Grieving for Pigeons Twelve Stories of Lahore (Revised Edition)

In this poignant and meditative collection of short stories, Zubair Ahmad captures the lives and experiences of the people of the Punjab, a region divided between India and Pakistan. In an intimate narrative style, Ahmad writes a world that hovers between memory and imagination, home and abroad. The narrator follows the pull of his subconscious, shifting between past and present, recalling different eras of Lahore’s neighbourhoods and the communities that define them.

These stories evoke the complex realities of post-colonial Pakistani Punjab. The contradictions of this region’s history reverberate through the stories, evident in the characters, their circumstances, and sometimes their erasure. Skillfully translated from Punjabi by Anne Murphy, this collection is an essential contribution to the wider recognition of the Punjabi language and its literature.

The great strength of Grieving for Pigeons is its closeness to Zubair Ahmad’s original Punjabi. […] These stories transport the reader through a Lahore haunted by several periods of its recent history.”

Pasha Khan, McGill University

About the Author

Zubair Ahmad is the author of two poetry collections, three short story collections, a translation, and a collection of essays, all written in Punjabi. Two of his short story collections were finalists for the Dhahan Prize for Punjabi Literature in 2014 and 2020. He lives in Lahore, Pakistan. Anne Murphy is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on the vernacular literary and religious traditions of the Punjab. Grieving for Pigeons is her first book-length translation.

Reviews

Ahmad paints Lahore and its life with the finest yet distinct strokes that are very gentle at first sight, but have storms raging within.”

Hindustan Times

Table of Contents

1. Introduction / Anne Murphy
2. Waliullah Is Lost
3. Bajwa Has Nothing More to Say Now
4. Dead Man’s Float
5. Pigeons, Ledges, and Streets
6. He Has Left, and Won’t Be Back
7. The Beak of a Green Parrot, Submerged in the River
8. Sweater
9. Unstory
10. The Estranged City
11. The Silence of Saints
12. Half Maghar Moon
13. Wall of Water

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). It may be reproduced for non-commercial purposes, provided that the original author is credited.