Summary Chapter 9th

She stayed away from the clocks in Pakistan. And since I was in charge of the time in the daylight saving
department, she felt the last decade to be very vivid. As far as I get the words, “You must put back the
clock an hour tonight”, I cannot help but feel strange about that October evening. Because of the dusk
from the east, we didn’t have to do the tasks of putting the clock back. That’s why we were away from
the strange dilemma which seemed so confusing that it couldn’t be said which extreme was it: a
profligate or conservative. The idea of the winters approaching, hurts and makes me feel hollow but still,
I keep on waiting for it.

I recall the triumph that the monsoons bring those rains that come to kill the summer sun, in the annual
peace that falls on me in New Haven each time I notice it is no longer dark at five and the air sighs out,
"another winter done" Soon, I think, we will put the clock forward, obliterate one April hour, and the
day will make a startling leap into expansive evenings, creating ample setting for lucid conversation.
What periods of ancient luxury I've known in something akin to the miraculous length of dusk in an
English summer, a lapse of time perfectly in sync with Shahid's expansive discourse! Or maybe his voice
is somewhere else, sitting in a garden with my father, talking through the night's silence, the absolute
silence of a summer in Lahore. The garden is still bustling with people and conversations, bodies waiting
for the rain to fall and unleash its pungent scent as it wets their dust, allowing them to sigh aloud,
"another summer done." I, in some other era of negotiation with my clock, own now a different idiom in
which to mention respite: "anther summer," sighs my father; "another winter," echo I.

It appears like the world is full of sour seasons. The month that we are in, March, has completely
changed character for me, from the period when a day, two days, would recreate the fragrance, the
feel, of summer in truncated form. You must not be elated, I would remind myself—but nevertheless, I
was delighted-at the prospect of the single-mindedness of summer: something is coming to strip us
bare, something to make our ideas live in interior spaces, I thought. It's strange that the thought of
intensity can be thrilling, and that I'd schedule my preparation time over a period of months designed to
force me to work extremely hard if I wanted to match my spirit with its own. But now is a strangely
relaxing moment, a month when soul might sit detached and say, "Never mind, never worry—this is not
snow, but only snow's reminiscence, a guarantee that precipitation will end." Summer has turned the
tables on me, and March has arrived to inform me that everything is inside out now, and that I don't
need to prepare. And, despite the fact that the month brought me two days of awful occasion, I
acknowledge that I have not mourned in March due to some simple principle of comprehension.

Memory is not a mourning activity. I used to imagine it was a catalogue, a list that I could draw with
loving neatness, because neatness is a kindness trait. So, every year when Dale and Fawzi bring flowers
to my house to remember my sister or mother, I finally understand that what those flowers represent
isn't an attitude I can adopt: instead, I watch the tulips curl, stiffen, and collapse on their own,
demonstrating the sufficiency of mourning on their own behalf. Ifat was probably more sympathetic to
herself than I could ever be in that split second when she answered yes, knowing that she would almost
certainly die. It gives me a warm feeling. Perhaps mourning is merely prolonging a state of wonder, such
as the one in which my grandmother found herself just before her death. My brother Irfan was
apparently delegated to transfer her from Lahore to Islamabad when she was in her nineties and fragile,
and he chose to use a train because Pakistan is still a country that values trains. Such commitment
makes of stations, however a seething mass of life: once they had reached Rawalpindi and Irfan had
looked first at my grandmother and then at the destiny of bodies all around him, he decided that he had
no choice but to pick my Dadi up and holding her above his head go running through those bodies like a
coolie, crying, “Jan dus!-Give way! Give way!” Light and tiny Dadi, the luggage on that coolie’s head, sent
wraiths of wails toward the ceiling: “Irfan, Irfan, Irfan.”

