A Man of Many Parts

Abbas’s manuscripts, which vanished from human ken shortly after his death, were believed to have numbered in the hundreds, but Kohli hazards that they just hit three figures. In the popular imagination, they may have multiplied on a technicality — Abbas was trilingual and separately published versions of his stories in English, Hindi and Urdu. Even so, 100 is a perfectly respectable tally, considering that he had a flourishing career in cinema, too. However, he never received critical attention because his stories have a literal rather than literary texture. If he were a visual artist, he may have preferred charcoal and palette knife over drypoint and paintbrush.

You could finish Kohli’s latest compilation of Abbas, An Evening in Calcutta (HarperCollins) in the course of a domestic flight. Perhaps direct simplicity was Abbas’s strength, but the critics tend to sniff at the lack of delicacy, and it must be damnably hard to blurb. Exasperating critics, publishers and peers is not a recommended strategy for a literary career and very few have got way with it. Ernest Hemingway did. Abbas did not.

An Evening in Calcutta, the story from which the collection derives its title, is a slightly eerie psychological tale which could be read as autobiographical. The protagonist who tells the story was a journalist in a Delhi newspaper called National Call in 1936, as Abbas was, and later moved to the Bombay Chronicle, as he did. And now that he has cataract and his friends in Calcutta have diabetes and the gout, he writes a popular column called Last Page in Blitz. It’s a reminder of the readership that Russi Karanjia’s tabloid once enjoyed in the big northern cities.

Having noticed these coincidences, the reader begins to wonder if the story is fact rather than fiction. If, indeed, the editors named — a Mr Sahni, a Mukul Ghosh and a PD Sharma — were real, living characters on the pre-war media scene in Delhi and Bombay. The narrator speaks of the reporter’s morning beat, which consists of cycling from the office in Daryaganj to hospitals and police stations in what used to be central Delhi at the time, in search of news. The cycle is rented for two annas per hour. There is also mention of a horseback interview of Jawaharlal Nehru. If that happened today, it would have been promoted as ‘Canter the Banter’.

It’s all very lively, and the setting is appropriate — Calcutta’s Park Street, then a flourishing international food, live music and entertainment scene, which was industriously erased by the moralistic anti-elitism which became an ugly distinguishing mark of the left in the state.

The opening pages of Siddharth Dube’s No One Else, which is just out, show just how lively the scene could get, but Abbas prefers to show the reader moodily lit Kafkaesque interiors in one of the street’s fabled restaurants (Kwality’s, Mocambo and Trinca’s, which are named, are still in business), in which two ageing men meet decades after they worked together in the press. Or maybe they don’t. Maybe it’s all in the mind, both their decline and the decadence of the street on which they seem to meet.

In an interview with Kohli which is included in the book, Abbas said that he was dismissed by the establishment of each of the three languages he wrote in because he also wrote in the other two. His energetic digressions into media and cinema can only have diluted their opinion even more. But Abbas saw himself as a communicator and used multiple channels to maximise his reach. “It gives me a sense of satisfaction to approach so many people by means of different media — films, plays, novels, stories and journalism, with occasional incursions into radio and television,” he said.

He was widely translated, too, and enjoyed mass contact on a scale that his critics may have envied. A website created by the KA Abbas Memorial Trust at abbaska.com appears to be working towards a database of his work and in the future, its sheer breadth alone should urge a revaluation.