Resenting Other People’s Being: Narrating Pakistani Social Rivalry and Discontent in Faiqa Mansab’s This House of Clay and Water

Abstract

Novels written in English by Pakistani authors frequently present a society based on a class system that makes social mobility challenging and that dictates economic and moral standards, status symbols and acceptable behaviour. Fiction is a medium for the portrayal of the effects of this socio-cultural environment on the individual, and for highlighting the tensions within a highly structured society. Narrated from the perspective of two women and a hijra, Faiqa Mansab’s novel This House of Clay and Water, shows how emotions such as resentment and anger arise and intensify in different environments that constitute Pakistani society while people face the challenges connected with the choice of obeying or resisting social rules.