Meatless days
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In this narrative of elegy and leavetaking, a remarkable writer negotiates the uncertain distance between personal and political history, between her loss and celebration, between the Third World and the First. The book's nine chapters intertwine the violent history of Pakistan's independence with the author's most intimate memories - of her Welsh mother, an English teacher of spare, abstracted eloquence, of her Pakistani father, Z. A. Suleri, a prominent (and frequently jailed) political journalist; of her tenacious grandmother Dadi and five siblings; of the friends who accompany (at a distance or close at hand) her own passage to the West. *Meatless Days* is an act of postcolonial mourning offered with redeeming humour and a critical eye to the very possibility of autobiographical writing.
Suleri's need to reflect upon and reconstruct the lives of her family answers her father's withdrawal from the subject. Z. A. Suleri supported the independence of Pakistan in his journalism but emerged from the partition of the subcontinent much like the country itself, disoriented, unsure what to do next, and with less family than at the outset. It is, however, the women and the relations among them that give Suleri's narrative its strongest celebratory impulse. In a sequence of tales that proceeds by metaphor rather than by chronology, Suleri recounts her mother's voluntary exile, her sister Ifat's paternal estrangement, her grandmother's love of God and food, and, finally, her own departure from her father's Pakistan to live in the United States. Throughout the book, preparing and eating food allegorize Suleri's concern with the relationship between men and women and between these characters and the historical world they inhabit. But the central obsessions of Suleri's meditation emerge from a series of deaths, two of them sudden and terrible - first her mother's, then Dadi's, and finally Ifat's.
Although a deeply personal book, *Meatless Days* is also an account of the colonial experience of the subcontinent and the persistently political issues of race, gender, and language. It suggests, furthermore, a new direction for autobiography in its deft questioning of the boundaries between public and private history. But *Meatless Days* is, finally, a profoundly moving literary work.
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to begin with, the writing was terrible. it took me a while to understand what she was talking about
as a diaspora myself, this did not connect with me and in no way did I feel nostalgic.
most memoirs are disturbing i get it, but just because someone has published their life stories doesnt mean i need to read them, right?
besides, this felt more like a practice writing exercise than a proper book
there is not a single character, let alone the main narrator, that i felt relatable to or that had intrigued me
maybe the dadi was someone who I understood better
This book was admittedly hard to read through, and the first serious challenge I've faced while reading in a while, but getting through it was so worth it. There are definitely sections of the book that even repeated re-reading does not help me to comprehend better (or at all) but other parts are so profound, and poetic and hard-hitting that the difficult writing style doesn't matter to me. I have too many favourite quotes from the book to list them all, but I'll list some choice favourites below.
But we had lost something, a certain protective aura, some unspoken myth asserting that love between sisters at least was sexually innocent. Now we had to fold that vain belief away and stand in more naked relation to our affection. Till then we had associated such violence with all that was outside us, as though somehow the more history fractured, the more whole we could be. But we began to lose that sense of the differentiated identities of history and ourselves and became guiltily aware that we had known it all along, our part in the construction of unreality.
In an unspoken way, though, I think we dimly knew we were about to witness Islam's departure from the land of Pakistan. The men would take it to the streets and make it a vociferate, but the great romance between religion and the populace, the embrace that engendered Pakistan, was done. So Papa prayed, with the desperate ardor of a lover trying to converse life back into a finished love.
By the time I reached Lahore, a tall and slender mound had usurped the grave-space where my father had hoped to lie, next to the more moderate shape that was his wife. Children take over everything.
‘What you would love most,' she wrote to me some months later, ‘are the rooftops. They have a slant that would ravish you.' For, as an oblique reparation for her inability to look at me again, Mustakor had slipped into the habit of looking at the world as if through my eyes.
He must have known some of the same exigencies: once in a while he would still wish to pull me back into the familiarity of his day, calling me with the terrible hesitance of someone who no longer trusts his license to intrude. [...] Some chemicals of tenderness of course would always wake up with a start to the sound of his voice, but listening to that sequence was a terrifying thing, as though I were being methodically slapped by the inevitability of my own irrelevance.
What a strange occasion it must have been: crowds of hundreds of thousands gathering in the open field next to the Badshahi Mosque, of which how many understood the two-hour speech that Jinnah rose to give, prefaced with the calm disclaimer, ‘The world is watching us, so let me have your permission to have my say in English'?
‘I am not talking about the two-nation theory,' I wept to my father, ‘I am talking about blood!' He would not reply, and so we went our separate ways, he mourning for the mutilation of a theory and I – more literal – for a limb, or a child, or a voice.
Then I realised what I must have known all along: of course, Ifat's story has nothing to do with dying; it has to do with the price a mind must pay when it lives in a beautiful body.
Ifat watched my face; ‘It doesn't matter, Sara,' she once told me ruefully. ‘Men live in homes, and women live in bodies.'
But we have managed to live with ourselves, it seems, making a habit of loss. ‘The thought most killing to me,' I told Tillat, ‘is – if Ifat could be asked – how firmly she would swear that we would never let the children go.' Tillat winced.
