Pakistani Literature Lec 2&3

The English Short Story in Pakistan: A Survey

The acquisition of English as a creative language in Pakistan (and indeed the other countries of
South Asia) is the direct result of the colonial encounter - a literary inheritance which has
continued to grow and develop to increasing critical acclaim over the last few decades. The focus
of this international attention has been the Pakistani English novel while the Pakistani short story
has been drowned under the collective term 'fiction' although it has had many practitioners since
Partition. This article will concentrate on full length English story collections in Pakistan, not
translations since English occupies a unique place in the literatures of Pakistan, as an erstwhile
colonial language which continues to be used extensively as the language of the professional
classes, government and by ex-patriates in the Anglophone diaspora.
At the time Pakistan was created in 1947 by the Partition of India, it 'inherited a small group of
English language writers including the young Calcutta-born Zaib-un-Nissa Hamidullah (1921-
2000) who became a columnist, a magazine editor and social worker. In 1958, she published her
only story collection The Young Wife and Other Stories! which is regarded as the first book of
'literary' Pakistani English fiction to have been written since 19472. Her literary reputation
however rests on individual tales, rather than the collection as a whole, which consists of fifteen
stories. The quality of Hamidullah's tales varies drastically and in some, Hamidullah's prose
ranges from the precise and poetic to the archaic, ornate and flowery. 'The Young Wife'
romanticizes rural
! Zaib-un-Nissa Hamidullah, The Young Wife and Other Stones (Karachi: Mirror Publications,
1958).
2 In 1948 Mumtaz Shahnawaz was killed in an aircrash leaving behind a historically important
but cumbersome first draft of her only novel The Heart Divided about Partition, which was
published by her family unedited in 1959. life and the harsh reality of women's lives3 through its
portrayal of a young, arrogant and beautiful village girl, who taunts and humiliates her fine,
adoring newly-wed husband. This is compared with the great bond of del love and respect that
her tyrannical father and her downtrodden, self-abnegating and 'wise' mother share. In marked
contrast, Hamidullah portrays a wonderful eye for detail and veracity in her story 'The Bull and
the She-Devil' which explores suppressed sexuality in rural Pakistan and describes a society
where marriage means sexual need, not love: a young villager Ghulam Qadir becomes
increasingly convinced that his wife has bewitched him, because he falls in love with her,
unwittingly and cannot understand his emotions. This story is one of Hamidullah's two finest
stories. The ·other 'No Music Before the Mosque' tells of the acrimonious relationship between a
traditional, religious, pious man and his disobedient son, who prefers to play the flute rather than
pray: the story reflects the old controversy in Islam between orthodoxy and creativity. (Hanif
Kureishi's portrayal of fathers and sons and their attitude towards religion in 'My Son The
Fanatic' provides an interesting reversal to this).
The somewhat uneven literary quality of Hamidullah's stories reflects a problem that runs
through the majority of English story collections published in Pakistan over the next three
decades. Among others The Wheels Go Round and Round by Aisha Malik (1966), Saqipur
Sacred by HK Burki (1969), They Simply Belong (1972) by Raja Tridiv Roy, Death By Hanging
by Yunus Said4 are all examples of early Pakistani English collections which include good short
stories, alongside hugely inadequate ones (Rahman, pp. 80-82, pp. 118-120). In other words,
promising talent received no proper direction. Also, a huge debate raged about the 'validity' of
English as a creative medium for Pakistanis in a newly independent country, although English
continued to be used as the language of government in Pakistan, and a lively English language
press flourished. By the 1950's the notion that literature should uphold nation-building, reform
and ideology, became widespread (Rahman, p. 58). The imposition of martial law in 1958,
followed by strict censorship, impeded English fiction more than in Urdu where the short story
was highly developed already and had many practitioners.
