BOOK REVIEW
By Shree Venkatram
NEW DELHI: Humra Quraishi is brutally honest, with others and herself. And it comes out in her writings. Her words do not paint soft pictures of the water colour type. Instead, they are like bold forceful line drawings of the charcoal variety.
The images Quraishi creates seem surreal. For, when she writes her stories, the real takes wings and gets into fantasies of the dark variety. Sad stories that shake you. No wonder, she calls her new collection of stories “More Bad Time Tales” (Har-Anand Publications). Her previous collection of stories was called ‘Bad Time Tales’ and came out in 2007.
Quraishi, a freelance journalist, says her stories in the new collection reflect the times we live in, which are not happy. Broken relationships, violence, the killings, the hatred, mental problems, the unrest and the unease which stalks our world today.
She writes of Kashmir, a state she covered as a reporter; of dementia, a disease she saw at close quarters as her father suffered and the way it affected those around him; of encounters and relationships. She is adept at drawing the landscape of Uttar Pradesh with its huge mango trees, a place where she grew up, and Delhi, the bureaucratic city she lived in.
If you are looking for good crafted English, Quraishi’s writings are not for you. The words are strung randomly at times, and then with a force that jerk and shake you to the bones.
Her stories must be read to know a brutally honest woman’s writing, the images she builds in her head and has no qualms about sharing. Unlike some writers, these images are not polite, neither do they camouflage, for Quraishi cannot do that. For she bares her soul, her fears, her longings, all for the world to see. You can only admire her for that. And hope that this bad time tale will somewhere take a turn for the better. Well it doesn’t and you move on to the next, the next, and reach the end.
The endings often enough keep you just guessing, wondering. At times, there is a definite signing off like In that Chai Cafe, the last of the stories.
“Images harrowing, almost throttling,” to use her phrase from her story “Those placid waters”….is Quraishi for you.