Aamer Hussein

Nov 16, 2024 | dawn.com | Aamer Hussein |Abbas Nasir |Muhammad Amir Rana |Shahzad Sharjeel

On a fine, cold November afternoon, I am sitting at a restaurant with Naila Khan, a friend from Dhaka, who is showing me proofs on her laptop of a book of stories in translation. The book is called Lost Tales From a Bygone Era and the author was her grandmother, Rahat Ara Begum (RAB), who lived and wrote in Calcutta, wrote in Urdu though she was fluent in Bengali, published in Lahore, and died in 1949 in Chittagong.

Jul 13, 2024 | dawn.com | Aamer Hussein |Muhammad Amir Rana |Abbas Nasir |Muna Khan

One Sunday morning in Karachi — I was eight — I heard my mother telling my father about a film she’d seen that Sunday morning, titled Zindagi Ya Toofan.

May 12, 2024 | dawn.com | Aamer Hussein |Abbas Nasir |Muhammad Amir Rana |Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhry

“This tale is steeped in the colours of the East and its connection to the conventions of Urdu literature is so deep,” writes Ghulam Abbas in his introduction to his short novel Jazeera-i-Sukhanvaraan (1941), “that… I myself begin to doubt that this is my work, for thetruth is that it isn’t purely my own writing; I took the basic idea from a satirical text by the French writer Andre Maurois.”Translation, adaptation or a case of inspiration? I asked myself as I read this exquisitely crafted text.

Mar 9, 2024 | dawn.com | Aamer Hussein |Asfa Sultan |Aniqa Atiq Khan |Abbas Nasir

“I’m puzzled. You have Khadija and not Hajira,” Qurratulain Hyder — who mentored my progress in reading modern Urdu prose — commented when she looked at a list I’d compiled of women writers I wanted to include in an anthology of Pakistani fiction I was editing to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Independence.

Jan 6, 2024 | dawn.com | Aamer Hussein |Sara Danial |Zafar Masud |Tariq Suleman

I am homesick, I wrote to a friend in Kashmir who hasn’t left his native town in about a year, and is now possessed by wanderlust. But London is home for you, he replied. My birthplace, where I grew up, is always home for me too, I responded. Home has many meanings. For me it is the landscape that formed me. Desert, seas, long days, sun, subtropical temperatures ...13 years of that. And so many returns.