4
Abbasi’s most recent stories in Bitter Gourd
and Other Stories deal with Pakistani women liv-
ing in New York. These stories show how a new
geographical location fails to relocate a Pakistani
woman as an agent of freedom. Divorce, infidel-
ity, and loneliness become the ultimate fate of
these women, who have migrated into a new land
in search of hope but end up as caged animals.
“A Bear and Its Trainer” is a story about a love-
less marriage of convenience between Dolly and
Mr. Mirza. Like the bird seller in “The Birdman,”
Mr. Mirza takes pride in his power as a trainer
and gladly discards his wife, “the ugly bear,” after
years of marriage. Yet, unlike the heroine of “The
Birdman,” Dolly refuses to be discarded easily. She
breaks the stereotypical image of a suffering wife
by creating a surprising meaning of life both for
herself and her husband at the end of the story. In
“Mirage,” the last story of the collection and win-
ner of the BBC World Service short-story com-
petition in 2000, a single mother of a mentally ill
child feels relieved after leaving him at an institu-
tion. The mother cleans her New York apartment
and makes it look like any other normal home,
getting rid of any sign of having a schizophrenic
10-year-old son. “I go to bed early,” the mother
says, “and sleep right through the night because
the lights don’t suddenly go on, off, on again at
1 a.m., the taps don’t run and flood the bath at
3 and I have absolutely no fear that the stove will
turn itself on” (154).
Abbasi’s short stories make a patchwork of
postcolonial women’s lives both at home and in
the diaspora. Her stories recall the style of Jane
Austen as she deals with simple and delicate mat-
ters in minute detail. She also resembles Virginia
Woolf in her use of the “stream of consciousness”
technique. Her heroines interpret the external
world in terms of disillusionment and create a
secret world of their own within themselves. In
their own world, these women constantly focus
on their entrapment, failure, and hopelessness.
The recurrent pessimistic tone in many of her sto-
ries reveals to her readers that, for a poor Muslim
woman in South Asia, love and hope are nothing
but a mirage.
Bibliography
Abbasi, Talat. Bitter Gourd and Other Stories. Karachi:
Oxford University Press, 2001.
Shamsie, Muneeza, ed. A Dragonfly in the Sun: An An-
thology of Pakistani Writings in English. Karachi:
Oxford University Press, 1997.
Fayeza HasanatAbdullah, Shaila (1971– )
A writer and graphic designer, Shaila Abdullah
was born in Karachi, Pakistan. After graduating in
1992 from the University of Karachi, with a bach-
elor’s degree in English, she attended the Karachi
School of Arts, graduating in 1993 with a diploma
in graphic design. Two years later, she got married
and moved to California. She currently lives in
Texas, working primarily as a graphic designer.
Her career as a writer was encouraged by her
father, who still serves as the first reviewer and
critic of her work. She started writing at a young
age, contributing to college newsletters and com-
munity magazines. She has been working as a
freelance writer since 1993, publishing her articles
and short stories in magazines based both in Asia
and America. Her first book, a collection of short
stories entitled Beyond the Cayenne Wall (2005),
generated much critical interest and won the Jury
Prize for Outstanding Fiction in the 2005 Norum-
bega Fiction Awards.
The collection consists of seven stories that por-
tray female protagonists attempting to transcend
the rigid gender roles imposed on them by their
conservative society. “Amulet for the Caged Dove,”
“Moment of Reckoning,” and “Ashes to Ashes,
Dust to Dust” are set in Pakistan and focus on the
relations of power within patriarchal households
where women are deprived of their basic rights of
self-definition. Although in these stories men are
merely background characters, it is clear that they
hold the power to make decisions that can alter
women’s lives. The first two stories additionally
present the plight of childless women, who are in-
variably subjected to derision and even abuse be-
cause of their inability to produce offspring, even
if their husbands are to blame for the infertility.4 Abdullah, Shaila