In 1966 Mehdi Ali Seljouk published in Britain, where he was living, his only collection
Corpses5 in which each story ends with a dead body. The volume is preceded by a preface
describing the massacres and suffering Seljouk witnessed in the Muslim princely state of
Hyderabad after it was taken over by India in 1948 by military force. Seljouk managed to escape
to Karachi (Rahman, p. 84) and could have used his displacement, anger and suffering to create
really worthwhile stories. Instead he lapses into a vituperative, uncontrolled abuse of Indians and
Hindus and sundry anti-war diatribes, which destroy his literary credibility.6
Meanwhile in 1964, the expatriat Zulfikar Ghose in Britain co-authored with the experimental
British novelist BS Johnson (1933-73) a story collection A Statement Against Corpses (1964f
which marked the beginning of Ghose's distinguished career8: ten novels four works of criticism
and five volumes of poetry - and a second story collection Veronica and the Gongora Passion
(1998). Ghose belongs to a group of early diaspora writers for whom homeland is an uncertain
territory, and identity lies in the use of words: in literature and writing. He was born in 1935 in
Sialkot (now Pakistan), educated in Bombay (now Mumbai, India) migrated to Britain with his
family in 1951, married a Brazilian artist in 1964 and moved to the University of Texas at Austin
in 1969. A Statement Against Corpses consists of nine stories by Johnson and five by Ghose,
who was the first truly contemporary writer of Pakistani short fiction, and gathers up past and
present to illuminate individual lives. Three of his stories 'Godbert' 'The Corpses' and 'Amy' are
set in England but do not have a trace of the sub-continent, nor sub-continental characters, but
often have an autobiographical element, and revolve around characters who are English. This
reflects Ghose's sense of Britishness, an assertion of identity and belonging - a discourse which
was to be central, more famously, to the work of British-born Hanif Kureishi two decades later.
In the collection's two 'sub-continental stories' each employs a different mode. The spare and
powerful 'The Departure' describes the emotions of a village family, on the eve of their son's
departure for the city; while 'The Zoo People' is a vivid and sad portrait of two, elderly
Englishwomen, Dorothy and Emily, who come to India as young women during the British Raj.
They find themselves, overtaken by history, in an in¬dependent India, a theme that Paul Scott
was to explore in his novel A Jewel In the Crown (1966).9
Ghose's next story collection Veronica and the Gongora Passion, appeared thirty four years later
and its tight, visual prose, embedded with metaphorical and mystical images, echoes elements in
his novels such as The Incredible Brazilian (1972) and The Triple Mirror of the Self (1993).10
Ghose's short stories also continue with his contemplation of memory and illusion, sexuality and
spirituality, passion, and death. In 'A Mediterranean Tale' set on the timeless shores of northern
Africa, General Abdelwahab Bassam Saeed, the kidnapped son of 'barbarians from the north',
reflects on his life to tell a tale of changing identities, the unexpected twists of fate and of his
love for a beautiful Persian girl. Accident and chance are pivotal to 'Arrival in India' which is set
in the sixteenth century. A Spaniard Jose Abbado Megid (born Yusuf el Majid, a Moor) decides
to travel to India to meet its great sufi intellectuals, but the year is 1492: Jose's friends smuggle
him on board ship travelling by a new route to India - westwards. Ghose's stories about South
America and South Asia have many parallels of class, social structure and poverty. In 'A
Husband for Carolina' a rich, Brazilian ranch owner develops a fascination for the voluptuous
14-year old daughter of his impoverished tenant. While in 'Male Weakness' set in Southern
Punjab, Javed the son of a landlord is surprisingly uninterested in Saira, his sister's beautiful
maidservant and drug-supplier, but makes a surprising discovery about his own sexuality and his
needs, when he discovers Saira's husband dancing - dressed as a woman. Both these stories
include elements which resonate with stories about feudal life in Daniyal Mueenuddin's 2009
collection Other Rooms, Other Wonders.l1
Meanwhile Pakistan continued to undergo great political upheavals. Short spells of democratic
rule were followed by long periods of military government. 1971 saw the military action in East
Pakistan to thwart the result of the 1970 election which led to a war with India and the separation
of East Pakistan, which became an independent Bangladesh. None of this evinced any response
in Pakistani English fiction for a long time. A large number of sub-standard English story
collections continued to be published including Sadness at Dawn by Nisar Ahmed Farooqi
(1967) to the 'sex obsessed' (Rahman, p. 87) The Seduced' by Saeed P. Yazdani.12
However, The White Tiger of Viringa by Bilal Ahmed Jeddy (1976)13, a one-time army officer,
does offer some immensely readable stories of adventure or mystery. Two, 'The Switch' and 'The
Miracle' are set in the 1971 and 1965 wars against India, respectively. These one-sided tales of
heroism, initiative and daring and their tone and style are very similar to popular British fiction
which emerged shortly after World War II. They are mercifully free from polemics of MA
Seljouk but J eddy's patriotic and romantic notions of war are very different to later works such
as Tariq Rahman's unflinching story 'Bingo' about the 1971 conflict and Moazzam Sheikh's 'The
Idol Lover' about the ambiguities of war and conflict in Kashmir.
