Janoon E Ishq By Riaz Aqib Kohlar

About this novel

Janoon e Ishq (Urdu: جنونِ عشق) by Riaz Aqib Kohlar is an Urdu romance about two very different young men and the women in their lives. One is so dark-skinned that every family turns him down, and the other is so handsome that he lives off the rich girls who fall for him.

The first is so happy he can’t sleep: after years of refusals, his mother has at last found him a rishta. Riaz Aqib Kohlar is blunt about why it took so long. No soap could change the face his naseeb gave him, and if he had been born in Ethiopia, he thinks, the proposals would have queued up. His mother takes him to a poor neighbourhood of broken doors and open drains. The girl who brings the tea is ordinary-looking, but he likes her, and the ring goes on that same day.

ایک کو چہرے نے ٹھکرایا، دوسرا چہرے کے بل پر جیتا رہا۔

Hammad is the opposite. He’s good-looking, and at university he goes after rich new girls for their money. His latest is Muskaan, a seth’s daughter who wears a niqab and has never let a boy near her. It took him two months to win her. Now she brings him expensive clothes, a phone and cash, and his friends envy his luck. But Hammad is caught between mohabbat and zaroorat. When Muskaan tells him she’d marry him against her father’s wishes and throw away all her wealth for him, he panics: “Nahi, aisi ghalti kabhi na karna.” She hears exactly what that means.

The opening chapters are direct and unsentimental about class, money and looks. It’s a long one, 938 pages in this PDF, so there’s a lot of road between these first scenes and the end.

You can read Janoon e Ishq online here or download the complete PDF for free. Riaz Aqib Kohlar has many more novels on the site, including Bhagora, Pasheman and Lado Rani. See them all on the Riaz Aqib Kohlar novels page.