Vampire : A Novel

The unnamed narrator in Azeem Baig Chughtai’s Vampire—written as a letter to God—is a 16-year-old girl who has just had her nikah ceremony. She dreams of a life of happiness with a loving | handsome husband—whose face | however | she will only see at her rukhsati | when she finally leaves her parents’ home for her marital home. Then | tragedy befalls her. Separated from her family on the journey to her cousin’s wedding in a neighbouring town | she finds herself stranded at the railway station. She has no other recourse but to spend the night at the station master’s house | discovering too late that the only other occupant is his male guest. In the space of a night | her life is changed forever; she loses her ‘honour’ and faces the terrifying prospect of being shunned by her family | in-laws and friends. In her letter to God | she pours out her grief and terror | her conflicting emotions of denial and acceptance of the events of that night | until she reaches a conclusion. The decision she makes when she finally comes face to face with her husband | leaves the reader both shocked and disturbed. The brother and literary mentor of the legendary Urdu writer Ismat Chughtai | Azeem Baig was an iconoclast and a feminist who did not hesitate to break boundaries. Nowhere is this more evident than in Vampire. Long before terms like ‘rape syndrome’ and ‘secondary rape’ were coined | Chughtai dared to write about the unmentionable subject of rape in Muslim society—from the female victim’s perspective. What makes the novel unique and amazingly relevant is that this story | set in 1930s’ India | could well be happening in the twenty-first century. Flawlessly translated by his grand-daughter | Zoovia Hamiduddin | this is the first of Azeem Baig Chughtai’s works to be translated into English.