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‘Scattered Leaves’ is Dr. Hussain’s fifth anthology of his rendering of Urdu stories into English. This collection offers a total of twenty-two stories, of which translations of all except seven are done by Dr. Syed Sarwar Hussain. The other seven are translated by his colleague, Dr. Syed Anwar Ali. These stories are written by some of the finest and most well-known writers of the language today - including Shafi Mashhadi, Zakiya Mashhadi, Shomail Ahmed, Shaukat Hayat, Hussain-ul Haq, Abdus Samad, and Qasim Khursheed. Each writer in this volume is unique in his or her style, but all of them are bound by a common history, since they were all born in the eastern Indian state of Bihar, during the first half of the 20th century. These are tales about ordinary men and women and the challenges they faced and experiences they encountered in a menacingly class-ridden, morally corrupt, and financially devastated social order. Every story in this collection appeals universally to our sense of distrust and dread about human nature. The stories lead us into a world shaped by the inner and outer conflicts that have wrecked the provincial life of people in the state, but in doing so they reveal the larger social, moral, and political chaos that has devastated the life of ordinary men and women in the Indian sub-continent. Ultimately, they testify to the depth of the human life and they reflect upon its mysteries. These short stories masterfully lay bare the whole fabric of Indian society. They capture the dilemma that the characters find themselves in, and a terrible sense of alienation–both within and without - that defines the existential crisis they are going through. The title of the book is inspired by the tales in this collection, which contains a wide variety of stories tied together in one place. The stories are brought to the English reader in accurate, modern translations, with originality and poetic grace. The cultural concepts or Urdu words, in each story that are not translatable are also annotated in the Glossary. This permits the retention of some Urdu terms in order to be faithful to the cultural setting of the stories, without alienating readers who are not familiar with such terms. This anthology presents to the perceptive English reader a selection of stories comparable in excellence to short fiction written in any other language.
