“Selection Week”
by hurmat kazmi
from the August 16, 2021 issue of The New Yorker
I’m behind posting this week (the last few weeks), but I think things will get better as the season changes. It’s been a very busy summer, and that was capped last week when my son had a surgery and was in the hospital for some days (all is great!). Hopefully things will calm down a bit and there will be more time — ha! But on with this week’s fiction.
I’ve never heard of hurmat kazmi (the lack of capitalization is deliberate, as that is the author’s preference), but from his interview with Cressida Leyshon I see he was born in Pakistan and served some time in the Air Force — which serves as inspiration for this story.
Here is how the story begins:
In the beginning, it was him and the gecko.
I was probably the only one in the room who saw it, my eyes secretly, partially, open. The fourteen other boys in the room stood obediently, bent over—their underpants at their ankles, bottoms hoisted in the air, like mine. Eyes shut. That was the only difference between me and them. Them and me.
Please let me know if you know anything else by kazmi. I’m, of course, looking forward to your thoughts on the story itself as well!
Moving.
“Selection Week” deftly reveals the emotional hurt and upset one can feel when their sexuality does not fit in with the religion in which they were raised or what their parents expected or what their temporary career demanded.
It is written very simply with just enough detail to portray very exactly an extremely unpleasant experience and the physical surroundings and type of majority male insensitivity present within that setting.
It is a paradigm of what a excellent short story should be. And it reaches out to a reader in a lot of ways but particularly in how excruciatingly uncomfortable making a mistake (that one thought might not be noticed or took the chance that might be anyway) can be. Especially when one is ruthlessly (in an emotional sense) punished when everything goes wrong.
Imagine having to explain to your parents. Or during a job interview, how you were sussed out as an outsider in your own country.
It must not be very easy growing up in Pakistan when you are in competition with so many other people to be part of the Air Force at the time of the Muslim New Year. Like everyone else you are just trying to survive and make a life for yourself and hope nothing about you will thwart your journey or make it more difficult then it had to have been since the day you were born.
Of particular note is how succinctly alone and set apart the protagonist feels. This short story could be an excellent chapter to a novel that kazmi may be writing.
It is an extremely moving story and reminds me a bit of Muhammad Hanif’s novel “A Case of Exploding Mangoes”, which I believe is also set in a Pakistani Air Force academy and prominently features a romance between two boys.
I just want to address one thing in Larry’s comment above: Muharram is not the “Islamic New Year” (it is the first month in the Muslim calendar, but that’s not its significance). Muharram is a month of mourning for Shias to commemorate the martyrdom of Imam Hussain, the Prophet’s grandson. The Shia/Sunni tensions are extremely significant in this story. The narrator prays in the Sunni way so as not to mark himself as Shia. Pakistan is a majority Sunni country and–though they are perhaps 20% of the Muslim population–Shia Muslims often feel like second class Muslims.
I am also intrigued by the notion that the other boy may not even be queer. He didn’t really seem to reciprocate the narrator’s advances. That makes it even sadder that he was punished (we assume) for an identity he didn’t even identify with.
Overall, a very relatatable story for Pakistani LBGT folk.
Kabir,
Thanks for the clarification. I read in a Norton religion survey book on Islam that worldwide 90% of all Muslims are Sunni and only 10% Shia. I did not know that Muharram was a Shia month of mourning for the grandson of the Prophet. That makes him seem more of an outsider within his own religion. I know it is a Pakistani and LBGT specific story but it is just so well told as a really bad day in this guy’s life it is really very human and very relatable in a general way.
I concur about the excellence of this story. It was moving, riveting, viscerally impactful and full of great use of olfactory and visual description.
I also had a thought that brings up discussion from the last story, Superstition, where there is also a somewhat open ending. I had complained about not knowing in that story whether our narrator had fallen to his death or not and many seemed to agree it was perhaps an “unearned” open ending.
Here, though, our not knowing exactly what happened to the other boy (who I definitely read as not being savvy to the narrator’s intentions) is “earned.” First–the other boy is not our narrator AND in this situation it also works dramatically–if the narrator KNEW what happened they could either mourn or perhaps rationalize or feel relief depending on what had happened, BUT they’d have some catharsis. As is, it can haunt him. I too hope this is the first of a longer work about the narrator’s experiences in the Air Force.
Ken,
Having an open ending is a little disappointing but actually wanting to know what happened is a testament to the writer’s skill and expertise in fully gaining his reader’s attention. An open ending allows the reader to dig more into the story to possibly figure out what happened. But it also prepares a reader to anticipate what happens next to be taken up in the novel if hopefully there is one. Because the story’s foundation is so real and convincing regardless of what happens next. For better or worse we’ll be waiting.
Have just read hurmat kazmi’s “Selection Week” again and it seems even more powerful than the first time. It has practically perfect structure and pacing even though it runs something like 7,500 words yet is so focused, it reads more like a perfect 2,500 word short story. Technically it is almost three quarters of novella length. Yet it is one of the most seamlessly smooth short stories I have ever read. And I think an author who would have loved this short story is Manto, who was persecuted for writing “pornographic” short stories much as kazmi might have been if this story had been published in Karachi. The irony is the fluke of love seems like it might have occurred in an unlikely way in an unlikely environment in the manner of any relationship no matter if technically LBGT or not. There is the irony of the protagonist being Shia saving him somewhat while being Sunni made it worse for the other guy. They are both Muslim. And that led me to thinking about how on a map, Pakistan looks so small compared to India, yet before Partition they were both part of the same subcontinent.