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 amon