SMALL SCALE SINNERS

Twelve lyrically taut stories about Pakistani women.

The sins in Sohail’s debut collection are both small and large. A woman marries for love and then realizes she’s made a mistake. A teenage girl has an affair with a boy. Perhaps to a Western sensibility these are so slight, they aren’t sins at all. Perhaps by traditional Pakistani standards they are significant. In “Basic Training,” two world-weary sisters steal a young girl from the hospital where their mother is being treated and take her to a hellish place where homeless children are being trained for “the cause” by being randomly shot and learning to kill animals with little except their own bodies. “Children are shaped by the shape of their country,” the sisters muse, trying to excuse their behavior until a first-person voice abruptly breaks through the “we” of the sisters’ communal voice: “I should not have to string these scenes up in front of you like this to help you understand that the word loss has a weight that cannot be borne.” Sohail takes measure of loss in story after story: about women deferring to men, about children living in the shadow of their parents’ mortality, about the burden of family and social expectations: “Everyone says women in this country are repressed,” says the daughter in “The Man Who Flew,” a woman in her 30s so frustrated by her obligations to her mother that she rebels in childish ways. “What came first, the mother or the repression?” But in other stories, like “The Park,” one of the collection’s standouts, mothers teach their daughters to be powerful, or at least not to hand over all their power to men. Sohail writes like a pointillist paints, and her stories, while emotionally heavy, lift from the page with humor and piquant details.

Many of the “sinners” surely deserve a second chance in these jewel-like tales.