The Red Box Book

Suleri twists the English language in all sorts of weird and wonderful ways; perhaps this is linked to her bilingualism, as she mentioned in one of her stories, her bilingualism, especially in languages are distinct as Urdu and English, has caused a kind of intellectual schizophrenia; unable to express herself clearly in either language, her literature coalesces the idioms and idiosyncrasies of both to create a rich and vibrant style which reverberates with poetry of Urdu and flexibility of English; both Urdu and English are, after all, bastard languages and mixtures of various, often completely different languages.

'Meatless Days' is a biographical portrait of Suleri's family; her politically minded and liberal father and her Welsh mother as well as her siblings and grandmother. Beneath all of this is a sense of grief; grief at the untimely death of her mother and sister, grief at the barriers which separate her form her siblings, grief the the slow descent of Pakistan into military and increasingly intolerant dictatorship, grief at existing in two worlds, both East and West, within which she not entirely comfortable and does not fit in. Yet beneath all of this is an understanding and tolerance of human frailties and idiosyncrasies;

"I like to imagine that there is space for improvident angels, the ones who wish to get away from too much light. There, a company of Ifat Ilie, arms across their foreheads, such an intensely familiar thought that it brings tears of delight to the grave eyes of god."

Yet beneath this darkness shines the light of human relationships. Of Sara's with her bellicose grandmother, of Sara's parents, separate by differing cultures but brought together by an intense emotional connection, of her childhood closeness with her younger brother before a wall of aloofness separates them. Entwined within Sara's sadness is on the loss of these connections and relationships and of the ability of art to, however superficially, recapture these, the recapture the colours and cadences of the people who pass through our lives and enrich them, or even of the silent contemplation of Lahore, with it's vibrancy and noises from above;

"I who loved the jut of his lower lip was quite content to be up there in silence, sweating in an illicit sky, and watching my friend T.K formulate and reformulate sentences I knew he would never say. Down on the ground there was too much chatter anyway, so it established a poignancy of comradeship between us, all that machinery and silence….What puzzled her was the city's habit of behaving like a mirage, it's Cheshire Cat's ability to disappear."

Indeed it is Suleri's ability to interweave the mirage like images within her narrative, to bring out the idiosyncrasies of her characters, to construct her weird sentences which lends strength to her novel and imbues it with vitality and verve.