Discover Meeraal (میرال) by Suleman Ashiq, an Urdu novel that begins on the Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul and never quite leaves the question it asks there.
A man walks along the bridge with heavy steps, watching seagulls dive into the strait below. The Bosphorus Bridge is famous for joining two continents, Asia to Europe — and looking at it, he wishes there were a bridge like it between the past and the future, because those two are always estranged, and people insist on living in one or the other.
Very few of us, the book observes, actually live in the city of the present. From there the novel moves through grief and memory: how life carries on as a caravan in which the loss of one traveller changes remarkably little, how mourning gives way to compromise, and how even the deepest bereavement is eventually folded away by the sheer speed of living.
A reflective, melancholy Urdu novel about memory, loss and the difficulty of living in the present — for readers who want fiction that lingers.
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