Fahmida Riaz: Life and Work of a Poet

 

Truth, love, self-respect

Fragile playthings, made of clay

Crumble in a moment

Still, the world is beautiful

Sacred—like Mariam

Pure—like falsehood

(Patthar ki Zuban, Fahmida Riaz)

It was a voice of a young poet communicating to the readers in the 1960s in Pakistan, in a patriarchal, class-ridden society under a military rule. The poems spoke of love of life, of yearnings for a beloved, of a muted sexual awakening. Despite being written in a traditional romantic vein, a certain vibrancy, a hesitant questioning, a subtle mockery of the norms, and a well-rounded lyricism set those poems apart from the run-of-the-mill Urdu poetry. And the fact that it was a voice of a woman, with an awareness of herself as a female growing up in a world where her feelings, her thoughts, her actions are circumscribed by traditional mores:

The girl of my thought, naive, virgin

Shy to speak out before a stranger

Veiled in her vague writings

Sidesteps with a bowed head

(Jhijak, Patthar ki Zuban)

Fahmida started writing in the early 1960s. At that time the modern genre—free verse—had already made a niche in Urdu literary tradition with Miraji, Faiz and Rashid being the fore-runners. Among senior woman poets, Ada Jaffery, whose repertoire mainly consisted of classical ghazal, was successfully experimenting with free verse, while Zehra Nigah and Kishwar Naheed’s forte was free verse.

Background

Fahmida belonged to a literary family. Her father Riazuddin Ahmad was an educationist. In 1930, Noor Mohammad, a reputed Sindhi educationist, established a school in Hyderabad, Sindh. It was the second high school for Muslims in Sindh. Noor Mohammad wrote to Aligarh to seek the services of some Muslim teachers. Riazuddin moved to Sindh the same year and joined Noor Mohammad High School. His affiliation with Sindh and its culture grew stronger with years. His circle of friends included Sindhi literateurs. He wrote poetry in Sindhi language. He also taught at the Teacher’s Training College, Hyderabad. When his wife was about to deliver their first child, in 1945, he sent her to Meerut, his ancestral hometown in Uttar Pradesh, to be taken care of by the women of the family. Thus Fahimda was born in Meerut. After childbirth, Fahmida’s mother returned to Hyderabad, Sindh—alongwith her six-week old baby. Riazuddin doted on his daughter. He used to spend a lot of time with the child and taught her himself to read and write Urdu. Riazuddin died in 1950 when Fahmida was only five years old.

Fahmida’s mother was well-versed in Urdu and Persian literary traditions, especially poetry. She brought up her daughters on her own. She was a strong-willed, educated woman of sharp wit and courage. After the death of her husband, she entered the public domain to provide for her family. Through her determination and verve, with the help of the social contacts of her late husband, she secured a grant, added to it her meagre resources, and opened a school in Hyderabad (Riazuddin Memorial Girls’ School) in 1952. She ran it for five years till the resources ran out. But her fertile mind did not run out of ideas for economic survival. Soon she had acquired government quota to run a sugar shop. As she lacked business acumen, the shop had to be closed down after a couple of years. She then got a contract for running a canteen in a maternity hospital. She remained engaged in economic pursuits till her daughters were educated and married off. Her mother’s strength and perseverance had a profound impact on Fahmida during her formative years.

As a child, Fahmida grew up among books and poetry, with her mother reciting poems of Ismail Meerathi and teaching her Persian. Fahmida was imbued with a love of storybooks and poetry from the very beginning. Her father’s large collection of books came handy. By the time Fahmida was in high school, she had become an avid reader and was reading classical Urdu and Persian poets at home and was getting into progressive Urdu literature. She was growing up in an atmosphere where it was not considered an improper for girls to dabble in poetry. However, Fahmida’s mother, though a woman of progressive mind, adhered to social norms of her days. Fahmida grew up as a strong-headed child with a will of her own. She used to slip out of the house and wander alone in the streets. She played with books literally—instead of dolls—making houses, towers and bridges of books. On approaching adolescence, Fahmida increasingly felt the weight of restraints put on her, more by society than by her mother. “By the time I composed my first poem, when I was 15, the gap between the two generations had become too wide,” she recalls. Fahmida did not show her first poem to her mother. Instead she read it out to some people outside her home.

