BOYS WILL BE BOYS: A DAUGHTER’S ELEGYBy Sara Suleri GoodyearPublished by PenguinPrice: Rs 200IN Meatless Days, Sara Suleri Goodyear’s memories of her Welsh born mother and her sister Ifat, both killed in accidents, dictated the text. In Boys Will Be Boys, Suleri, a professor of English at Yale University, returns to familiar familial ground, this time focusing on her late journalist father Z A Suleri, called Pip by his kids — short for patriotic and preposterous. But it’s more than just a personal elegy, it’s about the past and the present, language and translation. For instance, Suleri’s use of Urdu phrases to define chapters has more to do with her love for the language than her father’s. Dashing between Pakistan and the United States, it addresses the subject of cultural displacement among other things, but fortunately without an overbearing seriousness. Devyani Onial