The influence of Jim Corbett14 is also evident in Jeddy's hunting stories which reflect the
symbiotic relationship between man, nature and environment. The title story about a white man-
eating tiger in East Pakistan, incorpoates the supernatural and has its roots in the ancient jungle
lore of the sub-continent. The most rewarding story in this collection is the riveting 63-page 'The
Marine Man-Eater of Mauri' which was first serialized in Dawn in 1968 and has all the mythic
quality of Moby Dick15; (Rahman, p. 117) its central theme -the battle between a man and shark
and the hunting techniques involved ¬resonates across cultures with Peter Benchley's hugely
successful novel Jaws (1974).16 Jeddy's narrative is filled with wonderful details about the
aquatic environment, marine life and the inhabitants of the fishing village by the shores of the
Arabian Sea that the Great White Killer Shark terrorizes. The story which includes an orphaned
Hindu girl could have made a meaningful comment on minorities in Pakistan. However when her
Muslim fiance is killed by the shark and she volunteers to be shark-bait but is refused, this
virginal heartbroken girl offers herself to the narrator (an underwater diver and photographer) as
reward for killing the shark.
This type of gender bias and the portrayal of women either as people of inferior intellect or mere
seductresses, runs through the work of almost all the English short fiction of Pakistani men with
notable exceptions.
Meanwhile the South Asian English novel had started to dazzle the literary world, following
Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1982)17 which was the first to capture successfully the
hybridity of South Asian sound. There was critical acclaim for Pakistani novelists and dramatists
too such as Bapsi Sidhwa, Hanif Kureishi, Sara Suleri, and Rukhsana Ahmad. In Pakistan, the
military government of General Zia-ul Haq decided to 'Islamize' society and tried to replace
English with Urdu in government and in schools. This met with great resistance, because English
was now perceived in Pakistan as the global language of the electronic media and the
contemporary world - and English stayed.
In 1989, Tariq Rahman published his first colletion Legacy (1989) which consists of stories
written between 1969-1982 and is mostly juvenilia. Some employ British protagonists, others are
set in the distant past or the distant future. His next collection Work (1991) is rather more
rewarding. He is at his best when describing Pakistan's cocooned military life: Rahman had
served in the Pakistan Army for eight years but resigned because he had opposed the 1971
military action in East Pakistan. Is Work includes 'Bingo' a story he wrote in 1975, which brings
out that 1971 genocide in harrowing detail and is of great importance, because it is the first work
of fiction written in English by a West Pakistani about that conflict (a subject which has largely
passed into public amnesia). The story revolves around the relationship between fellow cadets,
the West Pakistani narrator, Safeer and his Bengali friend!Tajassur. Both are posted to East
Pakistan later but find themselves on opposing sides after the military crackdown, because
Tajassur joins the insurgency. Nevertheless, he rescues the wounded Safeer, provides him with
shelter only to be gunned down - with his mother and sister - by Safeer's West Pakistani
'rescuers'. Many of the stories in this collection revolve around social iniquities and rural life
including the humorous and poignant 'The Moustache'. One of Rahman's best stories, this tells of
a labourer Dadu and Shafqat his soldier grandson in a Punjab village, each of whom is blessed
with a luxuriant moustache which is considered a symbol of pride and honour - and myths grow
around them.
