Bargain from the Bazaar

This is the story of one middle-class family, the Rezas, shopkeepers in Lahore's ancient Anarkali Bazaar, caught in the great struggles that have rippled through Pakistan - compellingly narrated by a young Pakistani-American scholar and diplomat who has observed the traumas of the region at first hand. Awais Reza's family moved from Indian Kashmir to Lahore in Pakistan after Partition. As a young boy, Awais saw the bullet holes in the plaster of the house they took over and the smear of blood on the wall that testified to the violent founding of the new nation of Pakistan in 1947. Sixty years later, Awais is a storeholder in the Anarkali Bazaar. Married to Shaz, with three sons, he looks back on his own life, and his journey from idealistic young nationalist fighting for the new nation in its failed war in East Bengal, to increasingly watchful and anxious member of the mercantile class that is a the heart of Pakistani life. Haroon Ullah's portrait of a middle class family oppressed by a state falling to pieces around them is a remarkable piece of reporting and storytelling, made possible because of the author's fluency in Urdu and his essential sympathy with the plight of Pakistan's ordinary people.