The Funeral, by Mahreen Sohail
Read it here in 10 minutes.
Thinking about why I love it…
This story is set in Pakistan (the author’s home country) – a country I’ve never been to, and a culture I’ve don’t know much about – this means there are elements that I don’t recognise, such as the men taking the body to the cemetery while the women remain in the house, but there’s also so much that is universal: the sadness, the reminiscing, the meeting of people you haven’t seen for a long time. I’m the sort of person who likes learning about other places and people, so I appreciate the setting and cultural elements, while the universal elements resonate with my own experience.
Memories of the narrator’s childhood appear organically throughout the funeral, such as playing cricket with her cousins, her aunt turning off a TV advert for sanitary napkins, and eating ice cream with toppings such as cereal. This makes the story feel more realistic – it’s surely natural to think of time spent with family, while at a family member’s funeral, and these particular memories feel entirely appropriate.
While the story initially seems to be told in a simple and straightforward way, there are some beautiful descriptions that reflect the narrator’s philosophical thinking about life, such as ‘when my father was dying, you could see in the way his body was becoming just some bones that he wanted to be held together by people who had known the shape of him as a child’ and ‘There are many things we take to our graves just because there is no language for how to recount the experience of having lived through them.’ These ideas also resonate with me as being true to my experience.
I think this story is beautiful, and I love how it ends on a gentle and positive note with the narrator feeling comforted by the love of her extended family moving along the generations.
Mina Ma 