حلوا ئی کی دکان اور کتے کا ناشتہ

Mirages of the Mind is considered Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi's masterpiece. Yousufi writes "khaka," or sketches. As a form of "tanz o mazah," or humor and satire writing, Yousufi's work shows off the best attributes of the genre, namely, its ability to reveal cultural moments directly but without the fussiness of ethnography and, moreover, with a lightly fictionalized touch that turns the writing from anecdote to art. Mirages of the Mind is different from many "tanz o mazah" books because it focuses upon a single subject. This work hinges upon the traumatic event of Partition, and the narrative reflects on Basharat, an émigré to Pakistan, and his attempts to rekindle his lost love for his first home in India. (I call this work nostalgia satire; no one else has yet followed my lead.) Here, we see a young Basharat in pre-Partition India as he tries to get a job at a village school.

It is said that humor and poetry are the last two things a person learns when acquiring a foreign language—both because of the way they play with words but also because humor and poetry are culturally specific, reliant upon a knowledge of cultural history, contemporary society, and local, regional and national aesthetics. That means that translating humor too ought to be difficult. No doubt it is in certain cases. While Yousufi's work has a reputation for difficulty even in the original, this excerpt has narrative features that practically anyone can relate to, regardless of their cultural origins. Part of this is the Chaplinesque routine with the man and the dog. And another part must be the ritual of the job interview itself; everyone has one or two good stories about how easily that social rite can turn ridiculous.