In Ayaz Pirani’s debut collection of stories, Death to America, he doesn’t try to straighten a dog’s tail. His stories are the frays on Empire’s fringe, and his colored characters navigate a perennially perfidious Albion.
In the first story, “Battle of Waterloo,” Danju is obliged to choose sides in the struggle between disco and rock and roll, and in the last story, “Brief Survey of Coloreds in the Rift Valley,” Nunu’s feeble crush on his grade-school librarian spins out a second post-colonial yarn. The youngster Aqbal, in “The Lyric,” is rescued by racism, and in “They’ve Forgotten That I’m Not There,” the small-time fence, Mohan, observes the narrow path. And sometimes you get to start over, as Gently discovers in “Kitchener, née Berlin.” Other characters include Arf, Fruq, Eerfal, Salty, the East African dandies Sur and Nur, and the sparring teenagers Umed and Frenni.
With economy and a taste for the oddball’s angle, Ayaz Pirani makes the peculiar quotidian. He draws from Ismaili ginans and granths, and the Indo-Pak heritage of story-telling, oral poetry, and old-fashioned one-liners.