Meatless days

In this narrative of elegy and leavetaking, a remarkable writer negotiates the uncertain distance between personal and political history, between her loss and celebration, between the Third World and the First. The book's nine chapters intertwine the violent history of Pakistan's independence with the author's most intimate memories - of her Welsh mother, an English teacher of spare, abstracted eloquence, of her Pakistani father, Z. A. Suleri, a prominent (and frequently jailed) political journalist; of her tenacious grandmother Dadi and five siblings; of the friends who accompany (at a…