WHAT REMAINS AFTER A FIRE

Buried grievances, long-held secrets, and cutting grief simmer in the lives of Pakistani women.

Javed’s second work of fiction shares eight moving stories, each ending with its own kind of clarity, of “atonement.” In “Rani,” the opener, recently divorced Annie takes care of her grandmother, whose dementia has worsened after the death of her husband. Through their fractured conversations, Annie comes to remember Nargis, a maid who lived at her grandparents’ house when she was a child, and the unforgivable way she was treated. “Stray Things Do Not Carry a Soul” follows a young boy named Haider Ali, the book’s only male narrator, who, in idolizing his father, is forced to reckon with the realities of violence, addiction, and misogyny. While most of the stories stick to immersive realism, there are a couple of well-executed speculative moments: In one story, a woman’s dead twin visits her in a moment of suffering; in another, the ghost of an old, sickly woman’s lover appears to her in a glass bottle. The longest, closing story, “Ruby,” details the lives of 13-year-old Kaki and her mother, Rubina, after Kaki’s father dies. Rubina transforms into Ruby, becoming the vibrant, bold woman she had suppressed while trapped in a constrictive marriage. Newly free, Ruby and Kaki hide their Christian faith and move to a Muslim neighborhood, where Ruby falls in love with a man named Samuel and begins working for a wealthy widow named Tanya. Kaki begins to feel at home among these people, along with a new friend, Fatima. However, Kaki must grapple with the fact that this new iteration of her mother is a woman who primarily looks out for herself, and that financial security and friendships can shatter at any time. There are several chilling moments in the book—Javed does not shy away from tragedy and the darker sides of human nature—but the ending of this story is by far the most haunting. This collection is one to be admired, particularly for how it powerfully depicts Pakistani women (both in Pakistan and the U.S.) yearning for lives they have had ripped from them by patriarchy or prejudice. “We are catacombs of trauma,” Javed writes, “reservoirs of hurt.” Even so, these stories uplift the idea that we will all come upon an opportunity to be purified, whether in life or death.

Skillfully drawn, often heartbreaking reckonings.