The Death of Sheherzad

Intizar Husain, translated by Rakshanda Jalil

HarperCollins India

212 pages, S299

A man scours the town he left fifty years ago for some little evidence of past joys. In her dreams, an old woman boards a train full of dead ancestors. A sage who cannot control his anger must seek out a butcher for redemption. Sheherzad, who once told Emperor Shaharyar a thousand-and-one stories, is now an old woman who has forgotten her fantastic yarns. In their exploration of the past—and specifically of Partition—as a means of unravelling the present, the stories in this volume are representative of the veteran writer Intizar Husain’s oeuvre, and of his way of probing the horrors of Partition in a manner as oblique as it is trenchant.