First Collection

Fahmida sent her first poem to Funoon, a literary journal from Lahore, in 1963, when she was a first year student in Government College for Girls, Hyderabad. She got a very encouraging response from Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi, the editor of the magazine, a senior short story writer and a poet of repute. From then on her poems started appearing regularly in Funoon. The poems embodied ”… truth, freshness and femininity”— in the words of a male critic—and they were well received. Indeed, her poetry truthfully portrayed the personal world—the dreams and desires, thoughts and feelings—of a young middle class Pakistani girl. Fahmida’s poetry of that time was seeped into classical imagery—ishq, arzoo, wasl, firaq, udasi (love, desire, union, speration, sadness).

O My heart! Where shall I take you?

The lead of the night is about to melt

Accept now— he won’t come back

(Pichley Pehr)

Yet it was unmistakably a different voice with glimpses of non-conformism, a voice rooted in the physical and social reailty of her time, of her being, probing the duality of human nature, poking at the accepted norms:

Since the time the man

Ate the forbidden fruit in God’s paradise

And rebelled

This pungent taste

Comes back to him again and again

But… before the bitter taste of repentance
O’ the boundless pleasure of the sin!!

(Repentance)

The 1960s was a decade of political turmoil against the depoliticising process in Pakistan set in motion by the military ruler, Ayub Khan. Political parties, representatives bodies and students unions had been abolished by the Proclamation Order of 7 October 1958, and the 1962 Constitution, that revolved around the person of the President, had accelerated the unrest, especially in East Pakistan which, as a province, felt increasingly alienated and economically and politically deprived. Student unrest was increasing, more so in East Pakistan where the Students’ League and the Students’ Union, backed by Awami League and National Awami Party, were in the forefront of protest not only against University Ordinance but other political matters as well.

Fahmida entered college life in 1963 and got very much involved in politics as a student. She participated in rallies against the University Ordinance, took part in debates and mushairas (poetry recitals) and toured all over Pakistan in connection with inter-city debates and other activities. Fahmida recalls that she was very lucky to have full support of her principal, Mrs. Shams Abbasi, a colleague of Fahmida’s late father. “She never reprimanded me for my involvement in politics. Many people accused me of spreading rebellion among girls and of flying black flags on college building against the regime. But some how I felt she was very proud of me. It gave me a lot of moral strength. She was like my mother. There had been two strong women in my life—my mother and my college principal.”

An off-shoot of her involvement in student politics was a growing interest in the communist movement and the ideology of social justice of the left. At that time she learned Sindhi to read its literature. When Fahmida joined Sindh University for a Master’s in Political Science, after finishing her BA, she came into contact with Professor Jamal Naqvi and Jam Saqi of the (banned) community Party of Pakistan, and through them with Marxist literature.

Fahmida’s student life and activities came to an abrupt halt when she got married in 1967. It was an arranged marriage. She had not finished her Master’s degree. The same year she moved to London with her husband.

Patthar ki Zuban, her first collection of forty poems, was published in 1967, two months after her marriage, when she was twenty-two. Spanning a period of five years (1963-76), her poetry had focused on the domain of the personal, the realm of emotions of a young girl. In her own words, as she wrote in the preface of the second edition of Patthar ki Zuban in 1975:

‘What are these poems? Literary compositions? This is all nonsense. These are just the yearnings of a young middle class girl with a love of life, a yearning, which is dormant like a scent in the very being of every young girl and which suffuses the air with the advent of a light shower. And these thoughts have dark shadows of a narrow room of a girls’ hostel… a certain sadness borne out of deprivation… a vague hopelessness.’

This was a period of learning for Fahmida, of peering into a complex world with a myriad of divisions and power play at every level—gender, class, race, nationality. This period was important in giving her a breadth of vision for her self-discovery, in shaping her political consciousness and for the impact it was going to have in her later work.

Second Collection

Deep in the recesses of my heart is a picture of myself
God knows who drew it and when

There it remains hidden from me and my friends

But if ever I glimpse it, even by chance
My heart trembles at the comparison with myself.

(Tasveer)

When Fahmida accompanied her husband to London in 1967, not only the public sphere—the territory, the culture, the people—were alien, but her personal domain—the married life—was totally new to her. As a young girl—like any young girl—she had yearned for love, for sex, for a home of her own, and there she was, with all the shades of possibilities that such a life held out to her. It was a dizzying period—1967-73—that Fahmida spent in England, a period marked by richness of experiences—marriage, sex, motherhood, work in a public domain, learning, writing poetry—pain and guilt of conflicting emotions, discovery of her own sexuality and a hightened consciousness of gender and national politics.