It gives me a specific feeling. Every word that enters your mind, like a bright light, demands protection, a
punctiliousness of demeanour that places concealment everywhere—- daylight in each corner of the
room. When did light become a public thing? It must, instead, be found in the empty space of each
completed sentence, where grammar can reflect on some possible evenings it could have spent with
elegance, as it is in the empty space of each completed sentence. After all, darkness is an overtly
physical hiding place, ostensibly concealing the body's secrets: since secrecy annuls, eats up, what is
significant on the surface, it cannot satisfy our preferences. Ifat softened in the last summer we met, the
one time I ever saw her become tired of melodrama's tremendous good humour, the hilarious
inspiration that allowed her to be both costume designer and choreographer at the same time. When
she allowed her mind's exhaustion to relax, her body appeared different: the minute her voice stopped
declaring and instead stated what she needed to say, privacy-like an uncanniness-clung to her voice and
face. She grew more attractive than her own beauty, which was a difficult battle to win. I have to
remember the delicate trick she played on her surface, so that giving in would now be like folding a
garment that folds to announce itself a basic surface-shirt for me. That's what she turned her alter ego
into: the magic and mundaneness of newly washed clothing. Or maybe all I can get out of her right now
is some domestic bliss. I say, brave heart, you came to be undone like cleanliness, with the certainty that
you will begin again tomorrow. So, Ifat, no flowers this year: we've already spent too much money on
fetishes.

Sara Suleri's novel Meatless Days jumps around in time and space as she tells the storey of her family
and the brutal history of Pakistan's independence. It's worth noting that time plays an uncertain role in
the novel because it isn't strictly linear and is frequently employed in relevant terms. Knowing this, we
might deduce that the first sentence of the book's final chapter appears to have particular significance:
Each year, an hour gained. Because I never messed with the clocks in Pakistan, these ten years have
seemed like a hold on me, because they have thrust me into the realm of daylight saving time and made
me the master of time. That evening in Octobor remains a strange anomaly to me, implying a moment
of intense transaction, till I am certain I understand what I keep saying. "You must set your clocks back
an hour tonight." Of course, the efficacy of such a strategy raises an obvious question: ""That's fine," a
voice grumbles, "but is daylight equally capable of saving you?" What if it grows tired of such cheerful
presumptions?" It doesn't matter, for daylight exhausts itself in the afternoon, needing hours to retreat
—perhaps to read a book—and pretend it isn't day. Living in daylight, after all, isn't all that dissimilar
from living between two languages: it's a lie to claim that some people only speak one, because knowing
many languages is a way of displaying the aches of intimacy that plague our mouths every time we
speak. Coming second to me, Urdu opens in my mind a passageway between the sea of possibility and
what I cannot say in English: when those waters part, they seem to promise some solidity of surface, but
then like speech they glide away to reconfirm the brigandry of utterance. So snatches of discourse
overheard in the streets seem fraught with robbery, a low-income level making each voice belligerently
protest, "I need, I need, a different speech!" Speaking two languages may seem a relative affluence, but
more often it entails the problems of maintaining a second establishment even though your body can be
in only one place at a time. When I return to Urdu, I am taken aback by my own neglect of a space so
familiar to me: like relearning the proportions of a once-familiar room, it takes me by surprise to
remember that I do not need to feel grief; that I do not need to bury my mother but can instead offer
her into the earth, because I am in Urdu now. But, just as I was about to say, "the quietness of a home,"
Urdu interrupts my sense of habitation: "Do you believe you've ever lived on the interior of a space?" it
asks, sarcastically, "you, who lack the certainty of knowledge to intuit the gender of a roof, a chair?"
Surely, I might dwell in courtyards, afternoons, and ruminate in departures, venues of deferred
significance—a relaxing, genderless notion!

Living in a language is the same as living with others. Both are balanced positions that focus on gravity's
ability to float, which is a gloomy way of anticipating the moment when significance fades into routine.
For importance is that which must be bailed out at all times; it must be peeled away with onion tears so
that habit can come bobbing up on the surface of soup like mushrooms. When I have lived with other
people, one of me is always bailing out with a maniacal devotion, night and day, another of me with
great forbearance weeps over the onions; while the last is on the crow's nest of my mind, clinging onto
the expectation of the day when it can cry out, in some drama, “Habit ahoy!” it requires, of course, a
certain hardiness of soul, to peel or bail someone else's significance, given that another may not agree
with such a structure of commitment. But then there's the power of habit. For me, the theatre was a
merging of habitation and habitual speech: learning a part until it became habit was enticing, especially
because I didn't know any other space that could tell me so clearly. "You're only a piece." A day's shape
was different back then, and its durations were piecemeal, with each group rehearsing a segment until
measured words were completed. My body seemed synchronised with those phrases' postures, each
drawing from the discipline of the other, uninterested in determining which was curtain and which was
empty space. We developed a practise of desultory concentration during the day, so that our
performance at night became a reward for the methods we worked alone in a self-repeating solitude.
Night gathered our labours and wrapped us in a sheath, implying that we awaited the intensely
perfunctory binding of our bodies into work rather than applause. Only when the night was finished did I
feel elated: rarely have I felt as at ease as on stage after a performance. The lights are still turned on, but
they aren't turning on; The party now treads the floorboards with a strange ring of corporeal peace, for
they are going on and off in quiet chitchat, each face fatigued, restful in its half-undress.

