Dhah Lagi Wasti: Stories as Symptoms, Symbols as Witnesses

As old as literature itself, symbolism’s rise in Pakistani writing was no accident—it became the defining wave of the tide during the nation’s earliest encounter with authoritarian rule. It emerged as a powerful instrument for expressing the discontent and resentment of the people across nearly all Pakistani languages, with Punjabi literature being no exception. Among the works that reflect the oppression and anguish experienced by the individuals and the communities over decades are Fakhr-uz-Zaman’s Satt Gawache Log (Seven Lost People) and Mustansar Hussain Tarar’s Pakheru (The Bird), only to name a few among the notable works in Punjabi fiction.

Malik Maher Ali’s Dhah Lagi Wasti (The Village in Decay,) though a later contribution, brings an added awareness that this desperation is not confined to recent decades but extends along a continuum transcending history itself. Its symbolic treatment of historical memory is more sublime, quiet, and far-reaching than that found in Satt Gawache Log. Unlike Pakheru, its narrative maintains a deliberate distance from the cycle of demystifying and remystifying lived reality, with symbol playing a more dynamic role in advancing the story, challenging literal motifs more boldly.

Recently, I had the leisure to read this book aloud at the PILAC Lahore studio of Suhavi Audiobooks, a platform that brings selected Punjabi literature to listeners across the diaspora and beyond. Though often described as a collection of short stories, Dhah Lagi Wasti reads more like a fragmented epic—a quiet novel in disguise. The preliminary note, Eho Kahani Ae (Hence the Story) frames the following tales as symptoms presented by a patient to a doctor. Fiction becomes both diagnosis and medicine, revealing wounds beneath the skin of everyday life. The author invites readers to approach these stories not as isolated episodes, but as case studies of a deeper malaise—a civilizational fever running through generations.

The author hails from District Sahiwal, cradled in Punjab’s Neeli Bar region, not far from the ruins of Harappa a landscape where history lies shallow-buried, and that nearness to antiquity pulses through his storytelling. In Dhah Lagi Wasti, Malik Maher Ali constructs a fictional world steeped in the rural rhythms of Punjabi life, rhythms that are repeatedly broken, disrupted, and recast by encroachments both visible and unseen.

The stories unfold like slow ruptures in an already fragile world. One might begin by treating each tale as self-contained, but soon they betray that expectation. We enter a village where the torchbearer once a vital figure loses his role when a clan of jugglers arrives, selling amulets said to transform animals into humans. This sets the stage for a poetics of encroachment: how outside forces magical, ideological, economic invade the intimate interior of rural life, reshaping the village not by force, but through myth and illusion.

An old man recounts a story under the veil of night shaped by a history of darkness that does not pass but lingers, a tremor beneath the ground and chaos above the sky. Throughout the book, the language frequently ascends into highly poetic expression the eyes swollen from sleeplessness, the half-blind sun, the moon begging moonlight from others, and the stars colliding with each other—many killed, many wounded. These are not abstractions, but lived conditions.

The narrative next leads us to a familiar scene: an assembly of village elders deliberating over a theft. But this is no ordinary crime—the thief steals not objects but people’s hopes, bundled into a rag and carried away. The setting evokes the panchayat, the rural court of elders, but what unfolds is less a judicial event than a ritual of historical reckoning. Here, mythic allegory slips into political realism; what is lost is not only property, but the very possibility of justice.

Then comes a man who devours time months, years, whole lives embodying the slow violence of poverty. He is a cautionary figure that mothers and children of every hunger-touched household ought to know. Such characters are not individuals alone; they are archetypes drawn from the submerged mythologies of the dispossessed.

The stories carry us from riverbanks taxed for lamplight, to trembling earth beneath villagers who dare to resist, to funeral gatherings where widows speak of a man swallowed not by the currents of time, but by the knee-deep waters of a daughter’s tears. The man, once adept at swimming through the deep waters of time, quietly sinks in the shallows of grief. In Siwi, this pain echoes again: a father raising a daughter in a world where tenderness has no refuge.

We meet a slum-dwelling boy whose body simply stops growing—stunted not by fate, but by a world too cramped for possibility. We witness a flood that not only destroys homes, but erases graves—obliterating names, memories, and belonging. Ownership itself becomes suspect, as gypsies recount the curse that falls upon those who stake permanent claims to land. In such moments, the book enacts a subtle critique of property and permanence, showing how what seems stable may, in truth, invite ruin.

The final tale does not soothe. It follows a rebellious youth who dares to breathe freely in a place where even breath has been outlawed since the great thunderstorm of fear. His defiance is not dramatic, but elemental—reminding us that resistance can be as silent as breath: small, flickering, but irreducible.

What emerges across these narratives is a grammar of silence a quiet language of endurance, interruption, and grief. Malik Maher Ali does not sermonize, yet the stories burn with moral clarity. The repetition of symbols—light taxed, graves washed, breath denied functions not merely as literary devices, but as lament. Each story becomes a stanza in a collective elegy for lives lived under invisible duress.

There is temporal dissonance in these tales: the present flickers with the shadows of a mythic past. The Neeli Bar landscape—fertile, historic, scarred functions not just as setting but as palimpsest. Time in Dhah Lagi Wasti is not linear but layered. The contemporary village exists atop ancient ruins, and the pain of the present is soaked in the sediment of older oppressions. It offers no utopia, no final redemption. But it insists on the flicker of choice. Even when surrounded by collapse, the human spirit breathes, trembles, and sometimes resists. The stories do not preach, but they bear witness—to the storm, the silence, and the breath that endures beneath it.

When the last story folds shut, it is as if the lamp’s flame still trembles, the river still murmurs over erased names, and the air still holds the faint salt of a daughter’s tears. These are not endings, only pauses in a telling that began long before us and will go on long after, shifting its voice from elder to youth, from village dust to city fog, from the Neeli Bar to far-off shores where the language still carries its grainy warmth. Dhah Lagi Wasti leaves its reader in that in‑between space—where myth leans against memory, and silence leans against breath knowing the story will find its way back, whenever we are ready to listen.

Asad Fatemi is a poet and writer. He lives in Lahore.