Meatless Days

This is an autobiography of Sara Suleri, and records her experiences as she grew up during the struggle for independence in Pakistan. Her mother was Welsh, while her father was Z.A. Suleri, a prominent Pakistani journalist frequently at odds with the Bhutto regime and jailed for his writing. It is in the intermingling of public and private history that she tells a series of stories which proceed through metaphor rather than chronology. Suleri recounts her mother's exile, her sister Ifat's estrangement from their father, her grandmother's love of god and food, and finally her own departure for the United States. Throughout, she writes of a place where the concept of a woman was not really part of an available vocabulary.