Her life in London, as a young married woman, was like the lives of so many other Asian immigrant women; isolated, with no interaction with the host community. She worked for some time as an assistant in a library. Then she joined BBC Urdu Service in 1968 and for five years, till 1973, did news commentary and scripted and compered a weekly women’s programme.

This was a time when she did a lot of reading—literature, philosophy and Marxism. This was also a time for introspection, questioning, and building of the marital relationship. Soon her first daughter was born.

“Having a child had been one of the most beautiful experiences in my life. Childbirth affects you profoundly. It changes your perspective totally, you start looking at the world, at humanity, with a different angle—with empathy; carings instincts come to a full bloom”, Fahmida says. Some of the best poems she wrote during this period relate to pregnancy and early motherhood, like Lao Hath Apna Zara, which is a celebration of life, of life-giving process, of love between mates:

Come, give me your hand, touch my body

Listen to the beating of your child’s heart

On that side of the navel

Can you feel it stirring?

Leave it, hear

For a little while longer, this hand on my cold body

My restless being has found tranquiilty

My Jesus, the healer of my pain

Every pore of my body

Find relief through this palm

Beneath this palm my child seems to turn
But what Fahmida found most intriguing was the duality of her emotions, and the restlessness of her soul. Mothering was a consuming task.

“It demands a negation of your own self…the baby is totally dependent on you. You feel yourself in a time warp. You feel tied down, at times suffocated”. She asked her mother if she would take care of the baby while she studied in London. Her mother agreed. “When I got out of the plane at Heathrow, without the baby, I felt so light. I was so exhilarated. I thought now I could do whatever I wanted—read, write, study.”

But it was not so simple. Soon she started missing the baby and along with it came the guilt. She shuttled back and forth between Karachi and London. That was the time she also did a two-year diploma course in film making from London School of Film Technique.

“It was also a period of tremendous suffering”, she recalls. Her marriage was floundering. It was a relationship that had not worked out for her and she couldn’t live that lie any more. Fahmida opted for a divorce and faced condemnation from her relatives and friends who could not understand why she was leaving a husband who loved her and cared for her. “I wanted to be true to myself.” She got a divorce in 1972 and returned to Karachi with her daughter and a handful of poems she had written over a peiod of six years—from 1967 to 1972. She published Badan Dareedah—her second collection of fifty-three poems—the same year.

The collection created quite a stir. With its depth of emotions, the breadth of vision, multitude of themes and the precision of form, freshness of rhythm, sublety of expression, and its command of diction—the collection was indeed a landmark in the modern Urdu poetry. The themes ranged from human existence, loneliness, disillusionment, sexual politics, female sexuality and motherhood, to spirituality, religion and nature. Though female sexuality had found a modern expression earlier in fiction by Ismat Chughtai, never before a woman poet had touched upon the taboo themes and that too with such candour and such courage. Understandably, the poems that dealt with female sexuality, sexual politics and religion drew harsh criticism from the conservative segments of the society. But by and large, the collection was highly acclaimed in literary circles and proved an instant success with poetry-lovers.

Its undisputed literary merit aside, Badan Dareedah stands out as the first clearly feminist document written by a Pakistani woman. In the context of feminist history, feminism is defined as an active desire to change women’s position in society. This desire is articulated in various forms. Joint struggles against unjust social values, biased rules and discriminatory laws—in the shape of women’s movements—are just one of these form. An individual’s struggle to live one’s own life, to seek truth for one’s own self, is another form of articulation of the desire to change women’s position at a personal level. Literary and academic writings that question the existing rules, document the injustices against women, vocalize the feelings of subjugation and probe into the mechanisms of society that sustain male-supremacy, are a very important form the feminist consciousness takes. Among literary genres poetry holds a special place— in terms of its outreach and impact—due to its popular base in the Pakistani society.

Fahmida was writing poems on core feminist themes in the late 1960s. That was the time when the women’s liberation movement in the West had just come into existence and was groping for directions. The three important documents which served as the springboard for the movement—Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, The Female Eunch by Germain Greer, Sexual Politics by Kate Millet—all had come out around that time. In Pakistan feminism was an unheard term in the sixties, and the themes—female sexuality, sexual politics and Islam visa-vis women’s position in society—were considered taboo. Fahmida broke the taboo and gave voice to her innermost feelings, her questions and her mockery of social hypocricy vis-à-vis women’s social status. Her poems, especially, Baakrah (Virgin), Kab Tak, (For How Long?) Badan Dareedah (Lacerated Body), Rajam (Stoning), Aqleema (Sister of Caine and Abel) Muqabla-e-Husn (Beauty Contest), Woh ik Zan-e-Napaak Hai (She is a Woman Impure), are a testimony to her courage.

