Hum Log / ہم لوگ

by Fahmida Riaz

This collection comprises three novels by Fahmida Riaz: Godavari, Zinda Bahar Lane, and Karachi. These stories deal with the nature of political violence in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. The novels are partly based on the author’s experience of exile in alien lands and about the internal exile that she underwent in her own land when her political beliefs and sensibilities made her unacceptable for an authoritarian regime.

346 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Fahmida Riaz (Urdu: فہمیدہ ریاض‎) is a Progressive Urdu writer, poet, and feminist from Pakistan.

Born in 1946 in Meerut, educated in Hyderabad (Sindh) and London, she is among the front rank writers and poets of Urdu. She is also the author of several short stories and novels. Three volumes of her novels and collection of short stories, apart from the Urdu translation of selected verses from Shaikh Ayaz and the Iranian poet, Farough Farrakhzad have also been published. She has translated a selection of ghazal from Divan-e-Shams Tabriz into Urdu. She has travelled widely and lectured at universities and cultural forums in many cities of Europe and the United States.

She lives in Karachi where she has been publishing for women and children.

Reviews

[Mahnoor_96 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shelving this in place of Zinda Bahar/Bihar Lane, which is the first novella/travelogue/memoir in this three part collection because ZBR doesn't have any separate entry on Goodreads. I won't try to review or summarise it because it feels like a gargantuan task. But a few thoughts: This book bears witness to, gives shahadat for, the violence created by these three Nation States India, Pakistan, Bangladesh on the people of this land. It begins with Fehmida Riaz arriving in Dhaka two days before the Country's independence day. In the following days she bears witness to the details of how the country she is a citizen of killed real people, real people whose relatives now speak to her from the TV screens. In the same days she also falls in love with Dhaka.
The feeling that this book evokes at times is of deep discomfort, like the deep discomfort of the Bengalis to whom Fehmida Riaz keeps posing questions about the 2.5 Biharis in camps throughout the country (some of what she visits). There is a lot of pain in this book, understandably as one of its many tasks is of grappling with a fractured identity split into three jagged edges that keep cutting each other. But in these pages you also find Fehmida Riaz herself, and parts of her that are sorrowful, scared, funny, caustic, sarcastic, enthusiastic, and enchanting. At one point, annoyed by the opinions of a Journalist at Dhaka press club she begins to playfully flirt with him. He gets visibly flustered, and asks "Mr.Riaz kahan hai?" She replies "Wo tou mar gaye". She waits for him to pin her down as a flirtatious widow before casually saying "mai bohat choti thi jab wo mar gaye. Aap shaid meray shohar ka poochna chahthay thay. Wo Karachi mai hain, khariat sai." At other points she chastises herself for speaking too much, she hints for matchsticks to light her cigarettes.

Ultimately the book offers no clear answers, no dogma, only a deeply disturbing contemplation: who are we? Kon hain hum log?

[Arooj S]

This book is no open plz any one help me