Boys Will Be Boys – Sara Suleri

Neither was I particularly thrilled to conceive of it in the act of progeneration. “Your description of it is exhilarating enough,” I re¬ sponded kindly. “Why don’t you sit down and tell me about the birds?” There were, as it turned out, nothing but sparrows around us at that spot. “A sparrow!” 1 exclaimed. “A sparrow! How interesting, how in¬ teresting!” The guide looked at me with dubiety, which only increased when 1 couldn’t help but add, “There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.

. . . The readiness is all.” Horatio to my Hamlet, he could not help mutter an excuse and wander off, to where the boa constrictor was absenting itself from felicity. That was your habit, Pip, you know, to return from the Gymkhana Club and say, “Sara, read me some HamletV or: “Read me ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol’!”

1 think I enjoyed that better than listening to your prog¬ nostications about world affairs and what the government would do next, but it becam.e a trifle painful when your next demand would be, “Now play me the Russian birdsong record!” That was hard. On each of his official trips, Pip would return with an odd assortment of official gifts: Beijing brought us back more Red Books than we knew what to do with, although Moscow was both more eclectic and perplexing.

Why a jolly Russian wench doll, with a tea cozy tucked where other things should be? And why a record, titled Famous Birdsongs of the USSR? I am not averse to chirrups, but they belong elsewhere than to a long-playing record. The coos would begin quite prettily, but then degenerate into squawks, followed by some strange rustling sounds interrupted by slow moans. “Beautiful,” Pip would say, “beautiful.” But then he had strange notions.

Sara Suleri Goodyear s Meatless Days, recognized now as a classic of postcolonial literature, is a finely wrought memoir of her girlhood in Pakistan after the 1947 parti¬ tion. Set around the women of her family, Meatless Days intertwines the violent history’o^” l^a®tan’s indepen¬ dence with Suleri Goodyear’s most intimate memories of her grandmother, mother, and sisters. In Boys Will Be Boys, she returns—with the same treasury of language, humor, and passion—to her childhood and early adult- a hood to pay tribute to her father, the political journalist Z.

A. Suleri (known as Pip, for his “patriotic and prepos¬ terous” disposition). Taking its title from that jokingly chosen by her father ^for his unwritten autobiography. Boys Will Be Boys dips in and out of Suleri Goodyear’s upbringing in Pakistan and pher life in the United States, moving between public and private history and addressing questions of loss and cul¬ tural displacement through a resolutely comic lens. In this rich portrait, Pip emerges as a prodigious figure; an ardent agitator against British rule in the 1930s and 1940s, a founder of the Times of Karachi and the Evening Times, on-and-off editor of the Pakistan Times, for a brief time director of the Pakistan military intelligence service, and a frequently jailed antagonist of successive Pakistani leaders.

To the author, though, he was also “preposterous . . . counting himself king of infinite space,” a man who imposed outrageously on his children. As Suleri Goodyear chronicles, Pip demanded their loyalty yet banished them easily^from his favor; contrary and ab¬ surdly unfair, he read their diaries, interfered in their re¬ lationships, and believed in a father’s inalienable right to oppress his children. Suleri Goodyear invites the reader into an intimacy shaped equally by history and intensely personal detail, creating an elegant elegy for a man of force and contra¬ diction.

And perhaps Pip was not so preposterous after all; “On Judgment Day,” he told his daughter, “I will say to God, ‘Be merciful, for I have already been judged by my child.'” will key ka^ The University of Chicago Press / Chicago and London BOYS WILL BE BOYS daugMerW eleg^

Writing as Sara Suleri, she is the author of The Rhetoric of English India and of the acclaimed memoir Meatless Days, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: d232c4f0df15ae67
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 6,822,567 bytes (6.507 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• ISBN: 0226304019
• Pages: 149
• Language: English (en)

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• Estimated Reading Time: 226.84 minutes
• Total Words: 45,369
• Total Characters: 256,253
• Average Words per Page: 304.49
• Average Characters per Page: 1719.82

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