Sometimes the weight of the world’s problems forces you to seek the refuge of memory and fiction. And the uncertain weather, with early sunset, leaf fall and downpours, is melancholy.

Two weeks ago, after nearly two years of silence, I stopped what I was doing to write a story; in Urdu, in which I had not written since before the pandemic. Here, too, a war was recollected, the conflict of 1965 between Pakistan, where I was growing up at the time, and India. I showed the story to my friend Ilona Yusuf, who was visiting from Islamabad, at a café as the sun set over the canal by my house.

After a long discussion of the devastation in Gaza and troubles all over the world, we began to talk about how one responds to past and present in various genres, and what inspiration elicits a specific tone or timbre.

Both of us had dealt with the immediate impact of the pandemic’s first onslaught in 2020 in our contributions to The Stained-Glass Window, Taha Kehar and Sana Munir’s pioneering anthology, subtitled ‘Stories from the Pandemic in Pakistan’; Ilona with a brief, evocative prose piece about a couple escaping lockdown for an evening drive, and I with a fictionalised depiction of my experiences of death, illness and isolation during those months.

What makes us choose the genres we write in? What differentiates a story from a vignette or a memoir? Can a prose poem be both poem and fiction? We agreed that, as readers, we feel that short prose forms don’t need defined plots or closure, but are carried by theme, rhythm and the music of the written word; both of us have written about our mothers, who influenced us to bring music to our writing.

Later that evening, we mailed each other texts; Ilona sent me Tribute 2, in which she writes:

‘All I know of rhythm and poetry comes from my mother… simple words, she would say. You don’t need difficult ones.

‘But music came before all this.’

Taha Kehar was in London this last week. I was seeing him after 18 months. I’ve known Taha in person since 2019, though we’d been reading each other’s work with pleasure and had an exchange of literary messages in various media before meeting in person.

We met and sometimes shared platforms in Karachi and Islamabad at least once a year since then; but he hadn’t visited London or SOAS, which is both our alma mater, for about 9 years. And this time he was back to launch No Funeral for Nazia, his third novel, which is about to be published in London.

I met Taha, who was staying a short walk away from where I live. We picked up our conversation as if it had never stopped. He brought me a copy of his novel on a rainy night. I’d read much of Nazia in its earliest incarnation, parts of it on a flight from Lahore: he’d jokingly told me that he was playing with the conventions of a trope from Agatha Christie.

Now he calls it a hybrid work. But even at first reading, I felt that his depiction of a complicated network of social, familial, sexual and political relationships drew deeply from his rootedness in Karachi, and the purpose of his story, within its subverted mystery setting, is to remove masks from faces and unpeel layers of the identities we conceal from ourselves.

And reading it again, after years in which our lives have changed by force of external circumstance and private grief, the novel seems even more significant in its portrayal of the guilt, loss, denial and grief caused by a death.

Famous novelist Nazia Sami doesn’t want a funeral, she wants a party: she leaves instructions for her sister Naureen to send letters to six friends, summoning them to gather after her death (the Christie allusion).

My life is a story with many narrators, each with a different perspective on what matters and what doesn’t. When I die, I want all the narrators to be heard.

The chapters that follow are narrated, in the third person, from the shifting point of view of these narrators, many of whom feel that Nazia scarred them: Parveen, Nazia’s friend and self-appointed writing rival, who envies Nazia’s success, and has turned her daughter against her; Dolly, her publisher and sometime lover; Saleem, her former husband, an MQM supporter through whose memories the troubled politics of Karachi over several decades are revealed; Sabeen, Saleem and Nazia’s estranged daughter; Farid, Dolly’s husband and Nazia’s former boss at the newspaper she worked at; and Naureen’s husband Asfand.

Each one bears a grudge against Nazia, but since the eponymous protagonist is dead, the reader only knows her through the words she judiciously shares, or the occluded and sometimes biased memories of her guests.

Here, after nearly a hundred pages of comedy, satire, psychological probing and sociopolitical comment, Taha introduces a masterly stroke: Nazia has arranged for a hypnotherapist, Salman Narang, to be invited, to coax each guest to reveal his or her secret.

He plays, in a sense, the role of a Poirot-like detective. Is he genuine, or a fake? Will their repressed and unconscious memories create a true picture of Nazia, or are the stories they tell just extensions of their own fantasies? Above all, is Nazia a heroine, a villain, or merely a projection of the fantasies of her friends, antagonists and lovers?

Let me end, like a storyteller, on a cliffhanger, before I destroy the reader’s pleasure by giving away any more of the deepening mystery. On a Sunday afternoon, as I began the section in which Salman elicits his first confession (from Dolly), my phone pinged: Taha was on his way, coming to say goodbye before leaving for Birmingham to launch his book. I put down his book to wait for the author.

The columnist is a London-based short story writer and novelist

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, November 5th, 2023