Nighat M Gandhi's part-memoir, part-feminist critique "Alternative Realities" explores the lives of Muslim women in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan, all of which are homes to the author, and to which she has enviable access.
Gandhi's first story, which is about herself, is the strongest. Being born in Bangladesh, schooled in Pakistan and married in India makes "The Works", her story, outstanding.
The filmy falling in love of a Pakistani Muslim from a God-fearing conservative Karachi family with an Indian Brahmin when at college in US and her eventual elopement from Karachi to London, with the help of a Pakistani friend, is an adventurous read.
Gandhi's tells her story dispassionately. How her father fooled her into coming to Karachi to discuss her boyfriend with him and then refused to let her return to her studies or the boyfriend. How her passport was quietly removed from her closet by her mother, who never stood up for her or her siblings, and how she could not leave Pakistan on the sly even though an activist offered to buy her a ticket to the US.
A brave friend, whose assumed name in the book is Naila, gets a new passport made for her, while the boyfriend sends her a ticket to London, and she elopes for love - the central theme of the book.
But not before the Pakistani immigration checks her out suspiciously - in the unbelievable days when Pakistanis did not need a visa to fly to Britain.
The author undertakes the journey to Pakistan and Bangladesh (apart from India, where she lives) for the sake of love. She sees love in all the stories she explores but the meaning of love seems to have evolved at times, and changed at times, since the early 1980s when she had given it all up for love.
