The Heat of Grief and the Catharsis of Loss in “What Remains After a Fire” https://ift.tt/b2eT1tr
Kanza Javed’s debut short story collection, What Remains After a Fire, is appropriately blurb-ed as a series of “eight unflinching” stories told in the voice of Annie, Haider Ali, Aisha, Noorie, Zara, and a few other unnamed first- or second-person narrators. These stories of betrayal, mistrust, violence, loss, and grief are what lend this collection its character. What cuts through Javed’s haunting language of pain and memory is how clearly the scenes reveal themselves to you in every story. Be it Noorie collecting Bilquees Begum’s old lover in a bottle or Nargis’ braid that was severed from her head for committing the sin of Eve, Javed is able to render these scenes in sharp definition through her prose.
Spread across Karachi, Lahore, and America, each of Javed’s narrators allow us to live through their ordeals, passing on the memory as a keepsake through a loving caress each time. Turbulent in their respective plots, the stories in this collection do not shy away from grounding us in the place where they are set. Be it Morgantown or Maryland, Sialkot or “the village of Bismillahpur [which] watched a thirty-four-year-old divorced woman orchestrate her dead grandfather’s funeral”, the stories bring these spaces alive to speak the truth of what it means to live in them.
While the physical setting of these stories shifts between modern-day Pakistan and the US, the fictional setting that carries the beating heart of every story from “Rani” to “Ruby” is in the liminality—a space of crisis and unrest—each narrator occupies. To offer a closer look at her characters’ agitation and lay bare their conscience, Javed allows dangerous proximity to the chaos, enabling the tremors to reverberate through the pages and tickle your skin as you read. We see it in Aisha, the young wife jilted by her in-laws after her miscarriages, who finds solace in fire: “Gripped at first by fear, though that feeling soon gave way to something else. Something warmer. Something lovely. As she watched the fire snake around the room … she felt peace.” It appears that even we are not spared the smoldering embers menacing to scorch anything and anyone that dares come close. We feel the heat until peace arrives like deliverance.
The devotion and commitment with which Javed’s prose stays spliced to the craft of her fiction is something worth admiring. True to its title, each story in the collection brings back the image of a fire that leaves a mark on whatever it licks. Javed hides details like love letters in inconspicuous folds of her stories, reminders that summon the fire raging in and around all her characters. We see them flickering just behind the language in the “mud-red henna” of her hair in “Rani”; the blaze that Kamila brings to free her sister, Aisha, and melt away “Yasir, his mother, the babies” so she could fall “softly into her sister’s loving embrace” in “Carry It All” (79); and the burn-like “pinkish-white patches” on Rubina’s skin that she calls “a reminder of our bad marriage” in “Ruby”(176).
These eight short stories follow the legacy of grief, horror, and the macabre that we find in the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe and Shirley Jackson, while borrowing a similar levity from Amy Hempel and Alice Elliot Dark. The plots orbit around a burning memory, affliction, or consuming loss, the form balances the turbulence and achieves equilibrium by adopting a linear narrative lulled only by flashes of memory serving as a simultaneous storyline. With the exception of “It Will Follow You Home,” which stitches twenty-six numbered fragments into a whole, Javed’s stories avoid much experimentation in form or structure.
This collection is a mosaic of wounds and scars, carrying scripts of memory within. Despite the heat of grief, the stories offer vignettes of respite in the catharsis that comes after loss, reminiscent of embers glittering like stars in ashen remains.
FICTION What Remains After a Fire
By Kanza Javed
W. W. Norton & Company
Published September 23, 2025
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