Meatless Days by Sara Suleri (Penguin)

Sara Suleri Goodyear was born in Karachi, Pakistan. She is the daughter of Z.A. Suleri and Mair Jones. Suleri was a Pakistani journalist, author, and was also an activist for the Pakistan Movement, a political movement whose aim was to create an independent Muslim nation from British India. Mair Jones was from Wales and was an English professor who taught at a university in Pakistan. Suleri herself taught English at Yale University.

Originally published in 1989, Meatless Days is Suleri’s memoir. A new edition was published in the Penguin Women Writers series in 2018. However, this book is not just a biography of her life, it is about the people and nations that shaped her life. It is about living and experiencing life in the newly created nation of Pakistan, having an early education in the United Kingdom, and dealing with the mystery of the American Midwest. It also reads like a soliloquy on what it means to be a woman. 

In her discourse, Suleri says leaving Pakistan was the same as giving up the company of women. She goes on to say that “the concept of woman was not really part of an available vocabulary: we were too busy for that just living, just living, conducting precise negotiations with what it meant to be a sister or a child or a wife or a mother or a servant”. 

In her numerous autobiographical accounts, she starts off with talking about her Dadi, the mother of her father - her grandmother. It seemed to Sara that her grandmother had a special relationship with God. “God she loved, and she understood him better than anyone.” Sara’s Dadi could also be greatly moved by food. Sara and her sisters “pondered but never quite determined whether food or God constituted her most profound delight”. 

One of the most interesting chapters is about Suleri’s friend Mustakori, a woman who had an array of nicknames - Congo Lise, Fancy Musgrave, and Faze Mackaw. Suleri met Mustakori at Kinnaird College which she was attending. Her memory of Mustakori, although humorous, sometimes verges on the disrespectful as when she and her friend Dale were talking about her. Dale says, “That girl is amazing because…” to which Suleri responds, “Because…she was born stupid and will die stupid. And that’s the end of that.” What a thing to say about an innocent friend. Suleri and her older sister Ifat and other friends found Mustakori’s innocence confounding.

However, Suleri’s most profound chapters focus on her older sister Ifat. Early in the novel, we are told that Ifat was killed in a similar way as her mother. They were both the victims of being hit by a rickshaw. The rickshaw driver who hit Ifat never stopped and looked back and was never caught. The incident happened just two years after their mother died. The love for her

sister is evident in the way she wants to avoid the tragedy and to focus on how her sister had such a big impact on her life. Ifat was four years her senior. She was born beautiful, according to Sara. It was one of her casual friends that told her she had to write about her sister’s death. She responded with a loud “Nonsense”, but after getting home she recalled the conversation, Suleri comes to the conclusion, “Ifat’s story has nothing to do with dying; it has to do with a price the mind must pay when it lives in a beautiful body.”

Suleri’s memoir does not follow convention as we learn of her mother and sister’s death, only to have them come to life in later chapters telling the reader how each of them has shaped her lives. Her prose is flowing and full of metaphors and at times are quite hard to decipher. Sometimes I wasn’t sure if she was actually talking about a person or some object of her imagination. And as Suleri jumps from one relative or friend to another, we find ourselves in Pakistan, Great Britain, the American Midwest, Kuwait, and back to Pakistan. Sara Suleri had definitely lived a full and interesting life so I was a bit sad to hear of her passing this year in March. I hope one day to be as passionate about my family and friends and all those who shaped my life as well. ~Ernie Hoyt