The majestic Sydney Harbour Bridge now has in its lap the magnificent Sydney Opera House. From the sky it looks like a big ship with its convex sails forming a unique geometrical pattern. When you approach it on foot and climb up its friendly stairs you realise that it is, architecturally, one of the finest, if not the finest, centres of Performing Arts in the world.

Since the completion of the Opera house -- it took eighteen years to build -- Sydney has joined the ranks of Paris and New York as a city of the world. The harbour bridge and the Opera House now symbolise Sydney just as the Eiffel Tower symbolises Paris. Beyond the city’s concrete jungle lies the beach and the mountains which conjure up blue magic, while dusty tracks lead the way into a slowly unfurling outback.

I recently visited Sydney after sixty three years. What images I had in mind have all been mostly obliterated by a surge of skyscrapers which have sprouted in the city centre. The Bondi Beach with its pure, golden sand is now a relatively small patch with hundreds of nondescript modern residential blocks  hovering over it. Sydney is now a vast, multi-cultural metropolis with settlers from Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, China, Japan, Russia, Europe, India and, of course, Pakistan.

* * * * *

On the way back from Sydney to Dubai -- flying time fifteen hours -- I was fortunate enough to have been gifted Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s book of short stories, The Thing Around Your Neck. I found the stories so gripping that after finishing the book I read it all over again. For the first time, a long distance flight did not jolt my nerves.

What is on display in Ms Adichie’s stories is a dazzling imagination expressed masterfully. Each story is powerfully written by an exceedingly sensitive writer who evokes the less celebrated aspects of imagination -- loss of place, an unquestioning acceptance of things by some, and the plight of others who feel crushed by the authoritarianism that exists in Nigeria.

I have not been seriously reading fiction for some years now and so it came as pleasant surprise to me that Adichie is a renowned Nigerian writer whose work has been nominated by the Critics Circle Award more than once. Her first novel The Purple Hibiscus won the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Hirston/Wright Legacy award.

The tales in The Thing Around Your Neck are mesmerising in that they cast a spell over your intellect. Nearly every story ends at a point which is not the end of a story but which leaves you deeply engrossed in the predicaments of her characters. The tales about Nigeria reveal her country’s past and present turning it into a drama that opens your eyes to a different kind of human experience.

"They named him Akinwenwa: the earth god Ani had finally granted a child. He was dark and solidly built and had Obierika’s happy curiosity. Obierika’s cousins visited too often. They marvelled at how well Akinwenwa played the flute, how quickly he was learning poetry and wrestling moves from his father, but Nwambga saw the glowing malevolence that their smiles could not hide. She feared for her child and her husband and when Obierika  died -- a man who had been hearty and laughing and drinking palm wine moments before he slumped -- she knew that they had killed him with medicine. She clung to his corpse until a neighbour slapped her to let go; she lay in the cold ash for days, she tore at the patterns shaved into her hair. She thought often of the woman who, after her tenth successive child died, had gone to her backyard and hanged herself on a kola tree. But she could not do it because of Akinwenwa."

(The Headstrong Historian)

Adichie’s understanding of her characters is nothing short of remarkable. And she has a wonderful knack of depicting complicated relationships which involve families, men and women, and women and women. Her characters that haunt you are lonely souls, adrift in a strange physical and emotional landscape.

"Many years after her husband died, Nwangma still closed her eyes from time to time to re-live his nightly visits to her hut and the morning after, when she would walk to the stream humming a song, thinking of the smoky scent of him, the firmness of his weight, those secrets she shared with herself."

I am most impressed by the manner in which Adichie compresses her narrative. She packs a whole world into a few paragraphs. (This is precisely what a short story ought to be.) She builds for us a rich universe in broad and subtle strokes. Her stories -- whether about immigrants coping with life in an American city, or middle class Nigerian university students -- are not a so much about events as the clash between tradition and modernity. She reveals to us how imported dreams affect relationships between parents and children, husbands and wives, women and women. She does not moralise and she does not give us conclusions; instead she gives us wisdom and compassion. I was hugely amused to learn that middle-class indulgent mothers in Nigeria behave exactly like one of my aunts.

"My brother, Nnambia looked just like my mother with the honey-fair complexion large eyes and generous mouth that curved perfectly. When my mother took us to the market traders would call out. ‘Hey Madam, why did you waste your fair skin on a boy and leave the girl so dark. What is a boy doing with all that beauty?’ And my mother would chuckle as though she took a mischievous and joyful responsibility for Nnambia’s good looks. When, at eleven, Nnambia broke the window of his classroom with stone, my mother gave him the money to replace it and did not tell my father. When he lost some library books in class two, she told his former mistress that our houseboy had stolen them. When in class three, he left  home early every day to attend catechism and it turned out that he never once went and so could not receive Holy Communion she told the other parents that he had malaria on the examination day. When he took the key of my father’s car and pressed it into a piece of soap that my father found before Nnambia could take it to a locksmith, she made vague sounds about how he was just experimenting and didn’t mean a thing…"

(Cell One)

Adichie’s narrative method is simple, straightforward and skilful. Today she stands amongst the front rank of fiction writers. I would not be surprised if she is nominated for a Nobel Prize in not too distant a future.