All Passion Spent

In the mid-nineties, Birjees Dawar Ali leaves India to return to Pakistan to seek out a history left unfinished, a life from which she had earlier fled nursing heartbreak and betrayal. But when she returns, will she be able to find the family and home that had once been her own, and the friends who had promised her unquestioning love? Or will these past certainties have fled with the march of history? A deeply moving novel of love and loss, All Passion Spent focuses on the unresolved questions created by the1947 Partition of India and the emergence of India and Pakistan as two separate countries.

Zaheda Hina’s richly layered narrative is brought to life in a lyrical translation by Neelam Hussain, as it touches on the many consequences of this painful history—the profound sense of grief and displacement, the lives abandoned midstream, the lost friendships, as well as the quest for new roots and lands under different skies. All Passion Spent is a powerful and poignant personal story about the impact of Partition from the point of view of one woman whose life and family was torn apart.

Zaheda Hina is a well-known Urdu journalist and writer, whose strong interest in history informs much of her work. She was nominated for Pakistan’s highest literary award, the Pride of Performance award, in 2006, which she declined as a mark of protest against the military government of Pakistan. Neelam Hussain is a writer and translator. She works with Simorgh Women’s Resource and Publication Centre and teaches English at Lahore Grammar School in Pakistan.