The Walk

In her short story “The Walk,” British-Pakistani novelist and Women’s Prize for Fiction winner Kamila Shamsie contributes the opening story to The Decameron Project, an anthology that commissioned pandemic fiction from twenty-nine writers in homage to Boccaccio’s plague tales. Set in Karachi during the first weeks of lockdown, “The Walk” follows two friends, Azra and Zohra, who venture out through their eerily emptied neighbourhood. Shamsie renders the pandemic not as spectacle but as a quiet shift in the textures of everyday life: Azra’s mother walks in circles in the garden, one circle every forty-five seconds; Azra clutches a handbag empty except for her mobile phone, feeling “simultaneously safer and more of a target” (25). When the two women reach the sea, the vendors, families, and kite-sellers that normally crowd the coastline are all missing, and two masked policemen on horseback order them to leave.

The story’s power lies in its double movement. The lockdown empties the city and fills it at the same time: stripped of traffic and commerce, the neighbourhood becomes a place where people recognise each other again. A woman who has lived on the same street for twenty-five years raises a hand from her balcony—“First interaction” (26), Shamsie writes, compressing years of urban anonymity into two words. When Azra and Zohra find themselves on a road full of walkers, everyone waving and performing the rituals of social distance, it becomes the closest thing to a street party the neighbourhood has ever known, and Azra’s handbag swings loosely by her side, “unclutched” (27). Shamsie’s method is compression: three pages distil the pandemic’s central paradox—that enforced confinement can briefly produce an unexpected intimacy, a gift that cannot last. The closing exchange undercuts this warmth: when Zohra suggests they walk here again after the pandemic, Azra replies only “Maybe” (27), a single word that registers the fragility of connection in a world already beginning to return to its habitual distances. Set in Karachi rather than London or New York, “The Walk” situates a major South Asian novelist’s pandemic fiction outside the Western settings that dominate the anthology, giving the archive a distinctly South Asian exploration of the lockdown’s social textures. Shamsie’s restrained, observational prose captures the pandemic not through crisis but through the minor key of neighbourhood ritual, demonstrating that some of the most revealing pandemic fiction works not by dramatising catastrophe but by attending to the small, fragile negotiations of togetherness that confinement briefly makes possible—and that normalcy will erase.