Darkness and Other Stories

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Razia Sajjad Zaheer’s stories are gentle and unassuming tales that describe the lives of ordinary women—a homemaker, a teacher, a writer, a sex worker—whose struggles simply to be themselves, or to make sense of the realities they see around them, mark them as extraordinary. A low caste woman shows up society’s hypocrisy in dealing with caste and, in doing so, turns the mirror on her own tendency to do the same. A working woman, a mother and writer, grapples with how to deal with her over-helpful house help, a man, who thinks he knows that when she asks for tea, he must instead serve her milk. A writer travels alone on a train at night, fearful that she may be attacked by the sinister-seeming men around her, only to find that they are fans of her writing. Every story offers a situation that readers may easily recognise and relate to, and each then suggests a complex twist or an ambivalence that is sometimes elusive and sometimes illuminating. Saba Mahmood Bashir’s competent and accessible translation brings the work of this important writer—which has thus far received little attention—to life for readers of today.
Zubaan