‘My head bowed, I sit in the scalding desert

I have brought under your command

This sacrificial animal!

There is still a glow in its bulging eyes

Its black hair is still soaked with blood

You had ordained that it should be unmarked

So it was, faultless, untouched and unseen too

The warm blood absorbs in the endless sands

Look, it has stamped a stain on my chadar.’10

(Baakrah)

Another important aspect of this period in her life in London was her witnessing the War of Liberation of Bangaldesh, or the Fall of Dhaka, through the eyes of Western media, from outside Pakistan.

“It was an awakening about history. I felt allied to Bangalis in their struggle for independence as I was seeing the documentaries and the footages about the rallies, massacres etc. on TV. I was never an anti-India, or anti-Hindu person. Growing up in Hyderabad, Sindh, had made me closer to the Sindhis, and the Sindh’s new generation had no ill-feelings towards India. What happened in the former East Pakistan compelled me to study the history of the Subcontinent and its various social and political movements”, Fahmida says. When Fahmida returned to Pakistan in 1973, the new Constitution had been passed by the National Assembly under President Z.A. Bhutto and the Baluchstan insurgency had escalated with the Army’s entry in the province in January 1973.

Fahmida began her life anew as a divorced single parent. With a two year training from a prestigious film school of London, her first choice was to enter the domain of film making to try her hands in realistic cinema. She met Faiz Ahmad Faiz who told her to work with A.J. Kardar. She worked with Kardar for a few months but it didn’t work out. She then joined an advertising firm, Lintas, in Karachi as a maker of commercial films. She re-established her contacts in the progressive writers’ circle. After witnessing the events of East Pakistan (Bangladesh) from a distant, objective standpoint, she felt an urge to study the nationality issue from close quarters and to find out what was happening in Baluchistan. “When some students of Baluchistan Students Organisation told me that the federal troops were bombing some rebel enclaves in the province, I decide to go there myself to find out what was happening. I took a two month leave from Lintas, went to Quetta and did some research on the history and society of Baluchistan”, she recalls.

This was the period of her affiliation with the secular National Awamy Party during Z. A. Bhutto’s regime. She was in contact with NAP’s second cadre leadership and its members and supporters. She participated in their rallies and gatherings and read out poems. The banned Communist Party was marginally accommodated by NAP. But she didn’t become its member. “My comrades wanted me to toe their party line. That was something I couldn’t do. They wanted me to give up ‘romantic’ poetry and write just for the ‘revolutionary’ causes,” she laughs.

Contrary to popular impression, Fahmida never allied with Z.A. Bhutto’s policies and was, in fact, among his active opponents. “I never had any sympathy for Z.A. Bhutto. During my research on Baluchistan, when I went to meet Gul Khan Naseer and other leaders in Quetta Jail, I developed an intense disilke for the government’s policies” she opines. She wrote many poems against the government’s policies. She was prolific and her writings were diversified. During this period she wrote Adhoora Aadmi (1976). Based on Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom, this important document dealt “with the concept of freedom and the middle and lower-middle class psychology-in the historical and social context of Pakistan as a nation-in shaping a dehumanized ideology”, she says.

“In the 1970s existentialist movement held great interest for people of my generation. It got me interested in philosophy, not abstract philosophy, but the way it is applied to the development of a social system. Sartre came close to Marxism but felt there was an inner vaccum in the Marxist thought. One may not agree with Sartre but the passion with which he wrote and the moral stand he took on many issues, for instance, on Algeria, made its impact on us. He differed with Camu who lived in Algeria and did not want to leave Algeria to its people to rule,” Fahmida reminices about the days she was engrossed in the works of the existentialist writers.

Fahmida’s interest in the issue of nationalities brought her closer to the grass root political workers and their leadership. The sense of deprivation prevalent in rural Sindh led her to affiliate with groups that were striving for social change. That was how she met Zafar Ujjan who belonged to a peasant based party Sindhi Awami Tehreek which supported nationalities and criticised Bhutto’s policies in this regard. She married Zafar in 1976.

