All Passion Spent

In the mid-nineties Birjees Dawar Ali returns to Pakistan to seek out a history left unfinished long ago, a history from which, nursing heartbreak and betrayal, she had once earlier fled, back to her home in partitioned India. Will she find the family that so generously gave her succour, the home that, for that parenthetical period in her life, became her own, the people who gave her unquestioning love? Or, will all these certainties have fled with the march of history? A deeply moving narrative of love and loss, All Passion Spent focuses on the unresolved question of the 1947 Partition of India and the emergence of India and Pakistan as two separate countries. More than sixty years after the event, India and Pakistan continue to deal not only with the unresolved political legacies of Partition but also with its profound personal sense of the pain of displace-ment; of lifetimes sundered midstream, of lost friendships and lifestyles and the quest for roots in new lands and under different skies. Zaheda Hina's richly layered narrative, brought alive in this lyrical and poetic translation by Neelam Husain, carries resonances of other histories of displacement, of exile and uprooting, of the continuing search for home and the many unanswered questions that surround the creation of administrative borders and their impact on the lives and loves of ordinary women and men.