Grieving For Pigeons – Zubair Ahmad

At that point, I had stopped smoking my cigarette and was smoking a pipe. She smiled and spoke: “Now you are smoking a hukki.” On hearing her say “hukki”—a small version of a “hukka”—I chuckled, and she opened up a bit and laughed. Shoki had placed his pawn before me, as the saying goes, and now I had to evade it for the rest of my life.

She slowly started to speak. The heaviness of her tearful voice filled the room. It was like this every time, like some scene in a play—two hours long —as if this were some kind of performance, not real life. But no, it was all true—it was just that, after being repeated so many times, it seemed like an act.

The same characters, and the same lines. Fifteen years had passed like this. Bit by bit, her grief created a bond between us. I began to listen to her intently, even though I had heard this story a thousand times before. But this time, it seemed as if her voice was coming from far off. “In the end, some day he will be back. He told me he would in his last letter.

Now, there aren’t any more letters coming. So many years have passed with no word. He’ll come back, won’t he? You said so, so why not? It’s been so many years since I have seen him.” Sobbing in fits and starts, she fell silent. In truth, I had no answer for her. I was so surprised the first time she came to see me. How had she found her way to my home? I had come back from abroad so many years before.

Forgetting everything, I completed my studies, got a job, and got married. Everything that had transpired there was like a bad dream, something that I did not want to remember. But she called all of that back to mind. At first, I thought that she had come to ask for money.

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McCutcheon | Grieving for Pigeons • Zubair Ahmad, translated by Anne Murphy OceanofPDF.com R E V I S E D E D I T I O N T W E L V E S T O R I E S o f L A H O R E GRIEVING FOR PIGEONS Z U B A I R A H M A D Translated by Anne Murphy OceanofPDF.com Translations copyright © 2024 Anne Murphy Published by AU Press, Athabasca University 1 University Drive, Athabasca, Alberta T9S 3A3 https://doi.org/10.15215/aupress/9781771994316.01 Cover images © kkgas / Stocksy and The Advertising Archives / Alamy Stock Photo Cover and interior design by Natalie Olsen, kisscutdesign.com Printed and bound in Canada Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Grieving for pigeons : twelve stories of Lahore / Zubair Ahmad ; translated by Anne Murphy.

Other titles: Kabootar banerey te galian. English Names: Ahmad, Zubair, author. | Murphy, Anne, 1967– translator. Series: Mingling voices. Description: Revised edition.

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: 62f246063640bd20
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 3,373,922 bytes (3.218 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• ISBN: 9781771994316, 9781771994323, 9781771994330
• Pages: 121
• Language: English (en)

Reading & Word Statistics

• Estimated Reading Time: 237.29 minutes
• Total Words: 47,459
• Total Characters: 254,614
• Average Words per Page: 392.22
• Average Characters per Page: 2104.25

Most Frequent Words

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