Smouldering realities in ‘What Remains After A Fire’ by Kanza Javed

Real, restrained, and resonant! ‘What Remains After A Fire’ offers unadorned tales that feel genuine and intimately familiar, dwelling upon the small dilemmas of ordinary people. Shifting between Pakistan and its diaspora in the US, Kanza Javed follows people who are fighting to shape their destinies while being pushed to the margins of the world they inhabit. This collection, of eight powerfully crafted stories, weaves together strands of betrayal, love, festering doubt, brutal ruptures, aching absences, and grief that refuses to fade.

The motif of fire and its lingering aftermath — whether dramatic, as in blazes, or subtle, as in the stubborn, persistent scents — resonate with remarkable precision. The tales emerge from lived experiences and woven memories, shifting between past and present, amid here and there, feeling this and that. Yet each story is intensely affecting.

Javed undertakes a masterful exercise in characterisation, capturing the raw complexity of being human. Characters, both central and peripheral, are rendered with equal depth and vitality as they move through their lives — wrestling with emotions and confronting the weight of their choices.

Daddi, Muhammad Rauf, Zara or Ruby, each possesses a quiet dignity. Their every action, every hesitation, carries significance. In their contradictions and vulnerabilities, they feel alive, standing tall as if their stories were always meant to be told.

Parallel to the art of portrayal are the carefully sculpted narrative voices that reveal the subtleties of thought, emotion, and motivation that direct description alone could not have conveyed. Be it Noorie trying to capture Bilquees Begum’s vanished lover in a glass bottle and forging an unexpected bond with the dying woman; or Annie recollecting the maid’s braid, cut as punishment for a forbidden act; or Aisha erasing all traces of her third miscarriage — Javed’s narrators draw the reader into their struggles.

In fact, the prose moves with an almost whispered clarity and measured elegance, allowing simple phrases to open into deeper reflection. For instance, in ‘The Last Days of Bilquees Begum’, Noorie puts it out: “Muhammad Rauf had loved Bilquees. Bilquees must have loved her husband… and she definitely loved Waqar. Ghazala loved the house and her duty. Feroze loved me… And I loved Feroze… But if I looked very closely… there was no love anywhere. No one loved anyone… it was all an illusion.” Each story opens with lines that are stark, brutal and poetic.

‘Carry it All’ begins with, “She dreamt of fire again,” while ‘Rani’ opens as: “My grandmother kept calling her dead husband to bed.” These first words set the tone; the reader is drawn not merely into the nuances of human condition but also the poised craftsmanship of storytelling.

Written with acute sensitivity, these stories traverse socio-cultural divides, as Javed interrogates the dynamics of identity, the limits and possibilities of personal agency, and the realities of attachment and loss.

What strikes most is how the collection immerses readers in narratives so vivid and deftly wrought that they leave a transformative, almost overwhelming, catharsis.

— The reviewer teaches at GGDSD College, Chandigarh