Our car comes to a halt a few metres from a main crossing in Turiaganj, also known as Victoriaganj. At first we cannot locate the house, so we climb up a few flights of stairs to a row of shops. There, a shopkeeper points straight ahead and, opposite us, behind shops packed together like a deck of cards, a haveli rises. From afar, it almost seems like a child's sandcastle, with none of the frills commonly associated with havelis of North India. Instead, it seems to have been inspired by gothic architecture, two towers on either side of the conical façade rising up. Crescent-shaped swirls like half-drawn flowers are engraved on their arches, and perpendicular pillars are topped with football-shaped concrete blocks. A plaque above the arch of the left tower reads 'Adabistan' – the abode of literature. As we enter, the haveli greets us with LIVE AND LET LIVE carved along the roof's boundary wall.
Naiyer Masud's childhood was spent in the rooms and passageways of Adabistan. 'Ghar ke bahar nahin likh pate hain,' he says (I am not able to write outside the house). But once in Adabistan it does not matter which corner he is in – the stories come to him. As a child Masud would tell his mother he was affected by jinns and she, fearing for her child, would say, 'Ya to fakir ban jaoege ya pagal ban jaoge' (Either you will become a fakir or a madman).
Unlike Masud, his mother loved to travel. Once, he recalls, she decided on a whim to go to Kanpur, where she was born, without a train ticket. She also loved to eat while travelling, and would pack a tiffin and begin eating as soon as the train left the station. 'Ajeeb aurat thee, bahut bholee bhi thee aur hoshiyaar bhi. Aadmi ko pechaan ne mein mahir' (She was a strange woman, extremely innocent yet fully aware of the goings on. She was an expert in judging a person's character). She died suddenly of a heart attack in 1969. Masud was 34 years old at the time and in the process of writing 'Nusrat', which would become his first published short story. 'Amma ke marne ke baad thoda ham sab bhi mar gaye' (After mother's death, a part of all of us also died), he says. He wanted to write about her after she died, but was unable to do so – she was 'ideal', he says, and unless someone has some faults there is nothing to write about.
'Kisi ne mujhse kahan tha, ya to achcha likho ya alag sa likho. Achhe ka to pataa nahin lekin main alag sa likhta hoon,' says Masud. (Someone once told me that one should either write well or write differently. I don't know about writing well, but I write differently.) Well-known in literary circles in India and Pakistan, Masud was awarded the Sahitya Akademi prize for his Urdu short story collection Taoos Chaman ki Maina (The Myna from the Peacock Garden) in 2001. Masud's writing neither adheres to social realism nor does it employ florid and Persianised Urdu – both styles being the convention in Urdu literature. Rather, he writes in the vernacular and yet the world he creates is 'opaque' to borrow Muhammad Umar Memon's term from his introduction to Snake-catcher, a 2006 collection of Masud's short stories that the former translated. Memon points out that this world operates by its own logic but nevertheless 'demand[s] respect'; it is real and yet it does not 'add up to anything known'.