Rahman's third collection The Third Leg (1999)19 includes more stories about military life. In
'The Inquisitors' Rahman reveals how innocent children can be manipulated and turned into
monsters through games they play with their uncle, an erstwhile military man. Unknown to their
liberal, unsuspecting parents, the children are being trained, or rather brainwashed, to be worthy
of his fanatical hero General Zia-ul-Haq, through secret outdoor games involving slogans and
endurance tests. In this volume Rahman continues to expose class disparity and economic
hardship and he takes a step back into history to examine the hierarchy of power in 'Mai Baap'.
Set during the British Raj, this tells of the ambitious, Cambridge-educated Khaled Khan, a young
Indian in that elite colonial corps, the Indian Civil Service, who is posted to Bengal during the
great famine. He proceeds to echo the contemptuous attitudes of his British superiors, when he
finds himself surrounded by starving, people clamouring for food. Rahman culls work from all
his previous volumes in Selected Stories (2002) but this also includes work which is not
sufficiently developed. This is also true of Athar Tahir's only collection Other Seasons (1990fO
which consists of twenty five stories, many of which are lively vignettes of Pakistani life. Tahir,
who is better known as a Pakistani English poet, writes with ease and confidence to recreate the
rural landscapes and over-crowded cities of Pakistan and those who inhabit them often. He
employs indigenous words to characterize local speech, ambience and sound. One of his most
accomplished stories is the haunting 'Trolley Man' in which a proud, young man loses his legs in
a train accident; while 'The Inspector of Schools' tells of a dedicated village schoolmaster who
teaches in a open field and has no recourse to funding. In 'Rising World' Tahir knits in references
to the romantic Punjabi myths of Heer Ranjha and Sohni Mahiwal in his moving tale of love and
betrayal which culminates in an accidental drowning.
In fact the 1990's were extremely productive for short Pakistani English fiction and the
publication of Aamer Hussein's first collection Mirror to the Sun (1993)21 was an event of great
significance. Hussein's was the first volume of English short fiction by a Pakistani which
consisted of cohesive, multi¬layered stories about migration, identity, mother-tongue and
belonging, and which consciously tried expand the parameters of the English short story to
incorporate Urdu literature and lore.
Hussein who was born and brought up in Karachi, attended a boarding school in Ootcamund,
India, briefly before he migrated with his family to Britain and read Urdu, Persian and Arabic at
university. Mirror to the Sun includes stories which are set in pre-Partition India and assume the
quality of the timeless myths built up of different tales which resonate with the central motif.
'The Hidden One' tells of a princess who was educated as a man, rode and travelled unveiled, fell
in love with and married the narrator, her father's blue-eyed overseer, Jafar Khan. In 'The Colour
of a Loved One's Eyes' their son, a Pakistani diplomat recalls his ancestral home in India, the
pre-Partition suicide of his charming but frequently absent father, the silence of his powerful
dominating mother. The key to the story - and a lost love - lies in the spectacular imagery of an
Indian miniature. In 'The Hunter's Bride' Hussein captures the magical phantasmagoric quality of
the jungle where that mythical beast the tiger can metamorphose into the mythical women, each
embodying desire and danger, terror and beauty.
However the central theme in this collection, 'a poetic exploration of the condition of exile'22,
remains migration. The title story, set in a boarding school in India, provides a moving portrait of
dislocation and loneliness. The close intense friendship between two homesick boys, one from
Pakistan, the other from Singapore, is greatly misinterpreted by their elders and leads to great
anguish. The quiet reference to the narrator's 'abandoned childhood' in Karachi his 'city by the
sea' (Hussein, Mirror, p. 212) provides the images which Hussein develops further in his
subsequent collection, This Other Salt (1999)23, at the heart of which is a sophisticated 40-page
experimental sequence 'Skies: Four Texts for an Autobiography' which examines fiction,
imagination and autobiography.
