WARNING: This reckons with a portrayal of an adult recalling being sexually assaulted as a child
In Lihaaf, the quality of the prose is very distinct compared to the rest of Ismat Chughtai’s work. When I first read it, the significance of the child narrator’s presence landed differently than how I’m thinking about it now. At the time, I had thought of it as a decision on Chughtai’s part to process adult sexuality through the eyes of a child. This way, the reader’s existing system of intelligibility when it came to sex would be completely suspended, and they would be put in the child's unknowing experience. The child narrator is not the only one, though: there is also a quasi-omniscient narrator and (more importantly for my purposes here) the child narrator's adult self. When the child is narrating, she is really being rendered through the adult narrators’ memory: there is no demarcating the two. I would go as far as to say there is no child narrator, just an adult narrator rendering her thoughts as a child. As a result, she often does so in ways that must be inaccurate. For example, she notes Begum Jan’s “carefully plucked eyebrows” (10) — a child might notice their shape, but wouldn’t appreciate the care that went into them. Because of this, I agree with Tahra: in class, she had said that the perspective of the child is a manifestation of the adult narrator’s own repression. The 'child narrator' doesn't exist as an entity in itself in the story. As an adult, the narrator processes the sexual experience she was unknowingly thrust into as a child in a child’s terms. She is unable to bring that into a system of adult intelligibility. As an adult, she has the ability to see that an adult used her for sexual pleasure, but she cannot confront this explicit terms: she can only reproduce the experience of the unknown fear she had as a child. This, I think, is why the story reads as it does.