Abstract: The paper analyses K. A. Abbas’ short story ‘Cold Wave’ as a modern narrative of an independent nation that is dealing each day with its colonial baggage. It is a reading of the postcolonial elite individual as a product of a transition that is far from complete and who is stranded in-between to eternally undergo the upheaval of constantly shifting identities. He represents the liminality that informs the ‘third space’ which, however, resists homogenisation as each occupant has his own unique crisis that will not be subsumed into any larger categorization. It studies the disparity that informs how postcolonialism is nurtured and negotiated by successive generations of colonised men, belonging to same origin and class. It also charts how women resist homogenisation through professional emancipation that disrupts the home/world binary and the status quo of patriarchal gendered expectations. It traces the fluctuation in linguistic acquisition, the inadvertent transformation and translation of the colonial tongue and its connection to class identities. Alongside, other subaltern issues have been dealt with to depict how Western knowledge loses it applicability in the colonised space and gets distorted through nuances of meanings to give way to curious structures of difference, showing how postcolonialism engenders an ambivalence and, in turn, is engendered by it. 

Keywords: liminality, homogenisation, difference, postcolonialism, ambivalence.

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