Hussein's text needs to be examined in the light political events which had overtaken Pakistan in
the 1980's and 1990's. The death of Zia-ul Haq in 1989 was followed by great political instability
during the civilian governments of Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto. While the burgeoning
overpopulated city of Karachi became a cauldron of ethnic violence between its original Sindhi
population and the migrants who had come from India since 1947. In 'Skies' Hussein knits the
story of Partition, of Karachi and Sindh, with tales of other migrations, to ask: What is identity?
What is belonging? Hussein's fictitious, expatriate narrator, Sameer, returns to Karachi, his
native city as a celebrity and Urdu scholar. He is there at the invitation of Zoya, a feminist writer.
He tries to find the landmarks and images of his childhood, which have haunted his troubled
dreams. But this is a different, new and contemporary Karachi, where Sameer, who belongs to a
Sind hi family, realizes that he knows no Sind hi, yet Zoya, a migrant and the wife of a Sindhi
doctor, speaks Sindhi fluently. Sameer finds himself a stranger in Karachi's strife-riven society;
in turn, he is rejected by the city - and his words censored.
Hussein's work is never overtly political, but the great political upheavals and mass migrations
which have overtaken the subcontinent are built into his narrative nevertheless.24 He combines
poetry and prose in 'The Lost Cantos of A Silken Tiger' which transposes into contemporary
Pakistan, one of the great romantic and metaphorical stories of The Old Testament as well as
Arabic, Persian and Urdu literature - Yusuf and Zuleikha Goseph and Potiphar's wife). The plot
unravels through several voices, to tell of writers and writing, literature and literary
interpretation. Hussein recreates the world of exiled South Asian writers in contemporary
London with flashbacks to the oppressive, volatile political landscape of Pakistan and the
spellbinding literary landscape of a radical woman writer, Aarzou. In her manuscripts she
describes her bureaucrat husband, as Potiphar, herself as Zuleikha; her lover is the handsome and
peerless poet, Yusuf.
The overlaying and overlapping of cultures is one of the most interesting aspects of Hussein's
work. He has steered away from the hybrid 'bazaar English' and has tried to build bridges
between literatures by introducing into his English fiction, the metaphor, style and structure of
sophisticated Urdu short fiction. Several stories reflect multiple migrations and the intermingling
of many communities in London. In 'This Other Salt', a Pakistani takes out Briton's memories of
Karachi and his sense of loss are interwoven with images of his lover, Lamia, a Palestinian
woman dying of cancer in Indonesia. References to the trans geographical existence of birds run
through Hussein's work; while 'Painting on Glass' is an exploration of creative renewal and
rebirth through brilliant metaphorical imagery.
Over the years, Hussein's prose has become increasingly assured, spare and controlled. In
Turquoise (2002)25 which consists of seven stories 'displacement ... is often a metaphor for
unrealized desire. Characters move between countries cities or districts and find themselves
living in strange places or inhabiting folk tales:26 'The City of Longing,' is a sensuous, magic
realist fable of yearning and thwarted hopes. In the cinematic 'Electric Shadows' Hussein's
re¬claims memories of a cosmopolitan Karachi childhood against the backdrop of the 1965 war
against India.
In 2002, Hussein, who is also a translator of Urdu fiction, edited Hoops of Fire: Fifty Years of
Fiction by Pakistani women (mostly translations from the Urdu) and he provides a very fine and
sensitive portrait of women's lives across the upheavals, turmoil and division of Partition.
Turquoise includes 'The Needlewoman's Calendar': a young woman Tabinda musters up strength
to escape from a bruising, untenable marriage and transforms her life through her skill as a
needlewoman. Many of Hussein's stories have a great cultural richness and intertextualitY such
as 'Adiba: A Storyteller's Tale' which begins before Partition, which spans Pakistan's short
history, and reconstructs the life and career of an Urdu writer in Lahore and the altering
perceptions of her and her work.
Hussein published a selection of his work in a fourth collection Cactus Town which was
published in Pakistan. He attains a new maturity and sophistication in his slim fifth collection
Insomnia (2007) which continues to knit Pakistan, Britain and the many countries and cities that
Hussein, and London's migratory multicultural population, inhabits. Insomnia includes a
particularly intricate and elegant story 'Nine Postcards from Sanlucar de Barrameda' which was
written a week after the terrorist attack in London on 7/7/2005. Hussein's subtle tale of exile,
cultural commingling and adaptation is set in Spain, the land where a brilliant Euro-Arab culture
flourished once. In this illusory landscape, the sunlight reminds the illuminator of Karachi,
though the sea is different and there is no frangipani amid the hibiscus and jasmine but the land
also offers new colours and horizons for him to discover.