Fahmida’s third collection of poems—Dhoop (Sunshine) (1976) sought to develop an intimate relationship with the regional culture of Sindh at the level of language and forms on the one hand and at a thematic level on the other. Around the same time, she translated a selections of poems by Shaikh Ayaz, the most powerful modern poet to have emerged in Sindhi. These translations were collected in a book entitled Halqa Meri Zanjeer Ka (Circle of my chain) in 1979. She discovered an affinity between Sindhi and the language of the common people in the villages and town of Uttar Pradesh and, through it, between the two cultures. Dhoop could not achieve the success which Badan Dareedah did. One reason may have been the hesitation with which Famida approached the cultural theme and linguistic and formal devices in articulating her new found sense of affinity between the two folk cultures, markedly different from the ease, confidence and depth with which she tackled the feminist themes in the current literary forms. But another possible reason was the gap of perception between her and her readers. Typical readers of modern Urdu poetry had as much lost contact with the folk tradition of U.P. as they were alienated from the regional cultures of Pakistan.

In 1976, she started to edit and publish a monthly magazine Awaz from Karachi. She had previously been associated with Syed Sibte Hasan in the editing of Pakistan Adab, a progressive literary monthly published from Karachi. In her own magazine she sought to Karachi. In her own magazine she sought to provide a common platform to modern literary expression and writings on socio political issues. This was a period of deep political turmoil in Pakistan. The elected government of Z.A. Bhutto had transformed itself into an autocratic rule, articles of the constitution guaranteeing fundamental human rights stood suspended under emergency and most political dissidents were behind bars. The insurgency in Baluchistan had been brutally suppressed, NAP had been banned and most of its prominent leaders were either in exile or jailed, facing the Hyderabad Conspiracy case. Allegations of massive rigging of March 1977 general elections led to strong agitation by the Pakistan National Alliance which gradually became uncountrollable. The Bhutto government had to rely more and more on the Army, which eventually dismissed in and imposed Martial Law.

“With the arrest of Bhutto, on 5th July 1977, the scenario changed drastically. Once Bhutto was out of power, everybody went out for him. His popularity chart rose to immense heights in rural Sindh which felt humiliated. At the same time, the struggle and striving for social change came to an abrupt halt. The energies of the people were now directed against Martial law. I hated Martial Law. Just by virtue of being armed, a section of society could become better, patriotic and powerful- I can’t accept it.”

The Exile
Many dissidents and the people involved with other political movements went into exile in the Martial Law years. Life was becoming difficult for Fahmida who continued to publish articles in Awaz which were unpalatable to the regime. She was frequently warned with notices and demands for security deposits. Police raided her office a number of times in search of ‘inciting material’. A sedition case was also registered against her under Article 124 A, carrying capital punishment in the Karachi City Court. “We decided to leave. But it was not clear where we would go”, says Fahmida.

“I got an invitation for a mushaira in Delhi. I went there and decided to stay. Later, my husband and children joined me there. It was not a thought-out, deliberate choice. But of course, I loved India. And I wanted to live closer to my homeland, in a land where I could feel at home—my ancestors’ homeland.”

Fahmida lived initially in Delhi as a Poet in Residene n Jamia Millia Islamia. Later she worked as Senior Research Fellow with Jawaharlal Nehru University. She kept writing poetry and publishing in Pakistani journals. “Living in India was a very enriching experience for me. I searched for our roots in the history of the Subcontinent. I read Indian philosophy, learned Hidi and started learning Sanskrit.” The poems of her two later collections Apna Jurm Sabit Hai (Our crime is establised), Kiya Tum Poora Chaand Na Dekho Gay? (Won’t you look at the full moon?) were written during exile.

Fahmida’s, decision to live in India generated an unwarranted, through understandable, controversy at home. The fact that she was living on a grant from the Government of India further aggravated the situation. The conservative element that was not pleased with the poetry she wrote now found a reason to label her a ‘traitor’ Indian agent, etc. as well. Even some progressive writers and people who liked her poetry were irked by her decision to live in India.

Second Homecoming

Fahmida returned to Pakistan to a very warm reception during the Junejo government in 1988, happy at the prospect of a positive change at the national level. She picked up her literary pursuits, despite the music she had to face from many quarters, and joined the Peshawar-based English daily The Frontier Post. During the first tenure of Benazir Bhutto, she was invited to Islamabad to work as the Director General, National Book Council of Pakistan. She was soon disenchanted with the bureaucratic hold of the institution and was about to give up the job herself that the government was dismissed and she was packed off to Karachi.

