The Monkey's Wound & Other Stories

About the Book The Monkey's Wound & Other Stories is a collection of sixteen short stories by Hajra Masroor that are illustrative of her uncompromising tone, her piercing portrayals of the bitter realities of life as well as the wounds and traumas of the inner lives of women. The stories, translated from the original Urdu, are sourced from her well-known collection of stories, Sab Afsanay Meray and bring out Masroor at her best.

About the Author HAJRA MASROOR (1930-2012) is remembered as one of the most celebrated Pakistani writers of Urdu short stories and narrative fiction. Deeply influenced by the Progressive Writers' Movement, she made a place for herself among writers like Ismat Chughtai, Saadat Hasan Manto, Krishan Chander and Rajinder Singh Bedi. Masroor wrote with great energy and wit-her stories possess an elegant prose style, strong female characterization and a little twist at the end that keeps her readers baffled and engaged.

TAHIRA NAQVI is a translator, writer and clinical professor in the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University where she teaches Urdu language and literature. She has translated into English the works of Saadat Hasan Manto, Khadija Mastur, Hajra Masroor and the major works of Ismat Chughtai.

Introduction Hajra Masroor was born on 17 January 1929, in old Lucknow in an undivided India. Her father, who worked with the British- Indian government, died when she was eight. Saddled with financial burdens, her widowed mother took her son and six daughters and moved back to Lucknow to live with her father. Masroor belonged to a family of writers and poets. Her elder sister Khadija Mastoor, her younger brother, Khalid Ahmad, and her mother Begum Anwar Jahan were all writers. The sisters are often referred to as the Brontë sisters of Urdu fiction which is why mention of one necessitates reference to the other. In her essay titled 'Mukhtasar Haalaat' (Brief Accounts), Hajra mentions how they both worked together to create stories, their writing developing as the two shared ideas and themes.

children's magazines they read whatever they could lay their hands on. Our parents subscribed to nearly all the important literary religious and some of the women's magazines that were being publubed in these days. I read everything regardless of whether 1 understood it all er not. The same was true of newspapers. This is about the time when the flames of WWII had reached the borders of Hindustan and political unrest bad slowly begun to turn into public disturbances. One day I thought I should write something and I wrote a few sentences in a romantic vein. My first piece of prose was about the blue sky, pigeons flying bigb and colorful kites and it ended with the question: Do planes dropping bombs have the right to pass through these blue, peaceful skies? Signing with a friend's name, I sent this narrative to a and it was published more prominently than needed on the first page of the newspaper. I showed this to [my sister] Khadija and she was so happy one would think we had both stumbled upon a hidden treasure. Our elders, however, never came to know of this bold step I had taken.

**Contents and Sample Pages**