Aamer Hussein prefers to call himself 'a Karachi born Londoner' and his short stories with their
intermingling of cultures, are radically different from those of British born Hanif Kureishi. The
son of an English mother and a Paki¬stani father, Kureishi made his first trip to Pakistan at 28.
Commenting on his screenplay My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) which revolves around the
relationship of two boys Gmar and Johnny, Kureishi said 'The two boys are really two sides of
me; a Pakistani boy and an English boy'.27 He was already a well-known playwright, novelist
and screenwriter, ~hen he published his first story collection, Love in a Blue Time (1997).~8
Seven of the ten stories revolve around English characters including the title story, a tale of
friendship, and literary envy between Roy, a rich and successful writer and Jimmy a struggling
playwright during a drug-sodden binge. Kureishi's tight accomplished stories continue with the
'themes, character types, tropes from his novel (and previous work) are reshuffled and
considered.' (Moore-Gilbert, 145) His work seeks to redefine concepts of
Englishness/Britishness. He attacks the politics of the Tory Britain of the 1980's and the
dynamics of a corrupt free-wheeling capitalism in which the wealthy Pakistanis he portrays are
enmeshed. 'With Her Tongue Down my Throat' describes the relationship between the
unemployed Nina, the daughter of a Pakistani father and an English mother and her rich, well-
educated Pakistani half sister, Nadia, who visits London, then invites Nina to Pakistan. The story
reinforces Kureishi's depiction of Pakistan as a somewhat alien and distant land, from which
relatives and family friends suddenly intrude as an exotic, unknown, Anglicized species, into the
known familiarities and poverty of working class Britain. In· 'My Son the Fanatic' which was
developed into a screenplay, Kureishi compares the dreams and aspirations of first and second
generation Britons. Pervez a taxi driver who was born and brought up in Pakistan does not feel
the need to assert a Muslim identity in Britain, nor follow Muslim tenets rigidly, but his newly-
religious son c~iticizes him for being 'too implicated in western civilization' (Kureishi, Love in a
Blue Time, p. 127).
Kureishi's second collection Midnight All Day (1999) has only one story 'Girl' with an Asian
British character, Majid and 'his ethnicity is of marginal importance' (Moore-Gilbert, p. 152).
British critics assume that 'this has little obvious relevance to the novella', (Moore-Gilbert, p.
152) but Kureishi's treat¬ment of an Asian identity as incidental is the most important aspect of
this story and his later work. Kureishi's third story collection The Body and Other Stories (2003)
is dominated by the 126-word novella - the title story - about an aging man, who undergoes a
new experimental treatment that gives him a new, young body.
The international critical acclaim for English fiction by Pakistani women, had begun with the
novels of Bapsi Sidhwa in the 1980's and had coincided with Pakistan's highly politicized
women's rnovemeI?-t in Pakistan protesting against Zia-ul Haq's ordinances which marginalized
women and minorities in the name of religion.29 In 1988 Zia-ul Haq was killed in an airplane
crash and Benazir Bhutto became the first woman to be elected Prime Minister oj Pakistan.
