Who was Mrs Abdul Qadir? We know the names of her sons and the date of her birth, but not her own given name or when she died. She was born in Jhelum in 1898, began her studies of Urdu and Persian at the age of four, and by the time she was married off to a civil servant in her 14th year, she was well-versed in both literary and religious studies. In her own words, domestic life “crushed” her scholarly ambitions and her emotions. She spent the next few years giving birth to many children; it was only when she was widowed that she moved to Lahore and began to travel around the then undivided subcontinent. She didn’t publish her early fiction for fear of her very religious mother, but her son secretly sent off a few pieces to literary journals. Finally, after her mother’s death, she published her debut collection, Lashon ka Shehr, in around the year 1939. A second collection followed, but when all her sons went to war she stopped writing — using her pen “only to write them letters” — through the rest of the momentous period.

Qurratulain Hyder, looking back in the mid-90s, noted that that the “author of City of Corpses was peerless as a writer of horror stories”, and mentioned that Mrs Abdul Qadir and Nazar Sajjad Hyder and Hijab Imtiaz Ali “were very much part of the mainstream, not mere [sic] women writers”. Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi, however, included her in Nuqush-i Latif, his pioneering anthology of women writers, to which she contributed a new story as well as the brief but candid memoir from which I have drawn the details of her early life.

But her name appears very rarely in the annals of our literary histories: Shaista Ikramullah, for example, fails to mention her in her wide-ranging doctoral study of the time’s short stories. She was also the most prolific of the first wave of talented Punjabi women writers — Jahanara Shahnawaz and Fatima Begum come to mind — who wrote Urdu fiction in Lahore long before Partition brought a wave of migrant writers into the fold of what was to become Pakistani literature.

The past, with its secrets, myths and legends, was woven into Mrs Abdul Qadir’s tales of horror and mystery

I finally acquired a copy of her debut collection three days ago and was immersed in it until I sat down to write. It was unearthed for me and posted from Karachi by the redoubtable Fatema Hassan, who is a feminist critic as well as an eminent poet, and her colleagues at the library of the Anjuman-i Taraqqi-i Urdu (that wonderful resource of lost and forgotten Urdu classics). Shaukat Thanvi’s afterword to the third edition of Lashon ka Shehr helped me to understand what her contemporaries in 1943 thought of her work, and to juxtapose his thoughts with my own reading of the text.

Writing about two of her stories, ‘Gulnar’, in which the spirit of a jealous woman invades a spiteful cat, and the title piece, in which a displaced feudal lord commandeers an army of corpses to overthrow his tyrannical, woman-hating brother, Shaukat Thanvi remarks that they resemble the tales told by old women. But while he describes old wives’ oral narratives as “bhondi” and “sapat” (crude and flat ), he praises Mrs Abdul Qadir for raising such tales — especially ‘Lashon ka Shehr’ — to literary heights with her narrative and literary skills. (Thanvi tells us that the old grannies claimed such stories of possession and exorcism as personal experience, and though they made girls giggle in the daylight, they induced nightmares after dark.)

Though he praises the elements of horror, suspense and mystery that the author weaves into her narratives, Thanvi’s own favourite among the stories is the unashamedly romantic piece, ‘Yaum-i Muhabbat’: Nasir, on a visit to Darjeeling, falls in love with a fisherman’s daughter and asks her to be his bride. She refuses, only to consent when her dying father persuades her to marry her suitor. After years of a happy marriage, another young man enters their lives, and a period of suspicion follows before she reveals that he’s actually her son. We then discover that, many years ago, Nasir and Hajra had secretly married and her son is his, too. Hajra was blind at the time, but Nasir wasn’t; so how does he fail to recognise her? In many ways the story fits the trajectory of early 20th century Urdu fiction, with its multiple coincidences (that have much to do with traditional fairytales and dastans).

Her heroines sit university exams; her heroes travel to Aligarh and other cities for their education; the characters of these stories are doctors, teachers, civil servants, priests and landowners; the handful of feudal characters depicted are usually trapped in decaying ancestral properties, family feuds, and the evil vicissitudes of the past. Darkness is both societal and allegorical.

However, Thanvi criticises ‘Zaitoon’, the other romance in the collection, for being unrealistic because the male protagonist refuses to see his cousin-bride on their wedding night, and continues to reject her, which actually echoes many true stories of abandoned wives I heard within, and beyond, my family circle. This abandonment seems more realistic than Nasir’s inability to recognise Hajra, and ‘Zaitoon’s’ fairytale element — the bridegroom draws pictures of an imaginary beloved who turns out to be no other than his eponymous bride — is emblematic of the author’s immersion in forms of traditional storytelling, a point which in this instance Thanvi singularly misses.

