Early in Naiyer Masud’s short story “Snake Catcher,” in an inventory of bric-a-brac recalled from an amnesiac’s childhood, there is a description of a metal lion: “It stood on its hind legs with its mouth wide open as though it were roaring. Its eyes were crafted from some precious stone and they had disappeared several generations before me. Yet the lion’s only importance lay in its missing eyes.”

The universe of Naiyer Masud’s stories is one of absences: of lost objects and lost memories, disappearing people and disappearing peoples. It is also, paradoxically, a universe overcrowded with the detritus of the past — an endless procession of objects, practices, and recollections whose presences are disquieting, not because they are expressions of a meaningless and disoriented present, but because they seem to possess a meaning of the most dire imminence, the revelation of which remains forever out of reach. In “Lamentation,” a man travels amongst wasteland tribes who are slowly going extinct, participating in funerary rites, and describing the ululations and intricate gestures he imitates, but never understands. In “The Essence of Camphor,” a perfume-maker explains that his secret is to build all of his perfumes on a basis of camphor — not it’s scent, but an essence that has evaporated to the point of becoming odorless, so that “attempting to smell it one feels a vacant forlornness and the next time round, breathing it in more deeply, one detects something in this forlornness.” In “Obscure Domains of Fear and Desire,” a man who believes a child once saw him in amorous embrace with his aunt describes how he came to look at houses:

“Now I could look at a house in the most cursory manner and yet discover passageways that were secret or wide open, in use or abandoned. I could tell whether voices rising from one part of the house could reach the other parts of the house. I’d examine each room very carefully to ascertain which parts of the room were visible from the crack between the door panels, or from the windows, or the skylights, and which parts could not be seen. In every room, I found an area which was not visible from the crack between the door panels nor from any window, nor from any skylight. In order to isolate this area, I would stand in the middle of the room and mentally paint the whole place black. Then, using only my eyes, I would spread white paint on all the parts visible from the cracks or windows. In this manner, the parts which remained black were found to be the truly invisible parts of the room. Apart from the rooms meant for children, I never found a single room in which the invisible part could not provide a hiding place for at least one man and one woman.

“Around this time, I began to concentrate on the shapes these invisible parts formed. They shaped the outlines of different images which, at times, had a truly amazing resemblance to certain objects. But I never found a complete picture of anything. Everything appeared incomplete or fragmented, even though I examined countless such ‘invisible’ parts. Some of these images had familiar shapes — of a lion, for instance, or a crab, or a pair of scales — but they were always unfinished. Other images resembled unknown objects and even though unfamiliar, still gave a sense of being incomplete. They left a strange effect on the mind which was impossible to articulate.”

The sense of unreality that permeates Masud’s writing — its “strange effect on the mind”— is all the more remarkable because it is achieved without the least resort to any of the usual mechanisms; one finds no magical realism here, no inexplicable occurrences, no fantastic metaphors or games with language. This unique style, which is not in keeping with English-language expectations of how non-European foreigners should write (that is, with a maximum of miracles and political commentary), may also explain why Naiyer Masud has had so little success in translation, even compared with other Urdu writers like Intizar Husain, Saadat Hasan Manto, or Qurratulain Hyder. The unevenness of his translators, of course, is also a factor, as is Masud’s failure to produce a work of significant length — though given the time it takes him to write his stories this is understandable: when interviewed by Memon, Masud noted that in the twenty-five years he had been writing he had produced only twenty two short stories. The other reason may have to do with the confusion, common amongst western readers, between relevance and influence, and the difficulty of ascertaining the extent of Masud’s impact — amongst Urdu readers he is read and enjoyed widely, yet he appears to be without any literary descendants.

The fact of the matter is that Naiyer Masud’s writing resembles no one’s, and goes nowhere. In what is perhaps a testament to the purity of his aesthetic vision, his stories may very well be as ephemeral as the objects and people that fill them: old curios and scraps of paper; crumbling houses and family emblems; dying tribes and lost relatives, and nostalgic amnesiacs, trying vainly to remember something before they disappear.