Janay Na Tu By Ana Ilyas

About this novel

Janay Na Tu (Urdu: جانے نہ تو) by Ana Ilyas is a haveli romance about a medical student and an orphaned girl in danger. His dying mother asks Zark to give Khansa the protection of his name, so that she can be taken out of that feudal house.

Zark has come back to the village after months away; his medical studies hardly leave him time to breathe. He finds his mother Faryal much weaker than he expected. Kidney disease has drained her, and the face that was always bright has withered. He wants to take her to the city for proper treatment. She tells him there’s no point, and that what she needs from him is something else.

حویلی کی اونچی دیواریں، ایک ماں کی آخری خواہش، اور ایک یتیم بچی کی حفاظت۔

Faryal is blunt about the men of the haveli. Zark’s brothers, she says, are a stain on the name of manhood, and he is the only one who learned to respect women. Khansa lost her parents in a car accident and has grown up in the haveli, and Faryal loves her. While Faryal is alive no one dares touch her, but she has seen how Zark’s brothers, his cousins and even his uncles look at the girl. She wants Zark to do nikah with Khansa, only as a shield if it has to be, take her away from the haveli, get her educated and help her stand on her own feet.

Zark is shaken. He has always thought of Khansa as a little sister, and he wishes he had never come home and that her parents had never died. Ana Ilyas uses this premise to look hard at feudal customs and how women are treated in such homes. The story grows from Zark’s choice and what it costs both of them.

It’s 182 pages. Readers searching for “Zark and Khansa” are usually looking for this novel.

You can read Janay Na Tu online here or download the complete PDF for free. For another Ana Ilyas novel about class and feudal thinking, read Teri Chahat Ka Hisar, or see Teri Yad Ki Aanch and the rest on the Ana Ilyas novels page.