Review of What Remains After a Fire, short stories by Kanza Javed Today World News

Pakistani author Kanza Javed’s anthology, What Remains After a Fire, is a meticulously crafted set of eight stories that offer unusual and deeply moving glimpses of contemporary life in Pakistan and the U.S. Several stories in the collection offer perspectives of international students, their dislocation in a new landscape compounded by an intense nostalgia for home.

The volume also captures the interior lives of impoverished people in Pakistani cities such as Lahore, focusing on the alienation experienced in the intimate space of the family. Javed moves effortlessly between these locations and social classes, emphasising the fragility of human relationships.

The opening story, ‘Rani’, depicts the uneasy relationship between a woman suffering from Alzheimer’s and her granddaughter who is her caregiver. The granddaughter carries out her duties while processing the collapse of her own marriage. She remembers the dark secrets of her grandmother’s marriage and her cruelty during her younger, mentally alert years.

The intimacy that caregiving engenders between people is a theme also re-invoked in ‘The Last Days of Bilquees Begum’. Unlike Rani, Bilquees is more of a victim of feudal patriarchy, having lost her young and literary lover to the familial fury arising from a love match across caste lines. Bilquees is haunted by guilt and remorse, and shares fragments of her past with Noorie, a young Christian woman who has been reluctantly hired by Bilquees’ husband to care for her. Noorie’s fragile dreams of romance are thwarted just like Bilquees’ in the past, though Noorie is able to at least resume her studies by the end of the story.

Shades of violence

Several stories here focus on Pakistani working-class characters who eke out a precarious living as servants or caregivers of the rich. Sometimes, they also fall prey to dangerous addictions such as gambling or drugs. In ‘Stray Things Do Not Carry a Soul’, we witness a young boy’s life unspool as his father’s drug abuse grows and fuels his penchant for shooting stray dogs in the neighborhood. The son wants to emulate his father, but the story ends with his rejection of toxic masculinity.

The final story ‘Ruby’ also depicts a character leading a precarious life as a single Christian mother in Lahore. Ruby is brave and spirited, and determined to rewrite her destiny. However, she is curiously distant with her only daughter who yearns for her affection. The scourge of religious violence raises its ugly head and dashes their hopes for a better life in the end.

If Javed depicts life in Pakistani cities as a struggle for the urban poor, a different set of problems engulfs the Pakistani men and women who pursue their dream of a higher education in the U.S. The landscape of the new country often erupts with unexpected violence, like the suicide of a college student in ‘It Will Follow You Home’ or the death of a high school student in a mass shooting in ‘My Bones Hold a Stillness’. In both cases, these unexpected deaths rekindle unresolved traumas, including sexual assault and the silencing of victims. The stable relationship of a young couple in Karachi unravels when they become international students in a U.S. college town in ‘Worry Doll’.

Javed has a keen eye for evoking place and its influence on humans. Whether in Pakistani cities or American campuses, she presents every landscape as a palimpsest of buried memories with lurking dangers that unexpectedly alter life’s trajectories.

The reviewer is a Professor of English at University of Wisconsin-Stout.

What Remains After a Fire

Kanza Javed

HarperCollins India

₹499