Fahmida has been as prolific as ever during the last seven years. Apart from a number of poems, including a series Aadmi ki Zindagi (The Man’s Life), she wrote a reportage-cum-travelogue, Zinda Bahaar (The Living Spring)- for a Karachi-based quarterly Aaj-after her first ever visit to Bangladesh, Zinda Bahaar was hailed as a literary achievement is a novel Gaudavari which too appeared in Aaj and has recently been published in book form from Islamabad. Nowadays she is working on a long prose piece about Karachi. She lives in Karachi with her husband and two children.

End Notes:

1. Meeraji (1912-1949), Pseudonym of Sanaulla Dar. Led a very unconventional life. Changed his name to Meera-ji after the name of a Bengali classmate Meera Sen whom he met during his college days in Lahore and had an unrequitted love affair with. Meeraji was among the pioneers of modern Urdu poetry under Western influence. He also helped edit “Adabi Dunya”, a prestigious Urdu literary magazine from Lahore. Apart from several collections of poetry, he wrote long ntroductory and criticial essays on classical and modern poets from East and West collected in a volume called “Mashriqu wo Maghrib Ke Naghme” (The Lyrics of East and West). His poetry has recently been collected in two volumes Kulliyat-e-Meeraji and Baqiat-e-Meeraji

2, Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911-1984), Well known and accomplished Urdu poet of the Modern era. Was a prominent member of the Progressive Writer’s Movement. During the Second World War, he joined the British Indian Army to resist the ouslaught of Fascism. His profound commitment to progressive ideals and uncompromising criticism of the social conditions in the new state of Pakistan landed him in jail for several years. He edited the daily “Pakistan Times”, Lahore, owned by the Progressive Paper Limited (PPL), before all the papers owned by PPL were taken over by the Ayub regime. Faiz poetry has been collected separately in ‘Nuskha hai Wafa’ and ‘Sarey Sukhn Hamarey’

3. N, M. Rashid (1910-1975), Urdu poet, considered the pioneer of “free-verse” in Urdu. Was a member of Inayatullah Mashriqi’s Khaksar movement before joining the British Indian ARmy as a civilian. Travelled to Iran in connection with his army duties and got to know the modernist literary movements and trends in Iran. After the Second World War, he joined the All India Radio. After 1947, served United Nations in various places and in different capacities. Died in England where he settled after retirement. Four collections of Urdu poems, Mavara, Iran Mein Ajnabi, La-Insan, Guman Ka Maskan, a collection of translations from Persian poetry.

4. Ada Jaffery, born in 1924, is the pioneer of the modern stream of women poets. She has published four collections of Urdu poetry.

5. Zehra Nigah, a poet whose work is quite traditional, both in form and content. In her poem one finds a hidden ‘protest’ of women.

6. Kishwar Naheed, born in 1940, she has published numerous collections of Urdu poetry, she has pubilshed books for children and many translations from other languages into Urdu. Two collections of her poems have been translated into English.

7. Ismail Merathi (1844-1917), an employee of the Education Department who ranks amongst the first-grade text book writers in the Urdu language. His books contained some simple but highly enchauting poems for the young readers, giving word pictures of natural scenes, animals, birds etc.

8. Translation from We Sinful Women, ASR Publications.

9. Translation from We Sinful Women, ASR Publications.

10. Translation from We Sinful Women, ASR Publications.

Bibliography

Patthar ki Zuban, Fahmida Riaz, (2nd edition) Andazaay Publications, Naqoosh Press, Lahore, 1975

Badan Dreedah, Famida Riaz, (2nd edition) Maktabe-e-Daniyaal, Karachi 1974.

Dhoop, Fahmida, Riaz, Maktaba-e-Daniyaal, Karachi 1976.

Kiya Tum Poora Chaand Na Deykho Gay, Fahmida Riaz, Maktaba-e-Daniyaal, Karachi, 1986.

Hamrakaab, Fahmida Riaz, Pakistan Adab Publications, Karachi, 1988.

Adhoora Admi, Fahmida Riaz, Darul Isha-at, Lahore, 1976.

Halq Meri Zanjeer Ka, Fahmida Riaz, translation by Shaikh Ayaz, Institute of Sindh University, Jam Shoro, 1979.

Zeenat Hisam

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