Colour Of Straw

One of Pakistan’s best-known writers, Intizar Husain explores Hindu-Muslim interaction in pre-partition India, the trauma of migration and the burden of the past with a delicate touch. The agony of the person who left, the mystery of the one left behind, the thoughts of a careless childhood spent in the lanes of distant villages no longer within reach, teenage infatuations that glow and smoulder when they have no reason to...Husain knows exactly where to scratch.

Again and again, he takes a moment, a thought, a vision and turns it into the defining event in a life, a small stone that leaves endless concentric ripples, an apparition that refuses to go away. Only master short story writers can do this, and Husain is certainly that. That the stories retain the delicacy they must have in Urdu is a tribute to translator Moazzam Sheikh.