‘The Book of Death’: Khalid Jawed’s novella ruminates on the futility of life and the writer’s role

Enigma precedes existence. In the cosmic commerce of Being, the tussle between Life and Death has quite unrestrainedly preoccupied humans. I am reminded of a significant interaction in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame where Hamm questions Clov as to why he continues to stay with him. Clov counters the question by asking the reason for being retained. Hamm answers, in a very matter-of-fact way, “There is no one else”, and Clov surrenders to the conversation by declaring, “there is nowhere else.” Nestled between this world of no one else (koi nahi) and nowhere else (kahin nahi) is the world of Girgita Til Mas in Khalid Jawed’s The Book of Death, translated from the Urdu by A Naseeb Khan, and it is here in this wastescape of a place that we meet our unnamed protagonist.

The novella, spanning around 100 pages, is thumping mix of intensity and intrigue. We are instantly tugged into the world of the protagonist through a simple question – “Why do I write at all?” The narrative hinges on the exploration of this question. As readers, we are informed that the book appeared as a manuscript, a miraculous survivor from around two hundred years ago in the ruins of Girgitia Til Mas. This discovery is made by a certain Professor Walter Schiller, an archaeologist, who is visiting the ruins to ascertain their suitability to sustain a steel plant.

Writing and the writer

The city of Girgitia Til Mas was popular and well-known for its mental asylum, and as the name of the city suggests – chameleons and sesame farming. The city met a wilful end, it being practically submerged in water to aid the central government’s plan to build a dam. And now, with a larger climatic crisis looming – the rivers drying up, the ruins emerge. Schiller is surprised by the endurance of the notebook and holds on to it despite being unfamiliar with its language. He reaches out to his friend, Jean Hugo, who furnishes him with a machine translation, and it is this machine translation that is made available to the readers but not without certain caveats by Schiller, namely that this is no work of “literary merit” nor does it throw light on the “historical aspects of Girgita Til Mas”. It is as if in creating a distance from the work, Schiller also creates an aura of suspense around the nature of writing and the writer.

The writer, too, anachronistically maintains the charm of the suspense. The first chapter sizes up the connection with the famous lunatic asylum – we know that there is a lunar eclipse, and its effects are amplified and embodied by the writer – his lunacy is cosmologically willed. What follows next are the fragmentary thoughts of the writer as he deliberates on questions of life, love, lust, desire, and death. He emerges as a Levinasian Being – in his madness, and in the company of Suicide, he is bound to himself.

In his meditation on being, Levinas states that while human existence (being) is usually thought to be at home with oneself, it is in fact more complicated. In that, it is less about being with oneself and more about tension, effort, and burden. While sketching an intimate cartography of being, Levinas privileges attention to lived moods and physical states that reveal existence as oppressive and indeterminate – the “there is” does not align with what “one is”, and this aberration indicates the inevitable nothingness that this life decays into. Our writer, perhaps, has an intimate knowledge of such an aberration, and it is this knowledge that marks him as an aberrant being nudging him to acknowledge Suicide as a failure of being, and as an accomplice to his being. Suicide has not been following him; she was born with him.

The writer further sketches out his life trajectory and ruminations by pronouncing the futility of life. His “intuitive understanding” of nauseous existence has been made known to him not through meditation, not by sitting on a leopard skin or wandering into a forest but by the “cold sweat” that springs from the void of his soul. Immersed in a “pool of vulgar desires”, our writer leads a life that is violent with immorality – he has a mistress, he dreams of killing his father, he has savage and lust-laden thoughts, and these thoughts add complexity to his motives and reflections. For example, he detests his father for raping a minor and suspiciously throwing her to her death, and yet, he becomes his father when he thinks of crushing his wife and the women around him into a pulp, and discarding them “far into the drain.” The writer is hyper-aware of his flawed existence, and yet, he yields to it.

Theatre of the absurd

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and in moments of desperation, like when he sees bones in his mistress’s eyes or when he is contemplating gathering all his life under a speeding train, the writer attaches to his eyes the strands of pig hair (he carries some in his pocket). These are almost talismanic, a charm to prevent further disenchantment with life. The writer also talks about his missing mother – one who was beaten by his father while she was pregnant with him. It is almost as if his being was forged out of violence, and he was born into violence. It is snippets like these – about his spiral in the toilet, about his tears devoid of salt – the very symbol of fidelity, about his desire to kill his father, about his excessive desire for carnal pleasures, that form the content of the fragments within this novella. The writer’s world is no longer a theatre of beings but a “theatre of the absurd”.

If Levinas believes in existence as structured around needs and pleasures, which involves a loss of oneself in order to get out of oneself, the writer embodies just that existence. This deceptive escape is Sisyphean, a futile attempt that literally cages him towards the end of his narrative. Shame and nausea cling to him, and so does putrid imagination. The decay and exhaustion of his parasitic existence manifest through his leaking body and the extraordinary scatological detailing. The descriptions have been translated with such intensity that I personally could feel the lingering stench.

The writer makes peace with the impossibility of existence, and with a certain indifference to Suicide, bows down to the “dark water of the pit”. The last chapter is wordless – a plain blank as if indicating the nothingness of being. However, in reading this text as a phenomenology of human existence, I am reminded of the writer’s rumination on the “fundamental spirit of the letter ‘ऋ’” which may also be interpreted as a precursor to ऋृण or debt. All life may be summed up in the spirit of debt – to oneself, to others, and in extending the spirit of the letter in and within the realm of writing – a critique of translation. All translation, too, is a work of debt – as much to the text as to the author, and A Naseeb Khan overwrites that debt with his visceral translation. A minor quibble with the text could just possibly be that readers might need to steel themselves against the explicit and sometimes triggering content within the text. After all, it is the book of death.

The Book of Death, Khalid Jawed, translated from the Urdu by A Naseeb Khan, Ekada/Westland.