Meatless days

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.