ABSTRACT
“Phool,” a short story by Joginder Paul, was first published in Urdu with the same name in the collection Be-muhawra in 1978. ‘Be-muhawra’ means ‘without definition’ and Paul, in this collection, has stories that express creatively his ideas on a theory of fiction wherein each short story moves beyond the obvious and the expected. In these stories he broke convention in his writing and crafted his own individual style. In “Phool,” the narrative unfolds with a description of the river Ganga, a very real river but also an intense and deep cultural and social concept that most Indians would be able to understand and identify with. Through a conversation between two speakers, Paul describes the river, the hordes that throng her banks to perform obsequies for departed family members, to wash away their sins, or even to seek boons. The protagonist-supplicant in the story is there to ask Ganga for a son, for who else will immerse his ‘phool’ (literally flowers, but this word stands for deeper and extremely subtle philosophical, psychological, and spiritual ideas) when he is no more? The conversation, a back and forth of questions and answers between the supplicant and his cynical companion, slowly moves towards a point of self-realisation. The translation of the story throws up extremely delicate and urgent questions about how far a translator can go in order to weave in a literal word-for-word translation along with the layered cultural contexts in order to best present the story to its readers.