In fact, ‘Zaitoon’ contains many defining characteristics of Mrs Abdul Qadir’s style. Unlike her contemporary Hijab Imtiaz Ali, who wallowed in descriptions of elegant palaces in imaginary landscapes, she roots her stories firmly in recognisable geographic locations: they are mostly set in the author’s native Punjab, with extended forays into Jammu, Bengal, Agra and what is now Himachal Pradesh. ‘Zaitoon’, for example, moves from Shiraz to Karachi and then to Amritsar. Her heroines sit university exams; her heroes travel to Aligarh and other cities for their education; the characters of these stories are doctors, teachers, civil servants, priests and landowners; the handful of feudal characters depicted are usually trapped in decaying ancestral properties, family feuds, and the evil vicissitudes of the past . Darkness is both societal and allegorical. Women are abducted, abused, left to fend for themselves as single mothers, and even murdered by covetous men, yet remain resourceful and brave until the very end.

And it’s the past, with its secrets, myths and legends, that Mrs Abdul Qadir interweaves so intricately and exquisitely into the present, presenting it as both physical and mental landscape. In ‘Rakshas’, the opening story of the collection, two young girls — Zarina and Kamla, one Muslim, one Hindu — play in an abandoned temple in Jhang district, where they discover an idol they make their bridegroom. Their folly returns to haunt them in various ways until Zarina’s older brother, who has learnt to read Sanskrit and decipher dead languages from a German philologist during his student days at Aligarh’s university, discovers an old legend about a demon and, with his valiant female companion, vanquishes a superhuman adversary. Thanvi observes that he thought at first that the story was a translation from a European language, and after marvelling that it isn’t, comments ruefully on our tendency to believe that any original or remarkable work of fiction derives directly from the West and its influence.

Thanvi’s observation brings us to the question of Mrs Abdul Qadir’s thematic sources and of her technique. Though the story, and other works by her, have parallels to Gothic fantasies — Zarina grows up in “a pile of ruins”; old wells, caves and hidden chambers are everywhere, mysterious incidents occur in remote towns and villages — her method actually resembles that of the Qissa Chahar Darvesh. She often narrates in the first person, though she shifts from the established tradition by using female narrators; and her narrators, both women and men, are almost always involved in the actions they describe, rather than remaining passive observers. Narrators change, in the classic mode of the dastan, within the framework of a single multi-faceted story; one or another character either recounts his or her version of the past and its very long shadow, or remembers an ancient legend which casts light on the present and its hazards. ‘Rakshas’ draws its substratum from Jhang’s Hindu past, which Thanvi oddly fails to observe; the author brings together Muslim and Hindu characters with a distinctive blurring of cultural boundaries which is, however, a defining factor of the story’s remarkable impact.

Thanvi mocks another story, ‘Avagavan’, for its use of reincarnation; people recognise each other here from past lives, fathers are younger than daughters, brothers reappear as grandchildren and sisters as elderly strangers, etc. Yet the author’s real purpose here, as in other tales, is to recover and remove the injustices of the past: reincarnation stands in for family history. A woman is wronged by her lover and then by his son, property is restored, lost lovers reunite only to be parted. The story — or novella, as it’s the longest piece in the book and also the most intricately narrated — goes thus: in Lahore in the 30s, Shanti recognises Lateef (the narrator), as her Hindu husband from a past life. In a manner reminiscent of a folktale, she tells him of their shared past and their respective tragic deaths. The story moves to the present and a journey of redemption which ends well for some, and tragically for others, just as some of the tales of the four dervishes are left unresolved. It shares with the title piece elements of adventure and folklore, as well as of a struggle against tyranny, misogyny and oppression, though it is not as tightly-woven.

Lashon ka Shehr and Thanvi’s afterword are two aspects of a transitional phase in Urdu fiction. While Mrs Abdul Qadir displays a confidence in her literary abilities, which draw equally on the classic Urdu-Persian storytelling tradition, both oral and written, and the hybrid forms of modern Urdu fiction, Thanvi seems anxious about categories of East and West, fantasy and realism, oral (crude and flat) and written (Western-influenced) stories. It also points to why, in the ever-changing rewriting of our literary histories, some writers continue to be read, while equally talented others are erased from our itineraries. Their writings are doomed to be lost along the way, until, like one of Mrs Abdul Qadir’s protagonists, we discover them in the vaults of our short-lived cultural memories.