Book: WHAT REMAINS AFTER A FIRE
Author: Kanza Javed
Published by: HarperCollins
Price: Rs 499
Oftentimes, a book portrays not the heat of a major event, but the aftermath of it. In the Ramayana, Sita was commanded to walk through fire which has been symbolised across centuries to signify the relentless ordeal women undergo. Kanza Javed’s book shows what happens after that walk finishes. It begins where the smoke fades, and the air has cleared to reveal the ruins of a soul.
Javed’s debut short story collection is a haunting portrayal of grief that moves through the quiet kitchens and the locked bedrooms of homes. Her prose has a sharp, piercing energy that refuses to let the reader look away from the things that we usually hide. There is thus a stubborn refusal to sanitise the way the body or the mind breaks down.
Decades ago, Ismat Chughtai shattered the windows of Urdu literature with her story, Lihaaf, which portrayed female desire and the suffocating air of the domestic space. She used a precision which was scandalous for her time. Javed finds that same frequency here, but she tunes it to a different kind of rawness. While Chughtai focused on the sexual and the social, Javed’s revelations are channelled through the unglamorous, messy reality of being human. In her prose, we find commonalities in our lives — the heavy smell of a room where someone is fading away, the clumsy indignities of aeging, and the physical leaks and failures of a tired body. Like Chughtai, Javed understands that
to truly honour a woman’s life, you cannot just write about the embroidery; you must also write about the grime.
The people Javed breathes life into are not solid blocks of character; instead, they exist “in fragments”. This is the heartbeat of the book — the idea that a person isn’t a whole entity, but a pile of shattered glass held together by the thin, drying glue of memory. Whether it is a daughter watching her mother’s mind dissolve like sugar in water, or a woman haunted by the ghost of a sister, they are always stuck, defined by their roles — mothers, wives, sisters — and, yet, they are fundamentally deserted by those very relationships. Javed explores the heartbreaking paradox of being surrounded by family while remaining utterly — devastatingly — alone.
The women in Javed’s stories are broken, and she is brave enough to leave them that way. There are no triumphant phoenixes rising from the ashes here. Instead, she allows her characters the quiet dignity of sitting on the ruins of their lives; the lives they could have lived, and the ones that they did. There is no sugarcoating of the horrors in their lives.
The uniqueness of this collection lies in its refusal to give the reader the comfort of a happy ending. We wait for a moment of peace, a hand reached out in the dark, or a final word of closure. It never comes. The stories end on a sudden edge, leaving us with a hollow ache. The only sense of completion lies in the characters’ gradual realisations and evolution. The ending is not found in a solution, but in the finality of the characters’ exhaustion. They have finished the walk; they have nothing left to burn.
Javed’s storytelling reminds us that the most significant fires are lit behind closed doors. Her prose is a broken mirror, reflecting the fragments of a womanhood that is usually expected to be silent and seamless. What Remains After a Fire is a difficult, beautiful, and necessary book. It proves that sometimes, the most honest thing a writer can do is show us the debris.
