Release and Other Stories Author: Rakshanda Jalil Publisher: Harper Collins (2009) Pages 144 Rakhshanda Jalil writes on culture, society, literature, and she has published over 15 books. She edited a selection of short stories by Pakistani women titled Neither Night nor Day, which attracted a lot of readership. She runs an organisation, Hindustani Awaz, devoted to the popularisation of Urdu-Hindi literature and culture. This is her debut collection of ten fictional short stories, which took around 19 years in the making. In this collection, the writer touches upon the subjects of illusion of domestic harmony, the discords within marriage and the inexplicability of what attracts one person to another in the lives of ordinary middle class Indian Muslims living in bungalows and apartments. In the story A Mighty Heart, a woman discovers the deceit of her husband — a second marriage — during the funeral of her son, when the stepsons turn up to attend the funeral of their half-brother. Despite this traumatic revelation, she accepts the reality with great magnanimity, showing love for the stepsons. In A Perfect Couple, the infidelity on the part of the wife, who is in love with another man, is exposed when the lover comes to the hospital where the woman is lying unconscious in the intensive care unit. The husband spots this visit, which shatters him, but instead of showing any anger towards his wife, ends up sharing his grief with her lover, considering both of them as victims in the emotional dilemma. A Real Woman is centred on the life of the chief protagonist, Dia Mirza, who starts her life as a shy modest girl but ends up as a beer drinking, westernised woman, owing to her circumstances and surrendering to the values of society around her. This is the only story in the book that touches on the politics of religious discrimination surrounding us: “Any Muslim who goes to a mosque to pray is a terrorist in their eyes. And his sin is compounded if he has a beard! Did you see what they did to the poor man at the airport? And his hijab-clad wife? Pulling people out of queues even when they have valid papers, subjecting them to humiliating body searches just because they not only have Muslim names but, God help them, they look Muslim! What is the world coming to? Where will this madness end? Where is it taking us?” The story Release, also the title of the book, is a very powerful story of love between two individuals, Hassan and Azra, knotted in the bond of a childhood engagement. Growing up together, they are bonded together by an unspoken love: “Who can ever really fathom the depths of another heart?” The death of Hassan’s father, the architect of this engagement, leads to his wife’s hysterical outbursts against Hassan’s aunt, to be mother-in-law, leading towards the breakup of the engagement. Azra is married elsewhere while Hassan, the narrator of the story, ends up living alone. “Love had blossomed early between them, perhaps too young to know that a thing of such beauty and fragility cannot last forever.” Never looking back at his past, one day he is informed of Azra being in a coma, on her deathbed. The visit to the hospital transports him, now a 70-year-old man, back to his past and the memories come back with a ravishing force to haunt him. Holding her hand, he feels some movement in the lifeless body breathing its last, with his tear falling on her hand. A Holiday Gone Awry is a deeply touching and traumatic tale — narrated by Yousaf — of the humiliation suffered by girls on a vacation who are raped in front of their twelve-year-old brother. “And so Yousaf ended his tale — one with no punch line, no merry laugh, no twinkle in the eye. There was a furtive silence in the room as he finished talking and sat staring blankly into his glass. No one looked up. No one spoke. But the story did not go away. It coiled itself into a tight little knot and left the room with me.” The Incident of Frozen Snake is centred on the rivalry of an experienced but fading starlet, against an aspiring starlet, which ruins her life, owing to living in fear of a frozen snake sent to her in a birthday cake. “They say hell hath no fury like a woman scorned; imagine the lava of hatred that must erupt inside an older woman living in fear of losing out to a younger, prettier rival.” Some of the other stories appear to be pen portraits such as The Failure and The Strange Man. Rakhshanda Jalil has travelled from being a hardnosed, seasoned critic to a fiction writer. Her collection of stories has revealed the ordinariness of human existence. Her tales do not hinge upon her character’s religious identity but revolve around the everyday dilemmas faced by society around us. The reviewer is a social activist and blogs at http://drirfanzafar.com. He can be reached at drirfanzafar@gmail.com