Ashk was writing about real life and for ordinary readers

First published in 1963, In the City a Mirror Wandering is a Joycean epic that unfolds over the course of one day. Translator Daisy Rockwell writes about Upendranath Ashk’s modernist masterpiece.

In Falling Walls, the first volume of a planned series of novels covering five years in the life of his autobiographical protagonist, Chetan, Upendranath Ashk made clear his intent of writing about the not-so-pretty aspects of lower-middle-class life in Punjab. He was recording not the lovely lotus as it floats in the tank, but all the other muck and slime that can be found beneath. He was writing about real life and for ordinary readers. In this second volume of his epic tale of a young man climbing out of the metaphorical pond-scum of his existence towards the light of aesthetic expression and worldly success, he embraces this goal with renewed vigour. In the City a Mirror Wandering, first published in 1963—16 years after Falling Walls—takes the modernist “pattern”, as Ashk called it, of the epic novel contained within a single day made famous by Virginia Woolf in Mrs Dalloway, and James Joyce in Ulysses, and drags it through the literal muck of the Jalandhar streets one grimy monsoon day, stinting nothing in airing every bit of dirty laundry that caught its writer’s eye.

In these provincial city streets, we meet goondas, halfwits, bullies, frauds, drunks and misogynists of every stripe. Chetan leaves his family home, and his sleepy wife, Chanda, early in the morning, still smarting from the recent marriage of the woman he loved, his wife’s first cousin Neela, to a middle-aged accountant from Rangoon. He sets out on an aimless tour of the city streets in search of some sort of emotional and spiritual comfort. He wants friendly companionship, or sympathy, or at least a sense that he has done something with his life of which he can be proud. Instead, he is greeted at every turn not only by crude humour and bullying, but also by neighbourhood gossip about the fresh accomplishment of his former classmate Amichand, who has just qualified to become a deputy commissioner. This rankles especially because Chetan had recently encountered Amichand in Shimla, and been greeted superciliously, as though Amichand had already reached such a high level that Chetan was now far beneath him. In Chetan’s mind, Amichand is nothing but a crammer—he had possessed no extraordinary talents or intelligence that would have suggested his rise to such heights. And yet “Amichand”—not “Chetan”—is the name on everyone’s lips.

This epic journey of revulsion and despair ends where it began, by the side of the sleeping Chanda, in a small rooftop room in his family home. He had gone on a manly quest beyond the hearth, and walked among his fellowmen, yet found everyone and everything profoundly wanting. It is only deep in the night, when he raises the flame of the low-burning lamp by the bedside to gaze at his wife that he realizes that all the love, compassion and respect he seeks is here, in the woman he had dismissively abandoned early that morning. This realisation is touchingly poignant, but it may also seem absurd to the contemporary reader. Is this what it takes for a man to recognise the humanity in his wife?

In the City a Mirror Wandering is hardly a feminist tale, despite the careful portraits of the callous abuse of women that Ashk documents. But it can be read as a finely wrought portrayal of the inhumanity of men, not just towards women, but also towards one another, in a cultural context plagued by generations of poverty, illiteracy and superstition. The walls that Ashk hoped to see falling are the barriers to progress posed by an entrenched culture of urban want, and one such barrier is that which divides men and women, rendering loving and respectful communication nearly impossible (as well as creating an epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases). Chetan’s realisation that he can open up emotionally to his wife is a revelation in an environment where woman are seen entirely from a sexual and reproductive standpoint and their worth is measured in terms of ownership by their husbands and symbolic ownership by their caste-communities.

This is nowhere more apparent than in the final conflagration of the novel, a mini-epic battle between the neighbourhood’s Khatris and Brahmins over the beating of Bhago, a Khatri woman who had run off with a Brahmin. As Bhago lies bleeding on a charpoy in the middle of the mohalla, there is less concern for her comfort and well-being than for exacting justice against the assailant, her caste-mate and Amichand’s brother Amirchand, newly emboldened by his brother’s triumph. Indeed, it is decided that she should be carried on the charpoy to the local police station to be presented as evidence, and only after that should her grievous head wounds be tended by the local hakim, who is present throughout. The history of male literature is littered with women desperately needing medical attention while men do important things (think of Fantine, delirious with fever, and abandoned for many pages, while Jean Valjean embarks on a quest relating to his identity in Les Misérables), but it is always hard to bear.

In Hindi, the verb for “hit” or “beat” is the same as the one for “kill”—mārnā. This ambiguity is borne out throughout the scene, with reports coming in that Amirchand has beaten Bhago, but it is unclear until the end if he has beaten her to death (jān se). Indeed, her condition is still unclear when the conflagration devolves into a round of virile wrestling between Chetan’s brother Parasuram and his friend Debu under the referee-ship of Chetan’s father. What was really at stake was the relative masculinity and power of the two communities, and Chetan’s father is only reminded of Bhago’s plight when he’s about to take the two wrestlers for their reward of fresh milk at the sweet shop.

Throughout the novel, Chetan is disgusted by the callousness, bullying and hollow posturing he sees around him; at the same time, he clearly derives a measure of voyeuristic pleasure from witnessing it. He is generally the most educated person in each interchange, and the most sensitive, yet from time to time he steps in as an enabler. When his goonda friends land themselves in hot water for pranking passers-by by knocking off their hats, Chetan intervenes by speaking in English and introducing himself as a writer for a respected newspaper in Lahore. He does the same at the police station and at other junctures as well. This device serves the narrative well—how could we believe that our protagonist would spend an entire day hanging around with frauds and miscreants if he did not take some pleasure in it? Chetan wishes to rise above the pond—he aspires to the lilies—but as of now, he still belongs to the muck.

Extracted with permission from ‘In the City a Mirror Wandering’  by Upendranath Ashk, published by Penguin Random House India