A room of her own.

[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

Aakh ki thandak—cooling comfort to the eye. This is the meaning of her Arabic name, though friends called her Ainee Apa. Qurratulain Hyder herself also preferred this nickname. Her Anna Karenina has ‘Ainee’ on the opening page. All the books she owned are scrawled with it. (Except for Nehru’s A Bunch of Old Letters —it has only Jawaharlal Nehru’s autograph.)

Among the greatest writers in the subcontinent, the material remains Qurratulain Hyder left behind after her death in 2007 are lying preserved in Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia University. Her presence in the gallery is so palpable you half-expect the novelist to tap on your shoulder.

Qurratulain Hyder’s vast collection of books are in Urdu and English; both were her languages. She famously translated her classic Urdu novel Aag ka Dariya into River of Fire in English. “She transcreated the novel, reshaping the text along with translating it,” remarks Shohini Ghosh, a staunch Qurratuliainst who heads Jamia University’s Prem Chand Archives and Literary Center, which is the custodian of Qurratulain Hyder’s archive along with the archives of 33 more writers.

Aligarh-born Qurratulain Hyder lived for a long time in south Delhi’s Zakir Bagh, later shifting across the Yamuna in Noida’s Sector 21. The knickknacks of her private world are laid out inside a glass cabinet: two journals, an address booklet, a pair of reading glasses, a wrist watch with pink leather strap, prayer beads… a fridge magnet showing Emperor Shah Raza Pahlavi with Queen Farah, probably picked up as a souvenir from some long-ago trip to pre-revolution Iran.

The walls are decked with framed certificates of the writer’s many awards, as well as with the sketches she drew during her Lucknow Art School days in the 1940s.

A window-side corner is taken over by “Chair used by Qurratulain Hyder.” It has long armrests. The artworks hanging behind has two paintings by the writer herself. One shows a sofa plonked between a piano and a bookshelf. The affable archivist Syed Mohammad Amir (see photo), who administers the archives of the Center’s Urdu writers, points out the resemblance of the objects depicted in the painting to sone of the exhibits in the gallery.

Other exhibits include 13 thick folders containing photo albums, fine dining crockery, and a hut-shaped tea kettle. The most distracting is a framed photo of the author in which her probing eyes follow you whichever direction you turn to.

The archives’s building is located within a walking distance from the graveyard that is Ainee Apa’s final address.

Writer’s shrine

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