Pearls And Shards

Saleem Awan commences his journey from a small town in Pakistan’s Salt Range to find himself subsequently in Lahore, Ann Arbor, Oxford and Bath as he matures into a distinguished academic, significantly through his variable friendships with three brilliant women. Sitara Chughtai is a talented class fellow from one of the old-time British colleges in Lahore who, following her studies at LSE, begins teaching at Kinnaird College in Lahore. Saleem’s two American friends, individually, are Nadine Latham and Natasha Mullen – graduate students at the UoM in Ann Arbor whose intellectual discourses within romantic ambience augur blissful interludes by cycling together, visiting art places, and conversing with dissenting luminaries. While negotiating transformative and hairpin spirals, their lives turn surreal in distinctive ways. An epic pruned through the heady 1970s reaches its crescendo in the early twenty-first century intersecting three continents, several academic institutions and a few sharp individuals determined to traverse across the fluid boundaries.