Meatless Days by Sara Suleri

Author:Sara Suleri
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780241342473
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2017-11-27T05:00:00+00:00

‘I have never heard a lovelier thing,’ he gravely said. I was silent then, but later in the night I think I heard again,

Jesu Maria, shield her well,

Hush, beating heart of Christabel!

But that was years later, in recent times, long after I awoke at eighteen ready to be friends again with Shahid, only to find him gone. We had always thought of him, having as he did the greater mobility of the male, as the most Pakistani of us: it never crossed my mind that he would choose to stay away or choose a life that would not allow him to return. But then I had been so busy working for Pip that I had not stopped to consider what it must have been like to live in his house and not work for him, that it might well have sent one to the periphery, perhaps, or to the hills. For although Papa and Shahid always regarded each other’s minds with keen respect, they were both people of well-formed opinion, and there were a couple of subjects over which they tended to clash. They clashed over history and over womankind. It took me years to realize it: what else was Shahid doing in the years of his retreat but putting fresh air in between himself and Pip’s tyrannical dependence on history and on women? My brother must have thought we were at fault as well, we family women who let ourselves be so put upon, leaving our possible rebellion like ghosts in every room.

Shortly before Shahid went to England, we moved back to Lahore, shifting house in the December of the 1971 war with India, this time to Zafar Ali Road. For the next five years we actually kept on living there, the longest period we stayed in a single space, a span of time in which my life showed signs of taking shape again after years of feeling formless. ‘What a relief it is to see Sara becoming nice at last,’ I heard Ifat tell my mother, ‘for a while she was quite difficult.’ ‘Difficult is as difficult does,’ I added, meaningfully, since we had seen a regrouping once again, a shift in tone that made new allegiances available to us. Tillat was adding herself to our circle, and Ifat living in the same city, so for a second time there were three of us – a brightening thought for me.

After Shahid left, our paths didn’t cross for years, and I had no notion of whether Shahid was driving up the wrong road or how he planned to plot out his next move. I missed, however, the aesthetic of his face – his eyes, their lag of lid – using it as a talisman of sorts when I too sat down at the map to wonder what came next. Despite the proliferating duties of my day I knew at last that my time in Lahore was done: I spent many hours pondering over possible routes, until the quickest way from here to … what? formed itself as my most efficient question.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.