About Those Trees Outlive Them
The Author, Jani Abro
Jani, whose full name is Zahid Dara Abro, is a romantic at the quintessence with skills in painting, poetry, and prose. He predominantly expresses himself in his mother tongue, Sindhi. Jani writes about the remnants of life’s carnage, yet at the same time he draws inspiration from the garbage where life crawls. His aesthetics are abstracts like reverse tenses. His analytical side, coupled with an immense attention to detail, is evident in his work. Jani has viewed life through various lenses, including rural and urban perspectives, the developing and developed world. Over time, he has honed the ability to capture subtle nuances and reveal their true meanings. His novel Those Trees Outlive Them is a rolling tale of how five generations search for meaning and find the object of life itself, their overlapping narratives bridge the gaps between poverty and wealth, past and present, east and west, and good and bad. Jani is a trained physician, working as a neurophysiologist (an allied health technologist) in New York/New Jersey since 1999.
Foreword
This is a rolling snowball story of five generations interwoven in a long tale; which runs simultaneously between 1875 and 2012. It explores the land of Sindh and its people in many layers: their socio-political situation, their five-thousand-year-old civilization, their enduring Sufi attitudes, and the Indus River, which is a vital part of this civilization—but due to several dams and barriers upstream, the river has dried up, just as its mystic trends have evaporated with time. The narrator wanted to share his pathos with his readers. First generation: a self-made entrepreneur who became an orphan the day he was born. Second generation: a flamboyant character who ran away from home at the age of 12 and came back as a young man of 25. Third generation: an upstanding, hardworking, ambitious man, who started out in the Sindhi countryside and ended up in New York City. Fourth generation: a poet, who is the narrator of this story. He wonders, How do I know all this?—it must come partly from stories that I heard from my grandmother, and partly from my own imagination. Later in his life he became a physician by profession. Fifth generation: An American Sindhi who loves his heritage, but can’t go back, and is still trying to find his way.