The book Zareena and Abid: Two Characters, Five Authors, Five Stories is the work of five well-known Karachi-based authors, each given the same two characters—Zareena and Abid—and complete creative freedom to bring them to life.
I don’t know if that has happened before: five recognised, respected, and accomplished authors given the task of making the same two characters come alive, each in their own respective world of creativity.
The worlds they create take the form of short stories, perhaps in the footsteps of Anton Chekhov, Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, and Ernest Hemingway, to name a few. No pressure!
So why should you read these stories? You should read them because they are well written: diverse, interesting, and perhaps close to your heart and culture, whether you live in Pakistan or elsewhere with roots in the subcontinent. Or perhaps you live in the West and would like to take a peek into the lives of people in a part of the East.
The stories flow. They move. They affect. Once you get into one, you want to finish it without putting the book down, irrespective of the time of day or night.
Naeem Sadiq creates a realistic world of our country, portraying the exploitation of the powerless—because of their class and gender—by those in positions of power and authority. Yet this does not stop Sadiq from catching a ray of sunshine amid the darkness.
Rehana Alam takes us on an engrossing, emotional, traumatic, and tense train journey through the Partition of 1947, a journey of changing fortunes and enduring friendship. If you read it in a receptive state of mind, you may find your heart beginning to beat faster, perhaps in harmony with the speed of the train.
Taha Kehar ably weaves a complex emotional story, occasionally alternating between spoken and written communication, about a family burdened by the pressures of money, distance, affection, deceit, and deception.
Talat Rahim effortlessly engages us in a romance-laced blend of a traditional and modern world, colourfully draped in the complexities of marriage.
No disrespect to the other four authors, but while their characters live in the world we know, Javed Jabbar’s characters are unique: they live in the womb. His story is also unique because it consists entirely of dialogue, sprinkled with wit and wisdom. Fascinating.
Contrary to a suggestion somewhere that the book is only 170 pages long and could be read in one sitting, my humble opinion is: please don’t.
Since the names of the main characters are the same in all five stories, confusion can arise. So, read only one story in one sitting. Let the characters live, at least overnight, in your mind.
They can check out in the morning.
Zareena and Abid are given multiple lives through a unique literary treatment, each version moulded by the author’s imagination. They share a name, but not a narrative, and their settings and identities stay separate in each story. This underscores the boundless creative freedom that literature grants to writers and readers. In the end, the book offers a rare and fascinating experience for today’s readers.
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