Opening Clouds, Fermented Rain: stories

The characters in Tabish’s stories are always exploring, always looking for something, sometimes a job in a war-torn nation to a useless movie ticket, a worm, someone separated, or lost time. They are always dissatisfied with their present, preoccupied with memories, finding them still sitting in their midst. There is also a mother figure, as an overarching presence, protecting and guiding the protagonists toward a meditation on the meaning of hardships, poverty, and life itself. The prose is lyrical and has a certain poetry to it. The description and dialogues are rich in metaphors. While the stories are physically located in the prose, they fly in the higher sky. The characters are most often solitary, and much of the conversation involves the settings, as if they too are characters, working on the psyche of the protagonists, making them locate their surroundings within themselves. The stories are as much about the characters as about the plot, and sometimes they are the only stories. Tabish seems to describe the characters merely, and stories just come out of the description, as if the narration in itself has some beginning, middle, and end, sufficient to build a tale.