In 1996, the Lahore-born Tahira Naqvi in the United States, published her first collection Attar
of Roses30 which includes the lively 'Love in an Election Year'. The story is framed by the
possibility of Benazir Bhutto's becoming Prime Minister but consists of a flashback to 1964, the
year another Pakistani woman - Fatima Jinnah - stood against the incumbent President, Ayub
Khan to be Pakistan's executive head of state. The story links Pakistan's dreams and aspirations
for freedom with that of the narrator's cousin the 21-year-old Sughra Baji, who falls in love with
Javed Bhai that winter. But Sughra Baji'5 mother negotiates Sughra Baji's marriage, without her
consent to a man she ha5 never met: Fatima Jinnah loses her election and Sughra Baji gives up
Javed Bha: - and turns into a dour, plump disconsolate woman. Attar of Roses consist5 of
thirteen stories, set mostly in Pakistan and which have been strongly in¬fluenced by the Urdu
feminist fiction that Naqvi translates. However in th~ title-story 'Attar of Roses' a school master
becomes obsessed with a womar who is covered by a black burqa from head to·toe from which
peep a pair oj tantalizing hands and beautiful feet. To Naqvi the story embodies her owr
obsession with Pakistan, a place that seemed lost to her.31 Naqvi's nexl collection Dying In A
Strange Country (2001) is set almost entirely in America Many of the stories in Naqvi's two
collections are rather slight but shedoe1 provide an insight into the lives of Pakistani American
women. One of hel finest stories 'Song of My Mother' revolves around a Pakistani woman'~
preparation of a culinary speciality in her daughter's American kitchen. A~ mother and daughter
converse, time, memory and place merge into a seamles~ whole.
Talat Abbasi's only collection Bitter Gourd (2001)32 consisting of seventeen tight, intense
stories is possibly the strongest work of short English fiction by a Pakistani woman. Abbasi who
grew up in Karachi and worked in New York for the United States Population Fund turns an
unforgiving gaze at inequalities of class and gender. Often she employs, to great advantage, an
unremitting stream-of-consciousness narrative. In 'Bear and A Trainer' the narrator plans and
executes a terrible revenge on her Pakistani American husband: he has bullied and scorned her
from the day she married him and she left all that was familiar to come and live in New York.
While 'Sad Petticoats' is a more optimistic tale of self-empowerment, as a well-educated
Pakistani American woman copes with poverty and an incompatible marriage in New York by
launching herself into a lucrative career as a seamstress.
Abbasi's stories are set in Pakistan mostly and are filled with the quiet, imploding emotional
turmoil and daily injustices that her characters often struggle against. The title story and 'Granny'
lay bare the real social hypocrisy in the name of charity and the abysmal treatment meted out by
the rich to poor relatives who depend on meager handouts. Abbasi pays great attention to craft
and plot 'illuminating what Virginia Woolf called 'moments of being' sketching 'not only the
inner but the outer life of her society.>33 'Simple Questions' is one of the collection's most
haunting stories which is narrated by an impoverished, exhausted woman who has just given
birth and finds herself pregnant yet again. Abbasi encapsulates the daily hardship of the woman's
life while describing the argument between her and her eldest daughter's teacher who begs her
not to take the child out of school. 'Mirage' is another moving story which tells of a mother's
complex emotions in New York on the day she leaves her handicapped child at a home, because
she feels she has no other choice.
Bina Shah, who spent several years in the United States made her debut with Animal Medicine
(1999)34 a collection of enchanting, magical short stories for children. Shah went on to write
two novels before she published her first story collection for adults Blessings (2007) in which
several stories revolve around the response of expatriate to Pakistan, after a long absence.
'Funland' describes the crisis of a young ex-patriate couple who return to Pakistan after many
years and witness a terrifying road accident. In 'The Optimist' Shah explores the huge differences
between a young Pakistani man in Karachi and his bride, a British-Pakistani cousin. 'The
Wedding of Sindhri' indicts honour killings in Pakistan. Shah has a great eye for detail and
captures many different dimensions of Pakistani and diaspora life, though some of her stories
such as 'Imprint' and the 'Angel of Jalozai' need to have been developed more. There were also
some stories of interest in Shaila Abdullah's Beyond The Cayenne Wall (2006)35 while Sarajevo
Saturdays (2009)36 by Maniza Naqvi, the author's first story collection, comes after the
publication of her four novels. Naqvi who lives and works in Washington went to Bosnia
Herzgovinia on an assignment in 1999. Her unusual collection, is a tribute to the spirit of that
multi-cultural city and consists of rare vignettes of Sarajevo life though many of them are
impressions or anecdotes, rather than fully fledged short stories.
