Meatless Days: A Memoir

"Meatless Days refers to a time in Pakistan, immediately after independence, when the state was struggling to survive. There was not enough meat; so to stretch supplies it was decreed that you couldn’t buy meat on certain days of the week. This occurred as Sara Suleri was growing up in Pakistan, as the daughter of a Welsh-born professor of English and a very famous Pakistani political journalist. So this is a memoir of life in Pakistan as this new nation was finding its feet. “I see myself as multi-territorialized; it is not that I don’t belong to any territory, it is that I have a sense of belonging to many territories.” I first read this book as a college student in the United States. Reading about Lahore in a memoir by a Yale literature professor—who was reflecting back on her own youth in Pakistan—had a strange effect on me. It was like being caught in a hall of mirrors. There I was in America, reading about Pakistan, where I come from. It hit me with an enormous sense of nostalgia and also admiration for how Sara Suleri combined the strands of politics, autobiography and cultural criticism. I suppose I too, to a certain extent, have become de-territorialized by my life journey, living in so many different places. But, to me, the word de-territorialized suggests someone who is free of place. I see myself as multi-territorialized; it is not that I don’t belong to any territory, it is that I have a sense of belonging to many territories. In Sara Suleri’s work you see something quite similar. She is of New Haven and Lahore. Suketu Mehta, a wonderful writer and a friend, says that people who migrate don’t become multinational they become multi-local. I think that is true of Sara Suleri and myself. All of the places I’ve been have accreted onto how I write and who I am."