As I started reading Boys Will Be Boys
my heart stilled. This was vintage
Suleri: the voice I had grown to love in
Meatless Days. I have assigned the
memoir frequently in my classes and each
time I admire more the stylistic felicity
and cadence of her writing, the subtlety of
her nimble intelligence, and the exactitude
with which she locates her material. There
has been such a lapse of time since Suleri
wrote Meatless Days that I was
beginning to be afraid she would never write
another book; and who can blame her?
Meatless Days is a hard act to follow.
Whereas Meatless Days was a highly
personalized biography of Suleri's mother,
Boys Will Be Boys is an elegy to her
father. Besides, she is no longer writing as
Sara Suleri - she has married Austin
Goodyear since then and become Sara Suleri-
Goodyear.
Boys Will Be Boys weaves the history
of her family - and of her growing-up years
in Lahore - around the narrative of her
Pakistani father Z.A. Suleri, a prominent
political journalist. She manages to weave
in as well the story of her meeting with her
American husband and her marriage to him.
The book is not a conventional biography. We
know of her father only from the impressions
she's formed of him - there is little
attempt to trace his lineage or the
narrative of his life apart from the life of
his daughter and her siblings.
We learn in passing that Mair, Sara Suleri's
intrepid Welsh mother, was her father's
second wife. During the second world war, in
England, Mair went to hear Z.A. Suleri speak
about Indian Independence. At the end of the
thunderous and impassioned lecture she told
her friend: 'Now, I could marry that man.'
And marry him she did. It was an act of
immense courage. Not only was she marrying a
man from a different culture and race, she
was also marrying an Indian - a lowly
native, whose country the British had
colonized.
Early in the book we learn that the family
called Z.A. Suleri Pip - because of his
'Patriotic and Preposterous' disposition.
Pip's patriotism was evinced in his loyalty
and devotion to the founder of Pakistan,
Mohammad Ali Jinnah, and in the articles he
wrote supporting Pakistan's position on
various issues in the news papers of which
he was at different times editor.
However it is the preposterous and irascible
Pip who is the most engaging. We see a
father who believes in the inalienable right
of fathers to affectionately bully their
children. He demands their loyalty, is
easily offended, and banishes them from his
favour by declaring, 'Get out of my sight.'
His disfavour clouds their existence for
days, until they find themselves
inexplicably rehabilitated to favour - or
the force of his ire transfers to another
child.
He is contrary, and absurdly unfair. The
children are at his beck and call; too
preoccupied to remember their individual
names he summons them all when he needs the
services of only one. Sara is assigned to
laboriously transcribe by hand the articles
he is forever revising - he calls it
chiselling. He has no compunctions about
reading his children's personal diaries or
interfering in their friendships.
And Pip was equally outrageous in his public
life. At an ambassador's party, when he had
repeatedly parried an insistent diplomat's
question on a thorny issue involving India
and Pakistan and the man insisted: 'But you
haven't answered my question yet.' He
roared: 'You call yourself a diplomat?' And
in the ensuing hush, his voice again rang
out: 'You call yourself a diplomat?'
One wonder's what happened to that
unfortunate diplomat's career.
Despite Pip's prickliness and posturing
Sara's recall is often so tender that his
very preposterousness becomes endearing. One
of the loveliest scenes in the book occurs
when after his death Sara's younger sister
Tillat remarks that 'the one extraordinary
thing that she had lost was the complete
surety of the joy she could confer by simply
walking into a room... It is true, Pip: when
one of us walked into your room you would
look up with such a radiance in your face,
one that asked for nothing, nothing but the
joy of presence. It was a very profound
compliment that you conferred, which,
however life-enriching, was also curiously
humbling. With humility we approached you,
which is another way of expressing the joy
we too were feeling...'
Boys Will Be Boys is laced with irony
and a mischievous wit; it can also at times
be laugh-aloud funny. There is a memorable
scene to do with the unavailability of
Tampax: 'And then, with its unique talent
for plagiarism, Pakistan produced a product
of its own: it was called Yumpax.' The
vagaries of this product as described by
Suleri are surprising, to say the least. We
meet again the characters we have met and
loved in Meatless Days; her sisters
Iffat, Nuzzi and Tillat and her adored
mother. A reviewer in the Los Angeles
Times wrote of Meatless Days: '[Suleri]
forays lightly into Pakistan's history, and
deeply into the history of her family and
friends ...The Suleri women at home in
Pakistan, however, make this book sing.'
In Boys Will Be Boys the women's
voices are somewhat muted and it is the
force of Pip's personality that supplies the
impetus.
There is enough good poetry quoted in the
book to elevate the reader's mood: in fact
each chapter is headed by a line or two of
Urdu poetry. There is also enough of a
narrative thread, and an element of
suspense, to pique our interest and keep the
pages turning.
Suleri Goodyear brings her father to
poignant life in passages such as this: 'Farooq
said to me, "Do you know how small Papa
was?" I had not thought about that, but it
was true. "When I held him in my arms to
wash the body," Farooq told me, "I could not
believe that he was so small. You see," he
added, "There was so much presence to him:
he always struck you as larger than life."
Yes, he did, I mused, that lion's head, with
its outrageous posture of surprise.'
Boys Will Be Boys, if not as
breathtaking as Meatless Days, is
more readily accessible. One is grateful to
the University of Chicago Press for
recognizing and publishing such a finely
wrought work of literary merit. Sara Suleri
Goodyear doesn't have fans, she has
devotees, and few books have been more
eagerly awaited in Pakistan than
Boys Will Be Boys. |
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