THE famed Pakistani novelist Bapsi Sidhwa died on Christmas Day 2024, making it a sad day for those who love Pakistani literature and looked up to Sidhwa as an auteur extraordinaire. She put Pakistani literature in English on the map with her second novel, The Bride, which I read at the age of 11 when it was first published. I had no understanding of half the things she wrote about: where was Kohistan? Punjab was in the north, so why was Zaitoon, the protagonist, described as dark-skinned rather than fair? Why was the bride’s life in danger because of honour? What did that mean? And what was this horrible event called Partition in which Zaitoon’s parents were slaughtered?

Sidhwa’s writing, easy to understand technically but so complex to grasp thematically, aroused my curiosity. It also resonated with me because here, for the first time, was someone speaking to the confusions and contradictions I observed as a child of the Zia era. Black laws, Hudood ordinances, the mistreatment of women — Sidhwa was pointing out the roots of the malaise, our own particular stew of patriarchy, honour-based and gender-based violence, and underlying that, the traumatic beginnings of Pakistan,........

© Dawn