THE SCATTERED LEAVES

The Scattered Leaves is Dr. Hussain’s fifth anthology of his rendering of Urdu stories into English. 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. The stories lead us into a world shaped by the inner and outer conflicts that have wrecked the provincial lives of people, but in doing so they reveal the larger social, moral, and political chaos that has devastated the lives of ordinary men and women in the Indian sub-continent. Ultimately, they testify to the depth of the human life and reflect upon its mysteries. These short stories masterfully lay bare the whole fabric of Indian society. They capture the dilemmas that the characters find themselves in, and a terrible sense of alienation – both within and without – that defines the existential crises they are going through. This anthology presents to the perceptive English reader a selection of stories comparable in excellence to short fiction written in any other language.