Banned Urdu short-story collection now in English

Jahan's two pieces in the collection - ‘In the Women's Quarters' (‘Parde ki Peechhe') and ‘Seeing the Sights in Delhi' (‘Dilli ki Sair') - are concerned with the problems women face, especially how modern conveniences and medicine make women's lives worse than better.

She drew her own experiences as a gynaecologist to give an account of the social, sexual and medical problems faced by the women she treated.

The contempt that Mahmud-uz-Zafar had for the so-called ‘liberal-minded' Muslims is clear in his story ‘Virility' (‘Jawanmardi'), where modern ideas do not enable new circuits of sympathy but rather collapse back into more routinised patterns of spousal abuse and neglect.

Ali's stories in the collection turn primarily on the condition of women: poverty, domestic abuse, sexual desire and longing experienced by widows, and the cruelties that women endure in everyday life.