Quote by Sara Suleri: “There are no women in Pakistan. There are only shadows in the shape of women.”

Women whose lives are entirely defined by others' needs and expectations are not fully visible as people — they exist as outlines, not as full selves. This quote is a devastating critique of a society in which women are present everywhere but recognized nowhere. The 'shadow' is what is seen when the person herself is refused.

Suleri wrote Meatless Days during the Zia ul-Haq era in Pakistan, a period in which Islamization policies had explicitly reduced the legal and social status of women. The book processed both the personal loss of her mother and sister and the broader diminishment of women in Pakistani public life.

Pakistani-American literary critic and memoirist, born in Lahore in 1953. Her memoir Meatless Days, published in 1989, is widely regarded as one of the finest works of South Asian memoir in English, exploring family, grief, Pakistan, and colonial history with extraordinary prose precision.