Azra Raza in Dawn (April 2022):
Sara Suleri Goodyear died peacefully at home on Sunday, March 20, 2022 of pulmonary failure. She was 68 years old. She was my friend. Sara disliked being called exotic; except that she was. Hugely so. Dazzling, elegant, glamorous, charmingly imperious, impossibly intelligent. And most of all, fabulously, hilariously, screamingly funny.
As an author, Sara was adored, respected, admired and even worshipped. In 1989, Meatless Days burst on the scene with the same explosive energy that Quratulain Hyder had sparked with her magnum opus, Aag Ka Darya [River of Fire].
…The book didn’t just impress readers, it often had a strange effect on them. Some identified with her experiences at a deeply personal level, almost claiming ownership of them. In 2004, the great Indian filmmaker Shyam Benegal and his wife Nira arrived in town and my friend Anita Patil (actor Smita Patil’s sister) took us out to dinner. We were barely seated when the incredibly sophisticated Nira turned to me: “I was anxious to meet you, Azra. I’ve heard that you personally know the author I admire most, Sara Suleri. I’m dying to know everything you can tell me about her.” Talking about a writer we mutually admired bonded Nira and me. When we compared notes on our favorite Suleri passage, we discovered one about Lahore that we both loved:
“How many times have we driven down from Rawalpindi, fatigue in the marrow of our bones, to cross the full Ravi and then the empty Ravi riverbed, finally to see the great luminous minarets of the mosque rising in our vision like a gasp or a plea?
“Of course, nothing in the city quite lives up to the promise of such a welcome, so that somehow one is always expecting to find Lahore without quite locating it. I used to find it perverse myself, that aura of anticipation, until it occurred to me that the town has built itself upon the structural disappointment at the heart of pomp and circumstances, and since then I have loved to be disappointed by its streets. They wind absentmindedly between centuries, slapping an edifice of crude modernity against a mediaeval gate, forgetting and remembering beauty, in pockets of merciful respite.”
More here.
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