Nilanjana S Roy: To dad, with love

was such an iconic, pathbreaking memoir of her family and of Pakistan that she set herself a hard task with the follow-up.

Meatless Days was one of the most surprising, most cherished books to come out of the subcontinent. Suleri's quirky family became adopted kin to many of her fans; we related their stories and suffered through their tragedies as though these were our own histories on the page. (Among certain members of my generation, we flourish a Suleri catchphrase like a secret password. It's stolen from the story about her Welsh mother, so exasperated by a dilatory dhobi that she slipped unknowingly into the forms of classical erotic Urdu: "How could you cause me such exquisite pain?" We still repeat that phrase with relish, 13 years after we first read it.)

Her first book introduced us to Pakistan in Suleri's inimitable fashion: she didn't editorialise about her country "" instead she treated it much in the manner you'd treat an exasperating, eccentric but adored relative. Meatless Days had us on the edge of our seats, applauding and asking for more.

Instead of obliging her platoons of fans, Suleri disappeared into the world of academia and silence while a new generation of Pakistani authors, from Mohsin Hamid to Kamila Shamsie, invented their country anew for a global audience.

Boys Will Be Boys risks the inevitable comparison with its predecessor, and it's a damaging exercise. Suleri (now Suleri Goodyear) shifts the focus from the demanding and utterly fascinating women of her family to her father "" the "patriotic and preposterous" Pip, as Z A Suleri was better known.

The warmth and intimacy of Meatless Days still shines through every line of Boys Will Be Boys, but the relatively slender length of the book mirrors its form. This is a coda in comparison, a beautiful exercise in memory and a generous tribute to a man of many parts, but not as full or as satisfying as its forerunner.

As a father, Pip was at once impossibly demanding and movingly tender towards his large brood (there were six of the Suleri offspring); as a journalist, he believed passionately in the ideal of Pakistan and ferociously excoriated the men who turned that ideal into a shabby reality.

He punched the men who dared to jostle his daughters at the airport; he "chiselled" away at his editorials, lovingly burnishing even the most ephemeral pieces; he winced but remained patient as Sara struggled ("went like a blunderbuss") through the delicate fabric of Urdu.

Boys Will Be Boys demands to be read at its own tempo "" it's a gentle, sometimes disjointed, ramble through space and time as it shuttles back and forth between America and Pakistan, between the author's childhood and her 49-year-old self.

The picture that emerges of Pip is not unlike the picture used on the cover: a small insert of a man leaning back with his eyes closed, slightly remote, absorbed in his own world, even distant.

But Boys Will Be Boys is an honest attempt to pay tribute "" even the title of this "daughter's elegy" is the one he chose for the autobiography that he never wrote. If there is distance, it is accompanied with a formal affection, an intimate respect.

The stylistic tics that occasionally marred Meatless Days are much in evidence here "" there's a languor in the prose, a tendency towards hyperbole and a yen for the pretentious phrase that is very subcontinental (and, as readers of this review will note, as contagious as the common cold).

People wail; they ask each other questions "startlingly"; they respond "lucidly" to comments made "apologetically"; they speak in orotund sentences. But Suleri has an extraordinary gift; many authors make (unwittingly) the shift from pathos to bathos "" very few do it the other way round.

She can be maudlin in one paragraph and crisp in the next. "In a way, my mother lived most of her life in translation," she writes as she grapples with her own ability to "lose language".

"She never spoke Welsh, as her parents did; her French was merely academic; Urdu was one of those illusions that cast its shadow over her, but never long enough for her to possess it." Those two sentences tell us more about exile and being out of place than whole volumes of reflection.

And if Suleri's vignettes of Pakistan are paler than before, her anecdotes more loosely scattered across this book, she still has more to offer in the form of stray asides than most authors do in full-fledged stories.

No one who reads this book will forget Yumpax, the Tampax lookalike that Pakistani entrepreneurs conjured up, demonstrating a "unique talent for plagiarism" that we across the border share with that sibling country.

"Another Yum-Yum product!" the pack boasted. "...The Yum had ideas of its own and would choose to spread like one of those Japanese toys you place in water," writes Suleri of her undoubtably distressing encounters with this particular counterfeit.

She can sum up the Lahore of a particular time in one brilliant line: "The chic thing to do was to own a Pajero SUV, have a Kalashnikov machine gun in the backseat, and trot out to kidnap people, much as though one were setting out for a matinee film or an early evening play."

I'd forgive her a hundred lines of the "Newsprint, begone" variety for this. No one can pack quite as much into as small a space as Sara Suleri when she's writing at the peak of her abilities. Boys Will Be Boys may be a coda, but she does have you riveted until the last note has been played.

BOYS WILL BE BOYS

Sara Suleri Goodyear
Penguin
Price: Rs 200,
Pages: 121