The Stories
A note from the author
Joseph’s Box was inspired by many things (and non-things), but specifically by a box containing a medium-sized bundle of aged-looking manuscripts which landed one sunny morning on my desk. They had been posted via sea-mail by a certain Ruafza Zaliqa Chishti from a particular street in an area of old Lahore close to the Wazir Khan mosque, but when later I made enquiries I discovered that the house in question had been demolished decades earlier, during the period of the British ‘Raj’.
I undertook extensive research, but the only material fact I was able to uncover was a plain rectangular black marble gravestone in a state of considerable disrepair, situated in the older section of the Garden Town cemetery of the city with the name Ruafza Zaliqa Chishti inscribed upon its surface. There were no dates. I was unable to ascertain any further details about the life of such a person; there was nothing in the archives to denote her existence.
A peculiarity of this episode was that, as I was writing the novel, similar – albeit more diminutive – packages kept arriving. These packages continued the sequence of linked tales and endnotes, all written long-hand with a fountain-pen in Persian, each of which purported to have come from the ‘box’ with which I had become obsessed. After a while I became unsure as to whether, as most certainly had been the case at the commencement of the dynamic, the novel was entirely a consequence of the source material or whether, as time went on, the information within the packages had been altered through contact with my own fictional narrative. If the latter were the case, it would mean that whoever was sending the information had access to my computer or my recyclate container – or possibly to my e-mail, since I often would send fragments of the novel across the ether to myself in order that I could work apace on them from a variety of physical locations.
I can conclude only that the episode was an elaborate prank; one would hesitate to describe it as a joke, since the long novel that is Joseph’s Box went through some thirteen drafts and, with the inflowing of the boxes of sea-mail irregularly subsuming the flow of my thoughts throughout the process, it is a wonder I did not go quite insane [see footnote below]. I absolutely refuse to accept the possibility that epistles were being sent to me by a dead person.
I have had to ameliorate some of the material; I am unable to explicate much further on the matter in this forum. Suffice it to say that the original versions of the tales would possess neither palatability, competence nor coherence to a readership in this advancing twenty-first century. It is as though in our imagined sophistication we have become constitutionally incapable of gazing into a mirror; to do so is perceived as an act of barbarism, so that a veil must be inserted betwixt eye and glass.
Nonetheless, it is my privilege to be in a position to be able to present an approximation of the contents of these manuscripts on this website. As the reader will see, it is possible to discern a degree of tangential consonance between these tales, fragments, endnotes, etc. and the narratives contained within Joseph’s Box.
I have no idea whether or not the mysterious packages will continue to arrive. I also am unable to quantify the effect of such possible occurrences on this author’s output. If anyone who reads this has any information or indeed any suggestions in this regard, please do not hesitate to contact either Two Ravens Press or me, as I would be very interested to learn of any similar experiences.
Now let me share this strange narrative with you: that which is within the Box and that which purports to exist outside…
Suhayl Saadi
Glasgow, Scotland
2009
Footnote: Those critics who have allowed their faculties to be delineated by the boundary conditions of contemporary market-driven, LA-movie script-written orthodoxy will attest that Joseph’s Box is too long, too verbose, too abstruse;, that it is lacking in narrative tension, assertiveness, drive and credibility; that there are too many adjectives, adverbs, nouns, verbs, pronouns, definite articles, indefinite articles and cardinal and subordinate clauses; that it is not sufficiently sparing, and that there are too many dots above too many is. They may even quote, without irony and out of context, from this paragraph in order to substantiate their claims. They will pronounce – and this surely is the highest accolade to which any novelist can aspire – that it is not even a novel. Over the years there have been esteemed individuals who, somewhat nihilistically, have claimed that my novels are not novels, my plays are not plays, and my short stories are not short stories. To extrapolate in logical manner, it may be then that my words are not words and my letters are not letters. If I may suggest, perhaps it would be best in semiotic terms to regard all of my work as consisting of varying measures of wine decanted from the same gourd, and yourself, the reader, as an oak-walled jaam of infinite capacity. Reading Joseph’s Box and much else penned by this author, one may, if one so desires, engage in a process of discerning the possible natures of consciousness, re-learning the architectonics of one’s denouement with the world. This assertion may sound a little pompous. But then, in truth, as everyone who knows, knows, in relation to a work such as this, and perhaps in general too, it can be said that the author is not the author.
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