Since the 1990's Pakistani English fiction has started to come into its own although much of it
knits life in the diaspora and Pakistan. This includes Javed Qazi's Unlikely Stones (1997)37,
while Suhayl Saadi plays around with language in his first book The Burning Mirror (2001) in a
rare combination of Scottish English and Urdu which he was to use so effectively in his novel
Psychoraag (2004).38 Imad Rahman turns his attention to The Great American Dream and the
Great-Pakistani-Dream-Of-America in his first book I Dream of Micro¬waves (2004)39, a witty,
incisive and at times, raunchy, collection of interlinked short stories, narrated by Kareem Abdul-
Jabbar, a down-and-out Pakistani American actor - a persona Rahman uses to great affect to
lampoon the popular stereotypes perpetuated by Hollywood. The entire book is imbued with
references to well-known films, actors and acting which Kareem draws upon for inspiration and
which fuel his dreams, while he struggles to survive by doing menial jobs. Rahman's sense of the
absurd runs through this collection including his one story set in Pakistan 'I Claudius', in which
the unemployed Kareem finds work with an American Shakespearean troupe touring Pakistan:
he plays the part of Claudius in Hamlet - which takes him to remote and scenic areas and an
encounter with entertainment-starved dacoits.
Cultural commingling runs through the Pakistani-American Moazzam Shaikh's first book of
English fiction The I dol Lover (2008).40 In the title story, an Indian soldier in Kashmir, a
Hindu, questions war and conflict between India and Pakistan and contemplates his life and
loves and his fascination for Muslim culture, a Muslim woman and the Urdu ghazal. 'Monsoon
Rains' a poignant tale of a man's desire and lust and an attractive sweeper woman's compliance,
due to the exigencies of extreme poverty. Some of Sheikh's stories dwell on the searing conflicts
in the M~ddle East but several including 'Gypsy Leaves' and 'When Man Sleeps' bring together
the rich, jostling multi-cultural textures of San Francisco.
Pakistani English fiction attains a new maturity with the publication of Daniyal Mueenuddin's
first book Other Rooms Other Wonders a truly fine collection of loosely interconnected stories
set in rural Punjab where the half¬American author farms. The opening story 'Nawabdin
Electrician' which tells of a man's increased status in the fictitious district of Dunyapur when he
ex¬changes his old bicycle for a motorbike, reveals Mueenuddin's eye for detail, his ability to
pick out small anecdotes and embroider them into a rich, cohesive tapestry of colours and
emotions. 'Each of the stories opens a door on to a life you had never expected, shines a light for
a while and quietly closes the door again.'41
Mueenuddin's stories illuminate skillfully the ordinary lives of people who are connected, one
way or another to KK Harouni a feudal landlord with vast tracts of land in Dunyapur and houses
in Lahore and elsewhere. 'Saleema' tells of an attractive maidservant, married to a drug addict.
First she turns her attentions to Hassan, the cook and then falls in love with Rafik the elderly
married valet but the death of KK Harouni changes their entire lives. In Mueenuddin's stories
women tend to be rather conniving though his descrip¬tion of their lives and the inequalities of
class and gender are brought with great skill. In the title story, Husua a young, distant and poor
relative comes to see her 'uncle', KK Harouni for help. He arranges for her to have typing lessons
and slowly, gradually, she moves in with him, to the fury of his im¬perious daughters who have
their revenge, finally. Mueenuddin also provides an incisive portrait of politics, power and
upward mobility among Pakistan's rural communities in 'Provide, Provide'. Chaudhury]aglani the
manager of KK Harouni's lands grows rich at Harouni's expense, forms political alliances which
result in his election to the provincial assembly. He also falls in love with and takes as a second
wife, the driver's sister Zainab, but her world collapses when he is felled by a terminal illness. In
'Lily' Mueenuddin reveals quite a different aspect of Pakistani life through the story of Leila, or
Lily, a glamorous rich well travelled socialite and the sad tension in her marriage to the upright,
clever Princeton educated Murad TaIwan, the son of a large landowner.
From this it can be surmised that the Pakistani English story has come a long way after many
halting steps and stands on the brink of a new horizon.