Deconstruction: The term denotes a particular kind of practice in reading and, thereby, a method of criticism and mode of analytical

inquiry. In her book The Critical Difference (1981), Barbara Johnson clarifies the term: "Deconstruction is not synonymous with "destruction", however. It is in fact much closer to the original meaning of the word 'analysis' itself, which etymologically means "to undo" -- a virtual synonym for "to de-construct." ... If anything is destroyed in a deconstructive reading, it is not the text, but the claim to unequivocal domination of one mode of signifying over another. A deconstructive reading is a reading which analyses the specificity of a text's critical difference from itself." http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/derrida/deconstruction.html According to Derrida language is not the reliable tool of communication we believe it to be, but rather a fluid, ambiguous domain of complex experiences in which ideologies program us without our being aware of them. While applying deconstruction on literary text the following points must be kept iin mind Language is much more slippery and ambiguous than we realize it is Change in writers tone of voice and his emphasis on certain expression is important to decode the hidden meaning Meaning of something is derived from its difference from other things, as red is red because it in not blue or green Meaning is not stable, it keeps on changing, for one signifier there could be many signifieds.

Meatless Days by Sara Suleri Meatless Days is a book that encompasses person memoir, the history of the development of Pakistan, and female position within Pakistani culture. Suleri jumps from the present to the past, from the United States to Pakistan, and from the privileged world of Yale in New Haven to the traditional realm of cultural traditions. Both the clash of modern and traditional cultures as well as the exile versus the homeland is addressed in her beautiful prose. Through her misunderstanding of some of her own cultural traditions, she sees herself as existing in between two cultures and two ideologies, neither one nor the other. Sara, through her stories of her fathers work for Pakistan and his political machinations, Suleri presents history within a human frame. She also illustrates her own imagining of what Pakistan is an means to the exile. Her "country" becomes a homeland that encompasses both the remote and archaic world of traditions with the contemporary, modern society of both the East and the West. Through religion and the cultural development of the Twentieth Century, Pakistan is presented as both jarring and formless within Suleris prose.

The first chapter of the book is named excellent things in women. It actually revolves around Saras family and mostly about her Dadis character. Application. Sara Suleri starts her story with the line "Leaving Pakistan was, of course, tantamount to giving up the company of women" But then In the very next paragraph she deconstructs the idea by saying "my reference is to a place where the concept of woman was not really part of an available vocabulary: we were too busy for that, just living, and conducting precise negotiations with what it meant to be a sister or a child or a wife or a mother or a servant". She points out the absence of women in the sense that in a male dominating society like Pakistan a female is recognized only with her relation to a man not individually. By the end of the story she reaches on the conclusion that there actually are no women in Pakistan as she says, When I teach topics in third world literature, much time is lost in trying to explain that the third world is locatable only as a discourse of convenience. . . And then it happens. A face, puzzled and attentive and belonging to my gender, raises its intelligence to question why, since I am teaching third world writing , I haven't given equal space to women writers on my syllabus. I look up, the horse's mouth, a foolish thing to be. Unequal images battle in my mind for precedence--there's imperial Ifat, there's Mamma in the garden, and Halima the cleaning woman is there too, there's uncanny Dadi with her goat. And against all my own odds I know what I must say. Because, I'll answer slowly, there are no women in the third world. Thus she deconstructs the very first line of her story by giving a completely opposite statement at the end. Another important point to be noticed in the story is that, throughout the story we see that she uses the word my when she mentions her mother or father as my mother my father mostly when she talks about her mother we see that she adds my in order to show her closeness to her mother, whereas she has never used the word My Dadi anywhere. Wherever Dadi has been mentioned, its been Dadi only. In a way Sara shows that she was perhaps not too close to her Dadi. But we notice that she has spent hours and hours thinking about her to write a story and has given her the heroins place in her story. She has written pages and pages about Dadis personality and her life. That makes the readers think that she is although not mentioning it through words, yet its obvious that Dadi had a very special place in her heart. Sara mentions Dadi as the most pious and religious sort of person in the family as she is the only one in family who would offer prayer, sacrifice and recite Holy Quran and would also ask others to follow Islam. As she says, God she loved and she understood him better than anyone

I saw it in her concentration; I know that she was making God talk to her as to Abraham and was showing Him what she could do-----for Him----to sons.and she ate all alone We also notice that she also is the most miserable person , as she was married at sixteen and widowed in her thirties, had to leave her home, her country, her daughter died giving birth to a child, her son stopped talking to her, and she was also left alone by the family. As Sara says, in the winter I see her alone.and in summer, when the night created an illusion of possible coolness and everyone held her breath while waiting for a thin and intermittent breeze, Dadi would be on the roof, alone. In spite of being victimized by all the diversities of life, we see she never forgets thanking God for His blessings. But towards the end of the story we notice that she stops praying. As the text witnesses, it took us a while to notice what was missing: she had forgotten prayer. It left her life as firmly as tobacco can leave the lives of only the most passionate smokers, and I dont know if she prayed again. A person could either be religious or non-religious. But this is not the case with Saras characters. At first she constructed Dadis image as the most passionate one about religion and religious practices but then deconstructs it by presenting her as the one who stopped praying at all. Same is the case with her father, first he is shown as sort of atheist who doesnt believe in or doesnt give importance to religious practices but towards the end he is the one shown being very punctual in prayers and all that. Another point that takes the readers attention is that Saras father who is shown rude and negligent towards his mother as he doesnt talk to her, doesnt sit with her and is also very ignorant towards religion starts praying, when his mother gets burned. As the text says, At about this time, however, with heavy handed inevitability that characterized his relation to his mother, my father took to prayer. I came home one afternoon and looked for him in the usual places, but he wasnt to be found. Finally I came across Tillat and asked her where Papa was/ praying. She said. Praying? I said..so papa prayed. With the desperate ardor of a lover trying to converse life back into a finished love. That was a change, when Dadi patched herself together again and forgot to put prayer back into its proper pocket. Papa prayed and feasted and went on pilgrimage and read the Quran aloud with the most peculiar locutions

At another point we see Dadi giving piece of advice to her grandson to respect the women by quoting a saying of holy Prophet (PBUH), she would hear Shahid, her first grandson, telling me or any of my sisters we were vile, we were disgusting women. And Dadi who never addressed any one of us girls without first conferring the title of lady---so we were Tillat Begum. :Nuzhat Negum, Ifat Begum, Saira Begum:----would halt in reprimand and tell her grandson never to call her granddaughters women. What else shall I call them, men? Shahid yelled. men! said Dadi, men! There is more goodness in a womens little finger than in the benignited mind of man.and heaven, she grimly added, is the thing Muhammad says (peace be upon him) lies beneath the feet of women. It makes the readers think that Dadi is the one who knows the place of women in Islam and also knows how respectable they are. But this idea is deconstructed when we see her dealing with her White legged daughter in law, whom she doesnt like, as if she doesnt belong to the category of women under whose feet heaven lies. We see this contrast in her personality at one time being so concerned about her grand daughters respect and then she would not even allow them to touch her holy things as she didnt consider them pure enough to touch her things, None of us, according to Dadi, were quite pure enough to transport this particular item Thus to conclude we may say that language is not what it simply seems to be, rather it is very ambiguous phenomenon thats needs to be analyzed closely in order to derive its actual meaning, those are not always the same. Meanings are constructed through the way an expression has been said or written.