Lado Rani By Riaz Aqib Kohlar

About this novel

Lado Rani (Urdu: لاڈو رانی) by Riaz Aqib Kohlar is an Urdu romance about Mahmood, an orphan raised in his uncle’s house. He is horrified to find he has fallen in love with Dua, a girl of that house he once carried in his arms and has always called a sister.

The novel opens with a line about how love changes colour, and how stories are born when affection and respect turn into mohabbat. Mahmood lies on his bed, head in his hands, unable to understand what has happened to him. He has just seen Dua with her hair wet from a bath, and he can’t get her face out of his mind. If his Chacha and Chachi knew the wish in his heart, he thinks, they’d throw him out of the house, and he can’t even meet his own eyes. His heart argues back: she isn’t really his sister, and nothing in the shariat stands between them. He answers that he’d rather die than think that way after everything his uncle has done for him.

چچا کے احسان، چچی کی ناپسندیدگی، اور دل میں چھپی ایک خواہش۔

Then Riaz Aqib Kohlar goes back to the day Mahmood first came to that house. He was twelve, sitting frightened on the drawing-room sofa while Chachi Rukhsana tore into her husband for bringing home his bad-bakht nephew. Chacha Rizwan explained that after his elder brother died the boy was his responsibility. Rukhsana wanted him put in the junk-filled store room, well away from her own sons Faizan and Afnan. Rizwan quietly gave him the room next to his children’s instead.

So the shape of the story is clear from the start: gratitude to one man, the coldness of his wife, and a love Mahmood feels he has no right to. It’s 572 pages of family drama.

You can read Lado Rani online here or download the complete PDF for free. More by Riaz Aqib Kohlar: Pasheman, Janoon e Ishq and Harf e Dua, plus the rest on the Riaz Aqib Kohlar novels page.