Remembering a Lost Presence: The Spectre of Partition in the Stories of Lahore-Based Punjabi-Language Author Zubair Ahmed

Remembering against sentimentality: Partition’s literary shadows in the work of Najm Hosain Syed

“…For Sarkar, this allows treatment of the Partition not in isolation, but instead as “a particularly harrowing moment within a larger trauma of the Indian modern” (2009: 5). My recent analysis of the stories of Lahore-based author Zubair Ahmed engages such a reading, to explore literary choices and motifs that resonate with the impacts of the Partition (Murphy, 2018b). While the Partition is not an explicit subject within Ahmed’s work, except in one very recent story, “The Wall of Water”, its mark is visible in his treatment of time and presence, in the ways his stories “resonate with the lingering effects of the Partition, with the haunting of memories of a once-shared past that impinges on the present”, their portrayal of the “experience of loss, displacement, and betrayal”, and their exploration of temporal and locational displacement (Murphy, 2018b: 238; see Murphy trans.…”