Glimpses Of Human Nature In Short Stories From The Past

The softness of a peach juxtaposed with harsh angular lines. Artist | Farah Alam

I first read Sparrows by Khwaja Ahmed Abbas in high school. It was one of a selection of short stories that was a part of the English Literature curriculum. This week, nearly two and a half decades later, I re-read it in my renewed reading of that textbook.

It amazes me how I had the blueprint of human nature right in front of me but not the life experience to fully understand it. Sparrows is a story that lays out quite simply how people use other people as receptacles for their own anger. The protagonist, Rahim Khan, wreaks his full wrath on his poor wife and children for years until they leave from not being able to take it more than they have. Yeah, he picked fights with his community too but it didn’t come close to what he unleashed on those closest to him.

I can now see and appreciate what I couldn’t as a teenager. Some people require a passive well into which they can pour their anger. They need it to be where the well does not defend itself, does not fight back and does not protest. It just miserably takes in the ill-treatment, treating it its lot in life.

Rahim Khan was left quite purposeless when the last receiving object of his rage ran away. He didn’t know what to do with himself. I really like how K.A. Abbas explained the complex human nature of an abuser with unassuming directness.

I don’t know where the author stands on the issue morally but in the story he created, Khan’s anger is explained with a backstory of weakness in standing up to iron-authority and old traditions to build the life he wanted. What I can take away from the story, and how it echoes in similar personalities in society, is how these people fail to confront their inner demons. Whatever be the cause of that failure — lack of awareness, purposeful turning away, lack of integrity — the result is that these abusers don’t face their emotions.

They don’t take accountability for the harm they cause, which is evident in the story. Quiet tending to of sparrows doesn’t really help when one is unable to atone to people. It’s a story, I get that. It’s also subtly exposes human behaviour.

Then there is Gauri Shankar Joshi’s The Letter with Coachman Ali’s sorrow. Coachman Ali was addicted to his sadness, as hard as the situation was. Rahim Khan and Coachman Ali had that in common — an addiction to feelings and ways of behaviour. Neither changes their actions with new understandings of their situation. Well, at least Ali’s was a story in redemption. His past caught up with him and he experienced remorse for separating animals from their young as a hunter. Joshi describes Ali’s daily visit to the postoffice as being a product of deep hope and faith borne from that remorse. I can appreciate his dedicated trips to look for post as indicative of his steadfast, loyal character. At the same time, I also view it as him being addicted to pain and hope. In my world, Coachman Ali would maybe progress to weekly postoffice visits and set up the same forwarding arrangement that he eventually did at the end of the story. However, I can see that the characters in both these stories were operating within the constraints of their societies. And as pitiable as their plight comes across, and as much as their situation tugs at the heartstrings (well, the wife’s situation in the first story and Ali’s situation in the second story), the logical solutions that come to my mind would not have found admissibility in their respective societies.

English literature was one of my favourite subjects. The English textbooks were my favourite books among my school books. I loved the stories in the short story textbooks and the poems in the poems textbooks.

In the age of AI and social media discourse on the ‘number one social app’ Threads dissecting human behaviour everyday, revisiting these two stories has come up as a much-needed dose of sanity, staving off the distracting chatter.