayed inside her flat the whole day. Dressed in an old Japanese kimono with a large floral print, and doused in talcum powder, she walked on her wooden Japanese clogs like a skiff bobbing on the waves, its sails unfurled.

 

She spends her days in her apartment dancing, so much so that a downstairs neighbor named Mr Douglas takes to his violin to accompany Dorothy each time he hears her start to dance. But the other neighbors are not so kind and view Dorothy with great suspicion. Their worries don’t abate when Dorothy orders a fancy pair of sandals from Hanif the shoemaker. The sandals are taken from a design that Marilyn Monroe wore.

Dorothy is happy with the sandals and starts to teach Hanif all her fancy dance moves. The neighbors are horrified, especially as Hanif starts to fall for Dorothy. When the female neighbors have had enough, they write to Hanif’s wife, who has been living temporarily in Rawalpindi with their two children until Hanif can send for them. Yet it’s the other women in the building that end up sending for Hanif’s wife. All hell breaks loose when they arrive and the neighbors and apartment will never be the same again. In the end, the neighbors realize that Dorothy had brought much life to the building, but that lesson arrives all too late.

 

Several stories involve delirium that comes from respiratory illnesses. The story that gives the name to the collection, “The Monkey’s Wound”, is an example and involves a young woman who spends her days isolating from her family in the heat of the veranda while they cool off indoors. When she sees a wounded monkey surrounded by a troop of healthy ones, she compares herself to that monkey and her family to the monkey troop. In later stories, Masroor alludes to the outbreaks of infection during the early days of Partition and how easy it was to contract a communicable disease like tuberculosis.

Hajra Masroor’s stories seem timeless and most—apart from those that specifically deal with events just after Partition—could also take place now. Women still face pressure to marry by a certain age and are still judged by things like what they wear. Several years ago it may have been said that there wasn’t much to worry about when it came to contagious diseases, but this, too, still rings true.


Susan Blumberg-Kason is the author of Bernardine’s Shanghai Salon: The Story of the Doyenne of Old China, Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair with China Gone Wrong and When Friends Come From Afar: The Remarkable Story of Bernie Wong and Chicago’s Chinese American Service League.