The Death of Sheherzad

'Intizar Husain's stories often tread that twilight zone between fable and parable. His narratives are spun on an oriental loom' - Keki N. Daruwalla

A man scours the town he left fifty years ago for some little evidence of past joys. Javed who's returned to Lahore from East Pakistan won't speak of what he witnessed 'there'. An old woman boards a train full of dead ancestors in her dreams. A sage who cannot control his anger must seek out a butcher for redemption. Mahaban home of the monkeys once is now a city full of human beings. Sheherzad who once told Emperor Shaharyar a thousand-and-one stories is now an old woman who has forgotten her yarns of fantasy.

The stories in The Death of Sheherzad ably represent Intizar Husain's oeuvre defying narrative tradition and exploring the past specifically Partition as a means of unravelling the present. He imaginatively revisits a syncretic tolerant pluralistic past to analyse why the tide turned so irreversibly. Questioning everything - faith violence society - Husain probes the horrors of Partition in a manner as oblique as it is trenchant. Imbued with dark wit and literary brilliance these stories at once shock agitate and entertain.