Such thoughts abstract the spirit, like a cigarette, yet I don't want to compare my mother to nicotine.
No, I'm not going to write as if my habits have a source, especially when I'm referring to a woman with
such a long history. The theatre was more concerned with smoking: it understood the pleasure of
putting something into one's body that is uninterested in its origins. The theatre was more concerned
with smoking: it understood the pleasure of putting something into one's body that might be gone in a

When I decided to sit down and compose a series of short stories last year, I envisioned the stories
would eventually merge into a linol storey titled "The Last Cigarette." Renouncing vice seemed like a
fitting accoutrement of finality, perhaps a gesture of purity, making me look forward to the victory of
being able to write, "I have smoked my final cigarette." Apparently, I hadn't. At the nether end of habit,
the dark side of its moon, addiction rarely countenances such a clean completion: it refused to be
complicit with my desire to believe I can see some things to their end. Ending, vice told me with
courtesy, has little to do with starting again, which reminded me of how I first learned to write Urdu.
When we were children, we learned to write that magnificent Persian script with pen and ink, upon a
wooden board. Our boards, takhts—were lap-sized slabs. of wood, their surfaces smooth with dried
clay. We had to dampen lumps of clay and massage them smoothly on the letters we had written each
morning after writing on our boards, and then let our takhts to dry in the sun. They grew old in the
courtyard, waiting for the characters we'd inscribe in the morning and wash away at midday. I adored
the ritual so much that it makes me want to pass a lump of clay, moist and smelling fragrant, over my
own inscriptions, rhythmically covering over "The Last Cigarette" while I write today. Smoke, like clay,
has a pleasant freshness to it, and both are grey, but when has colour neutrality meant what one can or
cannot obliterate? Did we say a prayer? As we lay awake far after our authorised hour of sleep, I recall
repressing sniggers over books like The Right Path or a translation of the Quran by someone named
Marmaduke Pickthall. Ifat would send me racing to turn on the bathroom tap every now and again, and
I'd shout out, "Ifat, it's still water." When I returned and saw how sad she had become, like an angel
hunched down with the weight of her wings, I tried to cheer her up by saying, "Never mind, I've always
despised milk." "I agree with you, but that's not the point," Ifat grumbled. "When it's a miracle, you can't
look a gift cow in the udder." And so, sitting together companionably on Ifat's bed, we returned to our
books, looking for tales that delighted us both—perhaps the ladder did drop at some point throughout
the night, but only after God had sent us sleeping off, to put us in the wrong. Without Ifat's wonderful
company, I wouldn't dare to wait for or care to will a dramatic change in my content with writing's
method of claiming night: I am disappointment as its habit of coming, a gesture far more tempered than
the pitch of rapture. In any event, it was milk enough to fall asleep on Ifat's bed, to sleep in crumbled
calm next her body, even though I didn't realise it at the time. She runs through the phrases of sleep
sometimes like water, a medium other than herself, refracting, unaffected by all the algae it can bear
and capable of great transformation. Her water laps about me, almost as if it's chastising me: "When I
asked for your attention, you were preoccupied. You weren't paying attention. I used to be milk."

