No Funeral for Nazia

"This book is by Taha Kehar. I really like the fact that he has dealt with death in a comic manner. This woman, Nazia, dies at the very beginning, and we never actually meet her, but we know her through her friends. They paint a picture of who Nazia was. Nazia has a very strange request of her husband and her friends, and that is to throw a party instead of a funeral. Funerals in Pakistan are a three-day event, people are expected to be very sad and to cry and be in grief for days, so this request was such a strange manner in which to celebrate a life. And then, to top that, Nazia calls a hypnotist to hypnotize her friends, her sister, and her husband, to get closure. I found that it was just a really great way to deal with a sad topic. It isn’t an investigation. It isn’t a murder mystery. It isn’t grief, loss; it’s just this fun book. I really enjoyed reading it. Yes. I really appreciate writing that can manage to deal with serious topics in a funny or sarcastic manner, by putting in irony. I like writing that can make you laugh and make you ponder certain issues. I’m not much of a romance person. These books are mostly character-driven as well. My first novel, Eye on the Prize , was about helicopter parenting. The book is set in Karachi and revolves around a sports day. You see these three children competing at a sports day, but I tried to make it a social commentary about how the parents were more competitive than the children. This was a story that had never been told in Pakistan. We also have private schooling; we also have these helicopter parents who are micromanaging everything. With my most recent novel, The Idle Stance of the Tippler Pigeon , it was a story that had been sitting with me for a very long time, and I just wasn’t able to put it down. The home that the main characters, Misha and Zohaib, live in, is my childhood home. The mulberry tree, the big garden, and the staircase—all of that is based on my childhood home, but the characters are fictional. The story is about a pair of siblings and their house help’s daughter. I wanted to talk about class structures in Pakistan. Because my first novel dealt with the elite class, I wanted this to be a commentary between the middle, the lower, and the upper class. I draw that comparison by the house help’s daughter being best friends with the two children in the house. I tried to show how the children are able to form a deep friendship with Nadia, who’s the househelp’s daughter, but there is this resentment and tension in the air when the adults are involved. It deals with harassment, at different levels, in Nadia’s life, and it deals with mental health. I tried to touch upon quite a few things without actually saying too much, but my main focus was on what a woman’s life looks like when she is plucked from a very low class and dropped into the upper class and then the middle class. It’s a commentary on what happens when a girl receives an education she didn’t really ask for. Because here, when you educate someone, you are doing them a favor. You’re trying to make a better life for them, but, at the same time, does the social structure support this escalation in class? Is the girl then able to take agency in her life or is she somehow confused between the two classes? There are a lot of questions that come up within the story."