In October, when I turn back the clock, I know we must sleep deftly before we recollect that tomorrow,
night will come before its hour. It cannot matter. Bodies break, but sometimes damage feels a necessary
repair, like bones teaching fingers how to work, to knit. When my bone broke, I was perplexed: was I
now to watch my own dismantling body choose to unravel with the cascading motion of a dye in water,
which unfurls to declare that only in my obliteration will you see the shapes of what I really can be I felt
put out of joint by such a bodily statement, then chastened to imagine the arduousness of what it must
mean to scaffold me: poor winter tree, put upon by such a chattering plumage, casti- gated out of
season for its lack of green! Put upon by sentences galore—like starlings, vulgar congregations! In pale
and liquid morning I hold the Adam in me, the one who had attempted to break loose. It is a rib that
floats in longing for some other cage, in the wishbone-cracking urge of its desire. I join its buoyancy and
hide my head as though it were an infant's cranium still unknit, complicit in an Adam's way of claiming,
in me, disembodiment.

MCQs

1. For Sara, the month that we call ________ has totally changed character.

a. April

b. March

c. January

d. December

2. Narrator was elated—at the idea of

the single-mindedness of________.

a. Summer

b. Winter

c. Autumn
d. Spring

3. To mourn, perhaps, is simply to prolong a posture

Of________.

a. Happiness

b. Sadness

c. Astonishment

d. Misery

4. Irfan was deputed to transport her from Lahore to_______.

a. Karachi

b. Kokata

c. Islamabad

d. London

5. After reaching Rawalpindi, Irfan had looked first at Sara's _________.

a. Dadi

b. Father

c. Brother

d. Mother

6. David was the friend of_________.

a. Sara

b. Ifat

c. Shahid

d. Irfan

7. Wazir Khan Mosque was located in _________.

a. Lahore

b. Karachi
c. Bombay

d. Dhaka

8. David tried to teach the proper names of_________.

a. Pain

b. Pleasure

c. Days

d. Books

9. For whom are you writing? David asked _______.

a. Sara

b. Irfan

c. Shahid

d. Ifat

10. _______became more beautiful than her own beauty.

a. Sara

b. Ifat

c. Fatima

d. Helina

11. Suleri’s ________ never came to see her work.

a. Father

b. Mother

c. Brother

d. Husband

12. _______ was a place that gave Ifat pleasure.

a. Lahore

b. Karachi
c. Tehran

d. Kabul

13. Who wrote "Lahore a veritable garden."?

a. Ifat

b. Shahid

c. David

d. Irfan

14. New Haven is the city of ____.

a. Pakistan

b. UK

c. USA

d. Iran

15. Boys Will Be Boys is a book written by ________.

a. Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi

b. Russel

c. Durrant

d. Sara Suleri

16. Which poet's name has been mentioned in the last chapter of the novel.

a. Ghalib

b. Hardy

c. Iqbal

d. Shamlo

17. Gabriel said to Muhammad, "Read in the name of your ____".

a. God

b. Father
c. Mother

d. Wife

18. We would not pay much attention to ?

1. Listen

2. Reading

3. Sitting

4. Playing

19. Who has created man.?

a. GOD

b. Satan

c. Gabriel

d. Universe

20. The sudden twilights of east denied such a duty from our...?

a. Night

b. Day

c. Mid night

d. Morning.

21. You must put back the clock an hour.

a. Today Morning

b. Today

c. Tonight

d. Today afternoon

22. The garden is still full of_______.

a. Children

b. Boys
c. Animals

d. People

23. God wanted to make his people pray fifty times ?

a. A month

b. A night

c. A week

d. A day

24. After Ifat had been emptied the world made?

My sister

My mother

c. My Father

My brother

25. David asking what do you still need to protect?

a. Mama

b. Papa

c. Brother

d. Sister

26. I will not write as though the names of ?

a. My neighbours

b. My family

c. My parents

d. My relatives

27. Who took Muhammad up?

a. Gabriel

b. Israel
c. Satan

d. Abraham

28. Muhammad visited hell and heaven at______.

a. Shab e Miraj

b. Shab e Qadr

c. 20th Ramzan

d. 11th Moharam

29. Who nis the narrator of the novel

a. Sara

b. Dadi

c. Irfan

d. Shahid

30. Sara said but now I must admit that my faces do not remain____from contexts that their habitation
must lend feature to the structure of significance.

a. Distinguishable

b. beautiful

c. same

d. ugly